Tuesday, July 28

Adding OpenOffice to PupEee

Inspired by a fellow user at the EeeUser forums, I decided to have a go at adding OpenOffice 2.4 to my PupEee install.

Downloaded a squash file with OpenOffice 2.4 from DokuPuppy - at 168.41 Mb it was larger than PupEee, but smaller than OO3.0 by a comfortable margin. Saved it to the same partition on my SD card as PupEee and the main puppy squash file lives on - so far, so good. Download wasn't fast - about 10 minutes, even on a beefy line.

The process to add the squash file to the layered file system was simple enough - the images says it all really.


Select Menu, Setup, Puppy Setup

Configure startup of Puppy

Choose which extra SFS files to load at bootup

Add the OpenOffice squash file

Squash file added

Exit the startup configurator gracefully

Same with the Puppy Setup

And head to a reboot of PupEee!

A reboot (slower than normal, since the layered filesystem had to be rebuilt) later, we're in action. Or rather, wasn't in action.

As they say; Bugger!

But, nil desperandum, or something like that... If at first you dont succeed, find someone to blame... in my cause, must be somethign wrong with the squashfile...

A new download, this time of 2.4.1 from this link (from the same site as the 'pure 2.4) and we're back in business. The process is the same, so I won't document it again (I spent more time taking screen shots than i did doing each step=.


Success! As you can see they are all there in the menu!

Messing around with the PupEee

Or rather, trying to help out a bit.

Long story short, I talked someone at the EeeUser forum into trying puppy. Downside? He wants OpenOffice to run...

However, since he prefers 2.4, I decided to test out just how compatible with M$Office documents AbiWord - the default wordprocessor in PupEee 4.2 - really is. And the answer? Reasonable so, with Word 2003SP2. The really sticky issue seems to be fonts - and I can't really blame Puppy for not having a full set of Microsoft fonts, can I? Nimbus Roman No9L seems a good choice as far as substitution goes - your milage may vary, as it often does.