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OpenOffice 1.0 Writer at Work
By: bilbrey on 2002-05-22 09:22:56
Section 1 - Getting started

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First off, let's get OpenOffice 1.0 installed. Please note that I am writing herein about the Linux version of OpenOffice. I've briefly installed OO4Win, but that's not primarily my sandbox. From the OpenOffice.org 1.0 download page, download the ~67MB gzipped tarball. Then check it against the appropriate MD5 hash, and untar the file - here's an example of that:

bilbrey@garcia:~/download$ wget \
> http://sf1.mirror.openoffice.org/1.0.0/OOo_1.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
 ...

bilbrey@garcia:~/download$ cat > md5sum.txt
24b64e79509f4e6b4e458fe35f82c762  OOo_1.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
^D

bilbrey@garcia:~/download$ md5sum OOo_1.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz \
> | diff - md5sum.txt
bilbrey@garcia:~/download$ 

Several notes on the above routine are in order. In the wget and md5sum commands, I use the '\' (or backslash) character to continue the command line. While I can just type through and line wraps automatically in a terminal window, this makes the formatting here much nicer (and this trick also works in scripts, where readability is a useful trait). I got the appropriate md5 sum from the links on the download page, and pasted it into a file using the cat command, with minor modifications. That is, I removed a leading "1.0.0/" from the filename string that follows the md5 hash. In that way, when I use diff to tell me whether the md5 of the downloaded file and the standard match, it all works right. The purpose of doing the md5sum check in this manner is that I don't have to trust my eyes to compare two long strings of alphanumerics. Let the computer do what it does well, I say!

bilbrey@garcia:~/download$ cd ../temp

bilbrey@garcia:~/temp$ tar -zxf \
> ../download/OOo_1.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz

bilbrey@garcia:~/temp$ cd install

bilbrey@garcia:~/temp/install$ su
Password:Not_My_Password

root@garcia:/home/bilbrey/temp/install# ./setup -net

Above, I continued by untarring the downloaded file underneath one of my temp directories (I have lots of them, let me tell you!). Now, the plan here is to do what's called a network installation, meaning that the software is installed someplace in the Linux filesystem where many users can get to it. In order to do so, I need to be root, so that I have the necessary write permissions. The other alternative is to run a standard setup as a "normal" user. The drawback here is twofold. First, all of the StarOffice binaries, configurations and whatnot (all 200 megabytes worth) are installed in the user's home directory. Secondly, if any other user also wants to use/install in the same manner, they would have to do the exact same thing, and there goes another 200 megabytes. Even though there's just me on this system, I attempt to practice reasonable installation procedures, so I opted for the so-called network install. Another advantage is that you can optionally locate the program install in your NFS export tree, making it available to users across the network (the real reason for this type of install).

The setup is a graphical application, and requires that X be running, and that the root user have permission to access the running X process (so depending on your distribution's security setup, you may need to begin this process with an xhost +localhost command.

Now here's an important note: Do NOT accept the default installation location (directory). For me, it wanted to install in /root/OpenOffice.org1.0/, and that just won't do. The correct place is probably either /opt/ or /usr/local/. My preference is the latter. Other than that, you can pretty well just accept the defaults all the way through. Once installed, then you can exit back down to normal user status, and do the "workstation" install, like this:

root@garcia:/home/bilbrey/temp/install# exit
exit

bilbrey@garcia:~/temp/install$ /usr/local/OpenOffice.org1.0/setup

Only two bits of significance in the installer. First, explicitly select the Workstation install. This only uses about 1.5 megabytes in the user's home directory. Secondly, so far as I can tell, all the information that you have to fill in during the installer is for the personalization features of the program, not for any sort of online registration. That means be complete, so the info is there to let the program help you fill forms and formats out properly when you come to that stage of use. Finally, I asked it to install to ~/OpenOffice/ rather than some name with versioning in it. I'll make the (possibly silly) assumption that future version will upgrade the bits properly when the time comes.

Installed, OpenOffice put menu items in my KDE 3.0 menus. I'm told it also does so for KDE 2.X and Gnome. Other window managers, you're probably on your own. However, it's pretty easy to figure out. Type ~/OpenOffice/soffice (or whatever install path you chose in your home directory) and press enter to start the program. It comes up in Writer mode by default, but you can start new spreadsheets, presentations or drawings right from the File menu.

Now let's have a look at OpenOffice 1.0 Writer, in comparison to Microsoft Word.

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