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Building OpenOffice.org under Linux

This document describes the requirements and actions that you need to build OpenOffice.org on Linux.

Commands you have to type on the keyboard follow this syntax throughout this document: 

config_office> ./configure

In this example, the script configure is executed in the directory config_office.

$SRC_ROOT will denote the directory in which the source code of OpenOffice.org is stored.

Basically, there is the choice to build OpenOffice.org from two different branches: a stable branch, which results in the release version, or a less stable developer branch (latest release see here). Links to the different sources are given in the document.




Table of Contents




Overview

This section is meant as a reminder or checklist for those who have some experience in building OpenOffice.org. Everybody else should jump to the Build Requirements section.

Even experienced builders are well advised to check the release notes at http://download.openoffice.org/index.html and the section Build Requirements in this document to inform yourself about changes since the previous releases.

Detailed step-by-step build descriptions are given from the next section on.

You can perform a full build, or you can build an individual project using a prebuilt version.

Overview of Performing a Full Build

To perform a full build, you need to follow these steps:

  1. Get the source code, either from the download webpage (http://download.openoffice.org/index.html) or alternatively via a check-out from the cvs tree against a release tag, e.g. cws_srx644_ooo11beta.
  2. Run the configure script to check all requirements and to create the script LinuxIntelEnv.Set.
  3. Run the LinuxIntelEnv.Set script to set all environment variables.

    Please see the last screen from the configure script for more specific information on setting up for your platform.

  4. Create the build tools using bootstrap.
  5. Build typing dmake in $SRC_ROOT, or build --all in the instsetoo module, or build followed by deliver in the individual modules.
For detailed build instructions, see the section Building a Full Build of the Office Suite in this document. The installation procedure is described at the end of this document.

Overview of Building an Individual Project

You can use a prebuilt version to build an individual project. Having a prebuilt version is necessary because the individual project you want to build could depend on other projects. A project builds a particular component of OpenOffice.org. For example, the Word Processing project builds the Word Processing application. To build an individual project, you must follow these steps:

  1. Download the appropriate solver tarballs from the download webpage (http://download.open%20office.org/index.html) e.g., for 643B the solver tarball solver643B_linux_intel.tar.gz.

    643 is a very old release. Please use the latest version.

  2. Check out the modules for the project that you want to build from the OpenOffice.org cvs tree. If your project uses the resources module, res, check out this module also. You can, of course, also download the entire source from the download webpage (http://download.openoffice.org/index.html). However, it is not possible to download individual modules there.
  3. Check out the module config_office. This is always necessary to create the build environment.
  4. Also check out the modules dmake, external, xml2cmp, mkdepend, sal, solenv, vos, tools and rscpp. These are required by bootstrap (see below).
  5. Unpack the solver tarball in the $SRC_ROOT directory.
  6. Run the configure script to check all requirements and to create the settings file LinuxIntelEnv.Set.
  7. Run in tcsh source LinuxIntelEnv.Set or in bash source LinuxIntelEnv.Set.sh to set all environment variables.
  8. Create the build tools using bootstrap.
  9. Build each module against the prebuilt solver using the build tool, followed by deliver.
For detailed build instructions, see Building Individual Projects with a Prebuilt.


Build Requirements

Before you start building, you must ensure that your system satisfies the recommended software and hardware requirements for the type of system you are working on. For Linux, these are as follows:

Software Requirements
  • glibc 2.1.x or higher
  • gcc: OpenOffice.org has been successfully build under Linux using the gcc versions 3.0.x, 3.1.1, 3.2.x, and 3.3.x. Older versions were built with gcc 2.95.2, 2.95 support is not maintained for current branches however. Version 2.96 does not work!
  • The X11 development libraries and header files should be installed. Should be in place with most Linux distributions.

    Note the there are currently some issues with X version 4.3.

  • PAM (should come with most Linux distributions). You must install the development package for your distribution.
  • JDK 1.3.1 or JDK 1.4.1 (note you need the SDK, not just the JRE).
    JDK 1.4.2 is not supported for versions prior to OpenOffice.org 1.1.1, see issue 16626.
  • If you are building with JDK 1.3.1, you need to download crimson.jar from http://xml.apache.org/crimson/ and xalan.jar and xml-apis.jar from http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/index.html and add these to the compilation classpath
  • Perl 5
  • csh   Note that you can start a build in bash however all the scripts in the build system are actually csh scripts.
  • zip and unzip
  • The gpc general polygon clipper library release 2.31, located at http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/aig/staff/alan/software/. Download and unpack the tarball. You should have the files gpc.c and gpc.h in $SRC_ROOT/external/gpc.
  • GTK - If you enable the crash reporter in configure then you need the gtk 2, jpeg and tiff development libraries.
  • Ant Is required to build some features. This is a Java Make utility.

