I have OOo2.2.1 and 2.3-dev running on my machine along with the
OOo that comes with Ubuntu itself.
These instructions use RPMs, because up until 2.3-dev that was
what was available (no DEBs). I don't know how to deal with DEBs,
to be honest; I've never needed to.
I know that most people say to use alien to convert PRMs, and
IIRC the official OOo Setup Guide explains that, but Daniel
Carrera gave me the following instructions long ago and they work
for me, so I keep using them. I've annotated his instructions a bit.
Prerequisite: be sure rpm2cpio is installed. I found it by
installing the RPM package available through Synaptic.
1. Extract the OOo download from the file browser GUI. (I just
double-click and open it using Archive Manager and extract the
contents that way.) The PRM files are in a subdirectory of what
you get when extracting the download.
2. Open a terminal and 'cd' to the directory with all the RPM files.
3. Run this:
for i in *.rpm; do rpm2cpio $i|cpio -idm &> /dev/null; done
This creates a new directory called "opt" that contains the OOo
final installation directory. You can move the OOo directory
somewhere, or even leave it in your home directory (which is what
I do). I make a desktop launcher for OOo2.3-dev and I've also
added it to the right-click menu for ODT and other ODF files.
Double-clicking an ODT file still launches Ubuntu's version of
OOo, but that's not a problem for me so I have no interest in
attempting to change this behaviour.
--Jean
