In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenOffice on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache OpenOffice is a free and open-source office productivity software suite similar to LibreOffice and Microsoft Office suite. It was initially developed for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Solaris and later distributed for other operating systems. The OpenOffice suite included multiple applications to perform various functions such as OpenOffice Writer package for a word processor, Calc package for spreadsheet tasks, Impress is used for presentation application, Draw is for drawing application and many more.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the OpenOffice on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 11 (Bullseye).
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install OpenOffice on Debian 11 Bullseye
Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:
sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade
Step 2. Installing Java.
Apache OpenOffice requires Java to be installed on your server. Now run the following command to install Java:
sudo apt install default-jdk
Verify Java version using the following command:
java -version
Step 3. Installing OpenOffice on Debian 11.
By default, OpenOffice is not available on Debian 11 base repository. Now we download the latest stable release OpenOffice from the official page:
wget https://liquidtelecom.dl.sourceforge.net/project/openofficeorg.mirror/4.1.11/binaries/en-US/Apache_OpenOffice_4.1.11_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz
Next, extract the downloaded file:
tar xvf Apache_OpenOffice_*_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz
After that, change the extracted folder and run the OpenOffice installer:
cd en-US/DEBS sudo dpkg -i *.deb
Then, install the OpenOffice desktop integration package on Debian:
cd desktop-integration/ sudo dpkg -i *deb
Step 4. Accessing OpenOffice on Debian.
Once successfully installed, now we launch OpenOffice from the Debian App Menu:
Congratulations! You have successfully installed OpenOffice. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of OpenOffice on Debian 11 Bullseye. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Apache OpenOffice website.
