Installing the latest OpenOffice Suite for Debian and Ubuntu Systems

Introduction

Most of the time you will want to use the installed package manager with the likes of (apt-get or Synaptic) to use for Open Office, using this method whilst it ensures an easy to install solution does not give you the latest version installation, the latest version is harder to install partly because it comes as a tarball and there are several individual Debian packages within it and apparently no setup script of obvious means of installation. Detailed on this page are step by step instructions on how to install OpenOffice on Debian and Ubuntu Linux distributions.

Step 1

Visit the download page for Open Office from the following location Open Office Download. Locate the distribution and language that suits your system hover the mouse over the download option for the given system, we will assume you have chosen Debian 32 or Debian x86-64 for Linux, which this tutorial is based on. Using the right mouse button select copy link location or left mouse button to download immediately to your desktop. Using link location you can open a terminal and use wget to download the tarball to an given directory (you can use Shift + Insert).

#> cd ~/Downloads
#> wget 'paste_link_location'

example. /home/username $ wget http://download.services.openoffice.org/files/localized/en-GB/3.2.1/OOo_3.2.1_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-GB.tar.gz

Step 2

Open the archive you have downloaded either with a double click in file manager or using the console command tar thus.

#> tar xvf OOo_3.2.1_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-GB.tar.gz
#> cd OOO320_m18_native_packed-1_en-GB.9502
#> sudo dpkg -iR DEBS/

I think the above dpkg command is installing using "-i" and recursively with the "R" option and all packages in the DEBS directory.

Note: We strongly recommend you use the method above to install Open Office or the package that comes with your distribution, "gdebi" appears to work on some of the individual packages but not all of them.