[Solved] Desktop integration for OpenOffice

[jankom]

I have been using OO for the past 25 years, starting with StarOffice, then Libre/OpenOffice. I have an xubuntu laptop with LibreOffice - OK. My question and help request refers to my Fitlet2 desktop machine which has a Gentoo linux installation. It is customized to a bare desktop version where X server provides the gui environment, and twm has my menu system to access various gui or non-gui programs (apps). Gentoo only has the LibreOffice edition which to me is too much. Every time LibreOffice is updated my gentoo has to recompile it for more than 10 hours. So I decided to switch to the binary edition of Apache OpenOffice. I downloaded 4.1.13 from apprepo.de site. Then I extracted the AppImage file, and copied the "application" directory from it to /opt. I created symlinks to /usr/bin, such as "swriter -> /opt/application/program/swriter". Now I can issue command in xterm "swriter" and it works fine. It also works from my twm menu system.

I'm confused about .destop files and "desktop integration".
(a) There are .desktop files in /opt/applocation/share/xdg/ directory. As an example the writer.desktop file specifies to execute "openoffice4" command with "--writer %U" arguments. There is no "openoffice4" command in my gentoo Fitlet2 machine.
(b) There is another similar .desktop file in the squashfs-root directory of the downloaded extracted location. The OpenOffice.desktop specifies to execute "AppRun" command with "--writer %U" arguments to start the writer program. AppRun file is a shell script, and it is located in the same directory where OpenOffice.desktop is.

My question is: how to make do a "desktop integration"? The reason I ask this is because if I use a gui file manager it does not recognize .odt file as an OpenOffice writer file. The choice in the "Open with --> Other application "Office" does not have any of the downloaded OO modules. Obviously, something is missing.

jankom/Janos

[RoryOF]

Using prebuilt OpenOffice binaries, I have never had any problem with desktop-integration. I use the sequence I set out in

viewtopic.php?p=493557#p493557

This certainly works on Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Manjaro and other distros I have tried.

[Bill]

There are .desktop files in /opt/applocation/share/xdg/ directory.

Linux looks in /usr/share/applications/ and ~/.local/share/applications/ for the .desktop files. Try adding links in /user/share/applications/ to the .desktop files in /opt/application/share/xdg/ (works in Ubuntu Mate).

For desktop integration of Writer add the link:

Code: Select all

ln -s /opt/application/share/xdg/writer.desktop /usr/share/applications/openoffice4-writer.desktop

Writer should then appear on the menu and the Open With list.

[jankom]

Thanks Bill, that did it! I marked my question as "solved", and learned something more about linux - jankom/Janos