RHEL 6 for the Clueless: LibreOffice as Update

Today Red Hat issued a security update for Open Office on all three versions which had it (4, 5, & 6). If you don’t have access to RHN, you would be crazy to try building it from the SRPM. Frankly, you’d be crazy for not updating to the latest version now supplied by Libre Office.

(Update: Please note the advice offered below in the comments, and avoid using the latest version of Java 1.7. The latest updated version of 1.6 is still available and is preferred.)

Get it here. You’ll need both the main package and the help files. Open a Terminal window and login as root. Place them in a convenient directory. I generally use /home/bkup for stuff like this. When you install RHEL with the default configuration, it gives most of the disk space to a partition for home, where all the user directories are kept. Unless you have a half-terabyte or more, the other primary partition isn’t big enough for too much storage. Remove your old version of Open Office if you have it:

yum remove openoffice*

You’ll be shown a list of files being deleted. Do it. So you get it in that directory where you moved those two files, and you’ll need to open them up:

tar -xvfz LibO_3.3.0_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US.tar.gz
tar -xvfz LibO_3.3.0_Linux_x86_helppack-rpm_en-US.tar.gz

This will create two folders with matching long names on them. Start with the installer. Move down into the folder and you’ll see:

ls
readmes RPMS update

You can drop down into the readmes and take a look at the file there, but I’ll save you some time. Drop down into the RPMS folder. The “update” is a script we won’t be using. Inside the RPMS folder is a whole bunch of oddly named RPMs. We’ll keep this simple. In order to install these packages, which did not come from Red Hat, we’ll need to tell Yum to skip the signature checks, because we already know we can trust the good folks at Libre Office.

yum install --nogpgcheck *.rpm

On the the Linux command line, that asterisk is a symbol which means “match all” and we qualify that with the “.rpm” so it matches all the RPMs in the current folder. Yum will run through all the RPMs and check that they match up, then ask you to make sure you want to do it. You do, so hit “y”. Now move into the folder which holds the menu integration RPMs:

cd desktop-integration

Here, we need the package which integrates with the Red Hat menu system for your desktop, and we’ll tell Yum the same thing about that package, not checking the signature:

yum install --nogpgcheck libreoffice3.3-redhat-menus-3.3-6.noarch.rpm

Move up three layers, then down into the other folder with the RPMs:

cd ../../../LibO_3.3.0rc4_Linux_x86_helppack-rpm_en-US/RPMS

We need a similar incantation for this single RPM as we did the others:

yum install --nogpgcheck *.rpm

You’re almost done. I’m not sure where it came from, but there is an odd glitch in how this actually configures the menu. In mine, at least, I got duplicate entries, with one set for the new Libre Office 3.3, and another for the old Open Office 3.2. This stuff happens from time to time, and it’s why I advised adding the Alacarte menu editor in my installation tutorial.

Right-click on your “Applications” menu and select “Edit Menus”. In the window which opens, on the left pane select “Office” and you’ll see the list on the right pane. For all the items labeled “OpenOffice.org” simply click to remove the check marks. They are the ones missing the icons. This will hide them as menu entries. All that’s left is the newly installed LibreOffice stuff. You’re done. Enjoy.