Latest Openoffice on Fedora

Been a long time since I posted anything. Main reason being that the domain blogspot.com is blocked for the past couple of months from Pakistan. Of course there are solutions to that but I was just being lazy. Anyway back to linux .....

I am running Fedora Core 5 on one of my desktops. One of the problems I always face with these distributions is that I have to rely on the distribution to supply latest version of a specific software in their repository. For example I want to use Openoffice 2.1 but yum will not upgrade since its not there in the repository.

Here is how I installed latest openoffice2.1 manually on my Fedora Core 5 system.

• Uninstall older version of openoffice like this

#yum remove "openoffice*"

• Download Openoffice .tar.gz and untar it.

#tar -zxvf OOo_2.1.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US.tar.gz

• The above will extract everything to a folder namely OOE680_m6_native_packed-1_en-US.9095. Inside this folder there would be a folder named "RPMS". One of the packages in "RPMS" folder is not digitally signed so you need to switch off gpgcheck in file /etc/yum.conf. Open the file with your favorite text editor and change this "gpgcheck=1" to "gpgcheck=0".

• Now while staying in the "RPMS" folder do this

#yum localinstall openoffice*.rpm

• Now go to the "desktop-integration" folder which resides in "RPMS" folder and do this

#yum localinstall openoffice.org-redhat-menus-2.1-5.noarch.rpm

• Switch on gpgcheck in /etc/yum.conf
  

Thats all!

Next morning when I returned to my desktop, openoffice was downgraded to openoffice 2.0! Well I have yum running as a service which updates my system every night. It seems like yum does not know that openoffice 2.1 is later then 2.0, so it downgraded my openoffice. Anyway I repeated the above procedure and stopped yum from doing anything to my openoffice by adding this line in /etc/yum.conf
exclude=openoffice*

Enjoy!