Manually Installing OpenOffice.org 3 on Fedora

OpenOffice.org version 3 has been available since the 13th October 2008. The new version isn't available in the repositories yet, and may not be for some time. This brief tutorial explains how to manually remove OpenOffice 2, and replace it with OpenOffice 3 using the RPMs provided here.

You're looking at about 5 minutes to do the installation, not including the time taken to download the packages, so lets begin.

1. Download the Packages

Head on over to download.openoffice.org and get the Linux RPMs for your language, that's most likely Linux RPM for English (US). You can get English (UK) dictionaries as an add-on from the site after the installation.

You will get a single .tar.gz file. Save it somewhere, and when the download is complete, extract it with:

tar -xvf OOo_3.0.0_LinuxIntel_install_wJRE_en-US.tar.gz

You should now have a new directory with the OOo 3 RPMs, change into this directory but don't install them yet. First we need to remove version 2. If you do not have version 2 installed, skip to step 3.

2. Remove OOo 2

The first thing to do before getting started is to remove the old version 2, so we're clean and ready for version 3.

Login to a root terminal, and issue the following command:

yum remove openoffice*

You can use the '-y' command to skip confirmation, but I recommend ommiting it to confirm that you are in fact just removing OpenOffice, and not a million other dependencies that you need. Once you're happy with the yum summary, press Y to remove OpenOffice.

You are now ready to install version 3.

3. Installing OpenOffice.org 3

You should still be in the OOo 3 RPM directory from step 1, to install is pretty easy, just issue the command:

yum --nogpgcheck localinstall open*.rpm ooo*.rpm

Once the installation has completed, you should have menu icons under Office in the menu.

Enjoy.