kriston's Journal: Install Go-OO version of OpenOffice on Fedora

OpenOffice, the free desktop office application suite, is almost totally compatible with Microsoft Office. It does not support *.docx files and other proprietary (non-free) elements that are needed to share documents with users of Microsoft Office. Novell has solved this with their own version of OpenOffice but it is only for Windows and SuSE Linux. For Fedora users the Go-OO version can be used. Go-OO is the special version of OpenOffice with the non-free elements which Novell's version is also derived from. It should be noted that Fedora's version of OpenOffice is also Go-OO with the non-free portions stripped out.

The challenge is to replace the OpenOffice that cannot be removed from Fedora with this new, enhanced Go-OO version. It's not easy because OpenOffice is a core desktop application and Fedora forbids its removal without removing about 300 other packages that make up the desktop operating system. We're going to force an installation of Go-OO on my Fedora system, uninstall the "required" OpenOffice, and then force another installation of Go-OO on top of that to get things cleaned up.

Go to http:/www.go-oo.org/ and read the documentation.

Run Go-OO's downloader script in its own directory:
        mkdir GO-OO ; cd GO-OO
        wget http://go-oo.org/download/download-go-oo.py
        chmod a+rx ./download-go-oo.py ./download-go-oo.py

Forcibly install everything it downloaded:
        sudo rpm --install --force *.rpm

Remove the original OpenOffice packages:
        sudo rpm --erase openoffice.org-math-core openoffice.org-presenter-screen openoffice.org-opensymbol-fonts openoffice.org-core openoffice.org-math openoffice.org-brand openoffice.org-calc-core openoffice.org-impress-core openoffice.org-writer-core openoffice.org-graphicfilter openoffice.org-draw-core openoffice.org-langpack-en openoffice.org-xsltfilter openoffice.org-impress openoffice.org-writer openoffice.org-calc openoffice.org-extendedPDF

Install Go-OO forcibly again:
        sudo rpm --install --force *.rpm

Now it's all set. I can read and write *.docx and *.xlsx files in Fedora. It's also much faster than Fedora's OpenOffice.