How To Install Go-OO 3.2 In Ubuntu Linux

Like you probably know, there are no official OpenOffice.org packages in the Ubuntu repositories for the latest version (3.2) and also no packages in the OpenOffice.org Scribblers PPA (for now at least).

We wrote about installing OpenOffice 3.2 in Ubuntu from it's official website but that's not the same OpenOffice.org as the one in the Ubuntu repositories because Ubuntu uses Go-OO, an optimized version of OpenOffice. Well, here is how to install this optimized version called Go-OO. You can learn more about Go-OO @ it's official website.

Before installing, please note:

• Even though Ubuntu uses Go-OO, the version you will install by following the instructions in this post is still not 100% the same as the one in the Ubuntu repositories (obviously)
• There are no Go-OO .deb files for Ubuntu so you will have to convert the .rpm files to .deb. This is not an exactly proper way of installing Go-OO, but it will work fine anyway.

This being said, you can proceed to installing Go-OO 3.2 in Ubuntu:


1. Remove the OpenOffice.org packages:

sudo apt-get remove openoffice.org*

2. Install alien to convert the .rpm files to .deb:

sudo apt-get install alien

3. Download Go-OO 3.2:

mkdir go-oo && cd go-oo
wget http://go-oo.org/download/download-go-oo.py
sudo chmod +x download-go-oo.py
./download-go-oo.py

The commands above will create a folder called "go-oo" and download a script from the Go-OO website which will fetch all the Go-OO 3.2 .rpm files for you.

Before running the last command above, please note that you can customize it to download packages for a certain architecture or localisation (language):

Usage: ./download-go-oo.py [--localization=] [--distribution=]
[--system= version=]

Options:
--localization - language to download (default: en_US)
--distribution - distribution for which the menus are dowloaded
(default: freedesktop)
--system - architecture to dowloaded (default: linux-i586)
--version - version to download (default: 3.2)

Supported languages:
af, ar, as, be, bg, bn, bn_BD, bn_IN, bo, br, brx, bs, by, ca, cs, cy, da, de, dgo, dz, el, en_GB, en_US, en_ZA, eo, es, et, eu, fa, fi, fr, ga, gd, gl, gu, gu_IN, he, hi, hr, hu, is, it, ja, ka, kid, kk, km, kn, ko, kok, ks, ku, ky, lo, lt, lv, mai, mk, ml, mn, mni, mr, ms, my, nb, ne, nl, nn, nr, ns, oc, om, or, pa, pap, pl, ps, pt, pt_BR, ro, ru, rw, sa, sat, sc, sd, sh, si, sk, sl, sr, ss, st, sv, sw, sw_TZ, ta, te, tg, th, ti, tn, tr, ts, ug, uk, ur, uz, ve, vi, xh, zh_CN, zh_TW, zu

Supported distributions:
freedesktop, mandriva, redhat, suse

Supported systems:
linux-i586, linux-x86, linux-x86_64

For Ubuntu 32bit and English language, you can just run the script as the default options are enough.


4. Install Go-OO 3.2 in Ubuntu

You can either directly install the .rpm files using alien, or convert the .rpm files to .deb so you can directly distribute them, etc.

method 1 -> directly install Go-OO 3.2

sudo alien -i *.rpm

method 2 -> convert the Go-OO 3.2 packages to .deb and then install them:

sudo alien -d *.rpm
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Update: The OpenOffice Packagers PPA now has OpenOffice 3.2 for Ubuntu Karmic