CentOS - May 2006 - OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 vs. 2.0.2

Hi,

I recently migrated from Slackware 10.2 to CentOS 4.3, upon advice of fellow
Slacker and CentOS user Daniel de Kok. Been working very intensively for the
last three weeks with it, and I must say: I really like it. This is the Real
Work(tm) Distro I was always looking for!

There's a practical reason for this: beginning on June 1st I will be chief
sysadmin of our village's town hall. Don't be too impressed... besides
the
mayor and his dog, we're 900 people living here, mostly farmers... But the
village got a nice budget to build an even nicer public "salle
multimedia", the
house is ready (with a nice view over the South French hills), and here's
the
scenario. About ten PC's will be acquired new, so they will be equipped with
a
shiny CentOS 4.3. The remaining PC's in the town hall will either get some
light Linux distro (Slack with XFCE or something like this)... but some people
here desperately cling to their Windows 98 or Windows XP and don't want this
Linux thing.

At least two Windows machines here are equipped with the latest OpenOffice.org.
Now there's a slight compatibility issue. OO 2.0.x defaults to the .odt file
format, which OO 1.2.2 can't read.

I know that stock rpm's from openoffice.org *can* be installed, but I think
it
would be a pity to ruin the otherwise great artwork consistency (I have to
seduce the new Linux users, remember).

The latest Fedora 5 came out, and I see that there's a source rpm available
at
rpm.pbone.net. Unfortunately, I'm on dialup here, and there's no chance
I can
get this until next week. Plus, I'm only a beginner with source RPM's,
and OO
is somewhat of a bear to compile. Now what if one of the gurus here gave it a
shot? Got some bandwidth and some CPU to spare? Or maybe evaluate my chances as
to the outcome? Or is it better to tell the Windows people to default to .sxw
and stick with the present version (which, I must say, looks quite bug-free)?

Cheers,

Niki Kovacs

> I know that stock rpm's from openoffice.org *can* be installed, but I
think it
> would be a pity to ruin the otherwise great artwork consistency (I have to
> seduce the new Linux users, remember).
>
> The latest Fedora 5 came out, and I see that there's a source rpm
available at
> rpm.pbone.net. Unfortunately, I'm on dialup here, and there's no
chance I can
> get this until next week. Plus, I'm only a beginner with source
RPM's, and OO
> is somewhat of a bear to compile. Now what if one of the gurus here gave it
a
> shot? Got some bandwidth and some CPU to spare? Or maybe evaluate my
chances as
> to the outcome? Or is it better to tell the Windows people to default to
.sxw
> and stick with the present version (which, I must say, looks quite
bug-free)?
Rebuilding the OOo 2.x rpms from fedora require significant rebuilding
of several other packages as well, and what you end up with is closer
to fedora than centos. Because of the major package upgrades required,
we decided against a rebuild. The official openoffice rpms from
openoffice.org work perfectly, and install right beside the current
centos 1.x rpms. The 2.x rpms will import the centos/rhel settings and
'just work' if you install all the rpms (there's one in another
folder
that people forget when they unpack the tarball).

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