Issue 70435

I have found these instructions incredibly helpful for doing an installation of
openoffice. the advantage of using these include:
1. don't touch your existing OOo installation
2. related to above, don't touch your distro's settings
3. don't be dependent on your distro's packaging of new OOo releases
4. install quick and easily without the fear of "borking the system"
5. in debian, do not deal with rpm packages
6. in rpm-based distributions, don't have to upgrade from the distro-distributed
package to openoffice-distributed package (hence no playing around with
distro-speficic settings)

etc.

The link to the instructions is: 
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=26173&highlight=

Instructions (copy paste):
Some people miss the old installer which allows non-root, per-user installation.
This type of installation is nice if you don't have root privileges or if you
want to have multiple versions of OpenOffice.org installed concurrently. Well,
the same is possible with the .RPM installer.

Also, you can vary this procedure to install OpenOffice.org system-wide on a
non-RPM system using root privileges.

Prerequisites


   1. Skill: command-line use
   2. Program: rpm2cpio
   3. Program: cpio
   4. File: OOo_2.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz (contains .RPMs)



Where do you get rpm2cpio if you do not use an RPM system? Your distribution may
carry it, and look for the rpm package. For example, Debian and Slackware does
both carry rpm2cpio in their respective rpm packages.


Procedure: installing locally as non-root


   1. Download OOo_2.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz to ~
   2. Start a shell (also called a terminal)
   3. mkdir ~/ooo; cd ~/ooo
   4. tar xvzf ../OOo_2.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
   5. for i in `ls OOO680_m3_native_packed-2_en-US.8968/RPMS/*rpm`; do rpm2cpio
$i | cpio -ivd; done
   6. (optional) rm -rf OOO680_m3_native_packed-2_en-US.8968
   7. (optional) rm ~/OOo_2.0.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz



Procedure: running locally as non-root

~/ooo/opt/openoffice.org2.0/program/soffice


Procedure: associating with file types as non-root

This depends on your system, but if you use Nautilus, try this:

1. In Nautilus, browse to the file you want to open.
2. Select the file.
3. Click File->Open with other application.
4. Specify ~/ooo/opt/openoffice.org2.0/program/soffice as the program.

Procedure: installing system-wide as root #1

Your Linux distribution may have an updated OpenOffice.org 2.0.0 package
available. If It's not in your standard repository, it may be in a testing
repository or available through a users' website.

Procedure: installing system-wide as root #2

To convert from .RPM to your native package format, try alien or rpm2tgz.

Procedure: installing system-wide as root #3

To install system-wide on non-RPM system, simply follow the local installation
procedure and move ~/ooo/opt to /opt. Also, (using rpm2cpio) install the
appropriate system integration package from
OOO680_m3_native_packed-2_en-US.8968/RPMS/desktop-integration.