OpenOffice.org is the freely available and freely developed successor to Sun's StarOffice and is a full office suite available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
Recently, the latest major version, 2.0, was made available. As a result, most Linux distributions available now ship with OpenOffice.org version 1.1.x rather than the latest 2.0 release, which offers an amazing amount of new features and capabilities that truly put it on par with commercial offerings such as Microsoft Office. The 2.0 version also brings better compatibility with Microsoft Office and is a must-have upgrade for anyone who uses OpenOffice.org with any regularity, particularly if you often exchange documents with Windows users.
Downloading and installing OpenOffice.org is very easy. For Linux, the installation tarball is a bundle of RPM packages, although it is a hefty 100 MB-plus, single-file download. To grab the latest version of OpenOffice.org, visit the Web site and do either a direct download or use BitTorrent.
Once you've downloaded the tarball, execute:
<code>
# tar xvzf OOo_2.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
# cd OOO680_m3_native_packed-2_en-US.8968/RPMS
</code>
You will need most of the packages here, although some you can remove. For instance, if you only use KDE and don't use GNOME, you can remove the openoffice.org-gnome-integration package. In the desktop-integration/ subdirectory are some special packages for particular distributions such as Mandriva, Red Hat, and SUSE, which will allow OpenOffice.org to integrate with the desktop menu system. When you've removed the packages you don't want to install, execute:
<code>
# rpm -Uvh *.rpm
</code>
This will install OpenOffice.org into /opt/openoffice.org2.0/.
For anyone using an office suite for text editing, the new version of OpenOffice.org far surpasses the previous 1.1.x series, and the increased compatibility with Microsoft Office is a definite boon to those required to work with Word or Excel documents.
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