This how-to describes the installation of Openoffice.org in an external device like a SD-card or a usb stick, without removing the original version of openoffice which comes in your eeepc. In this way, you can have a SD-card containing the documents of openoffice.org and the software to work on them. And your original copy of Openoffice.org will be usable also if you don't have the SD-card.

First, you should reformat your medium to have a 500 Mb space in one partition with the filesystem ext2. You can use the rest space to create a second partition for data. In my case, the SD-card is recognized as /dev/sdb.

• To format, you will use

sudo fdisk /dev/sdb

• then use

sudo mkfs.ext2 /dev/sdb1 to create the filesystem(s).

Your data will be lost!

Second, you will make that the partition will be mounted automatically as described here Tautan Sumber:

• Create a mount point (f.e. sudo mkdir /opt/ooo231),
• then edit /etc/udev/rules.d/50-xandros-udev.rules to add the following line:

BUS==“usb”, KERNEL==“sd*1”, SYSFS{serial}==“your-serial-here”, NAME=“oocard1”, OPTIONS+=“last_rule”, RUN+=”/bin/mount /dev/oocard1”

• and last, edit your /etc/fstab to add the line

/dev/oocard1 /opt/oo231 ext2 ro,defaults 0 0

Third, install Openoffice.org 2.3.1. For this,

• mount your newly created partition with

sudo /bin/mount -o rw /dev/sdb1 /opt/ooo231

• then, unpack your openoffice.org installation (f.e OOo_2.3.1_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz)
• move to the DEBS directory and extract the openoffice.org packages to your SD-card:

for i in *.deb; do sudo dpkg -x $i /opt/oo231; done

Finally, to access the program though the easy mode, edit the file /opt/xandros/share/AsusLauncher/simpleui.rc to add the following:

<parcel simplecat="Work" extraargs="/opt/oo231/opt/openoffice.org2.3/program/swriter" 
icon="documents_norm.png" selected_icon="documents_hi.png">
      <name lang="en">Documents2.3.1</name>
      <desc lang="en">OpenOffice.org 2.3.1 office suite - word processor</desc>
</parcel>

and similar for scalc and simpress.

Update: another approach to the last step is to edit /usr/bin/ooo-wrapper and to change the 7th line to let the SystemInstallDir point to your OpenOffice install dir. For OpenOffice 2.4.1, I also had to comment out the line at the end that sets the OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP environment variable to kde (just prepend a hash). This seems to be a known problem. Using this approach, you don't need to make all the changes to simpleui.rc. Please note that if you take this approach the /usr/bin/soffice command will still invoke the original OpenOffice installation. This command is e.g. used to open MS Office documents from within Firefox. If you want to have Firefox invoke the updated version of OpenOffice, you will need to configure it to run the “ooffice” command instead