HowTo repackage an OpenOffice.org installation set
by Oliver Braun

Introduction:

This HowTo describes the necessary steps to take to be able to make standard unix packages (rpm, pkg, ..) out of an OpenOffice.org installation set. It does not deal with any specific package manager. If you have created a script for your favourite package manager and want to share it with others, please drop me a note.

The OpenOffice.org 641 B/C installation on a unix system differs slightly from an StarOffice^TM 6.0 installation, so if you are looking for instructions for the last one, you should look here . The most obvious difference between OpenOffice and StarOffice^TM 6.0 is the missing menu integration for KDE and GNOME. Before copying the this integration to the OpenOffice.org installation sets it should be made clear if the OpenOffice.org community likes the document centric approach of the panel menus and if it wants to create an own set of icons or to stick with that ones provided for StarOffice^TM .

A. Install OpenOffice on your machine

Log into your machine as root.
Start the setup application with the "-net" option: <path-to-office-installation-set>/setup -net &
On the "Select Installation Type" page, select "Custom Installation".
On the "Select OpenOffice641 Modules" page open the node "Optional Components" and
a) de-select "Java Environment Installation" if you want to detect/select the java version yourself.
Choose the directory to install to, e.g. /opt/OpenOffice641, and install.

B. Create the package file list(s)

Before you start to scan the directory tree you should decide if you want to create one single package containing all files or if you prefer two packages, a binary and a language one. The second way has the advantage of saving a log of disk space if you are going to provide packages for different languages on the same disc.

To split the file list into two, you should include all files in <path-to-openoffice-root>/program/resource and the <path-to-openoffice-root>/share tree into the language package list and the rest into the binary package list.

C. GNOME 1.4 integration

StarOffice^TM 6.0 comes with a user space GNOME 1.4 integration that consists of a set of zip files containing the menu integration files and a small binary that does the user space filetype registration. As you may want the GNOME integration to be system wide, you can only take the corresponding files as templates, but have to provide your own set of files.

To find the files provided by StarOffice^TM you will have an OpenOffice.org build tree available. You should find the following two sets of zip files in the output tree of a successful OpenOffice build: group_pngs.zip, writer_pngs.zip, calc_pngs.zip, draw_pngs.zip, impress_pngs.zip (containing the icons) and gnomeappgroup.zip, gnomeappwriter.zip, gnomeappcalc.zip, gnomeappdraw.zip, gnomeappimpress.zip (cntaining the .desktop templates).

If you want to register the OpenOffice file types, you may will find a list of them here. Note that there is currently a problem with Nautilus 1.x with the XML file formats: Nautilus recognizes them as zip files (which is correct), but does not offer a way to override this detection result for specific extensions.

D. GNOME 2 integration

In the upcoming 2.0 release GNOME will probably switch to UTF-8 encoding for the NLS strings in the .desktop file, so you may use the KDE integration files as templates.

E. KDE integration

StarOffice^TM 6.0 comes with a user space KDE 2.x integration that consists of two sets of zip files containing the menu integration files and the mime registration files. These files contain a bunch of placeholders you will have to replace before using the files. You may also think about changing the menu structure from being document based to be apllication based for the document based structure has the following drawbacks: One sees a document (e.g. Textdocument) in the "Open with" list of the context menu of a StarOffice^TM file and the application launch feedback also names the document instead of the application.

To find the files provided by StarOffice^TM you will have an OpenOffice.org build tree available. You should find the following two sets of zip files in the output tree of a successful OpenOffice build: kdeappgroup.zip, kdeappwrite.zip, kdeappcalc.zip, kdeappdraw.zip, kdeappimpress.zip (containing the menu .desktop templates) and kdeappgroup.zip, kdeappwriter.zip, kdeappcalc.zip, kdeappdraw.zip, kdeappimpress.zip (containing the icons and the file type registration files).

F. Java setup

coming soon ..