OpenOffice.org 1.9.95, Best Installation

[Andy Choens]

There has been a lot written about installing the new version of OOo. 
I've tried making my own debs from the rpms, and I even installed the
debs froma website that someone else had posted.

Either way, I was going to wind up rewriting my menu entries by hand,
redoing mimetypes, etc.  And, I'm lazy.  So, I looked atsome things. 
The Ubuntu version of OOo is in /usr/lib/openoffice2.  The rpms and
debs put it in /opt/open........

So, I copied the contents from /opt/open....  to /usr/lib/openoffice2,
and uninstalled the 1.9.96 debs.  This has a number of advantages over
anything I've seen here previously.  A, I don't have to rewrite my
menu entries, and I can still take advantage of the perl scripts that
Ubuntu has installed to start OOo.   Ubuntu doesn't realize anything
has changed because the layout and locations of the binaries are the
same.  You do lose the gnome-integration, but I'm working on a
work-around for that (You won't use the Gnome open and save dialogs).

The best thing about this is during an update to Breezy, you don't
have to do anything to have a smooth upgrade, because Synaptic thinks
it's an older OOo, and will upgrade you to a the "official" one when
you upgrade to breezy in 5 + months.  In the meantime you can take
advantage of any code improvements of 1.9.79.

After you copy stuff over, just use synaptic to uninstall the 1.9.96
stuff to free up the space on your hard-drive.  You don't need 2
copies of the same ~250 megs of files.

I know it seems a little silly, but it's a working really smoothly for
me, and it simplifies my future upgrade path.

--andy