Upgrading OOo in Slackware

After reading Mr. Harry's post, then Vavai's, i want to share the same things, but in different operating system, Linux Slackware.

OOo is not included by default in Slackware, but we can easily install it using SlackBuilds script or using the original package from the download page. I prefer the latest approach. Nothing personal with SlackBuilds script, as it works also and many people have used it and found no problem. It's just a matter of style

Slackware officially doesn't support of RPM (even though it includes rpm as one of the official package) by default, so it's not recommended to install RPM packages into Slackware, since you will have many problems due to different package scheme (Slackware doesn't use the same database as RPM, so you will notice a lot of missing packages, even though those packages already installed in the system).

The main problem is that OOo is distributed as individual RPM packages. So what's the solution? Do we have to compile from the source code? That would take too much time, so the solution is to convert it using rpm2tgz (another official Slackware package) using rpm2tgz *.rpm command. First, extract the tar.gz file to some directory, then go to RPMS directory where all the RPM files reside. Next, use the above command to convert all RPM files into tgz. Please be patient as this process takes some time to finish (depends on the specs of your computer).

When you are done converting, the next step is to uninstall the old version (if you have installed it before). I have tried to use upgradepkg command to upgrade the package, but the result is not as i expected. You can use pkgtool to help you removing the packages. When all of the OOo packages has been removed, you can install it using installpkg *.tgz. That's it. OOo is installed on /opt/openoffice.org2.4 (the version depends on the version you installed).

You can start the application by using command line or if you installed kde integration package, you will have OOo on your application menus. I didn't install those package, so i add it by myself. After some dialog, you can start working with your new OOo. The screenshot below is the original about dialog from OpenOffice.org without being modified.