Perl Module requirements

The perl modules will be tested by configure beginning in V2.0. Here is a list of the modules that you can install.

Module: Used for:
Archive::Zip packing image lists, evtl. for further zipping needs
XML::Parser expat based parser for the new XML based build lists

Perl - Additional requirements

For committers who want to use the CWS tooling

Module: Used for:
Config::Tiny parsing .cwsrc configuration files
Crypt::SSLeay for SSL encrypted SOAP connections
SOAP::Lite access the SOAP based CWS webservice

Hardware Requirements
  • Intel Pentium II (P4 recommended)
  • 256 MB RAM (Much more recommended)
  • 4 Gb free disk space, add approximately 2 Gb to build with --with-lang=ALL option. Approximately 8 Gb with full crash report enabled, --enable-crashdump.


External Components

The code contains some further external components which are already provided. If you are interested in details about these, look at the External Components webpage at http://tools.openoffice.org/ext_comp.html.




Get the source code

You have two options to get the source code:

  • Download the source code tarball (http://download.openoffice.org/index.html), e.g. oo_643B_src.tar.gz in case of the 643B release.

    Unpack the tarballs as follows (for the example 643B):

    > tar -xvzf oo_643B_src.tar.gz
> cd oo_643B_src

    This will be $SRC_ROOT from now on.   NB: 643 is a very old release use a current one.

  • Another possibility is to check out the code from the cvs tree. If you don't have a username and password, you can still do a checkout as anoncvs: 
    > cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.services.openoffice.org:/cvs login

    Just press enter when prompted for the password.
    
> cd $SRC_ROOT
$SRC_ROOT> cvs /
    -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.services.openoffice.org:/cvs /
    co -r OpenOffice643 OpenOffice
    The non-bold slash means that the command should be in one line. It is possible to update an already existing older copy to a newer release: 
    $SRC_ROOT> cvs /
    -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.services.openoffice.org:/cvs /
    update -r OpenOffice643 OpenOffice
  • If you're only interested in building individual modules, you won't need the entire source code. You can check out individual modules from the cvs tree: 
    $SRC_ROOT> cvs /
    -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.services.openoffice.org:/cvs /
    co -r OpenOffice643 (module-name)

  • A note on the tags (i.e. the argument to the -r option in the cvs commands listed above): If HEAD is used as a tag, you will get the newest latest source code. This, however, will most likely not build since development is going on there. In general, the code is given a weekly tag like SRC641 (with weekly increasing numbers), and from there a branch tag OO641B (standing for OpenOffice.org 641 Branch) is created. Release engineering builds on this branch, adds eventual fixes, and tags the result as OpenOffice641B. The source tarballs are also created from this, i.e. the code resulting from checking out against OpenOffice641B is identical to the one in the 641 source tarball. After release, some further bug fixes will enter the branch. From then on, the code at OO641B and OpenOffice641B will differ. Finally, changes made on the branch (i.e. the difference between OO641B and SRC641) will be merged back to the main trunk.

    Some releases are respins of a previous release. Those are marked 'C' instead of 'B' (for instance OO641C and OO643C. Note that 'B' stands for 'branch' and not for any counting index, even though it is treated like that in case of a respin. Therefore, there is no such tag as OO641A.

    This process is currently under change so the above may be outdated when you read it.




Generating the Build Environment and Build Tools

You use the configure script to generate the build environment. The configure script checks that all software, hardware, and system requirements for the build are satisfied, and it creates a configuration file called LinuxIntelEnv.Set that you then run the source command on to set all necessary build environment variables.

This configuration file will be moved into the SRC_ROOT directory. A top-level makefile script makefile.mk and the script bootstrap in the config-office directory will be moved into SRC_ROOT as well. This is due to technical reasons: The SRC_ROOT directory in the cvs tree can only hold directories. On the other hand, the top-level makefile.mk should logically be placed in the top-level directory SRC_ROOT. The cvs tree holds these files in config_office and configure copies them up.

If you are running a compiler with a non-standard name or location. Perhaps you would like to use ccache to reduce your compile time. Before running configure, make sure that the environment variables CC and CXX point to your c and c++ compiler: 

CC=/your/path/to/gcc
CXX=/your/path/to/g++
export CC CXX

To run the configure script, type the following command:

$SRC_ROOT> cd config_office
config_office> ./configure

There are a number of options that you can use with the configure script. To display these options, type the following command: 

config_office> ./configure --help

After running configure, you have to source the configuration file which sets all environment variables: 

$SRC_ROOT> tcsh

$SRC_ROOT> source LinuxIntelEnv.Set

See the last screen from configure for exact details for your platform.

If you experiment with newest sources from the cvs-tree, mind that updates to the configure process may not happen via updates of configure (the script file) but via the files configure.in and set_soenv.in. The configure script itself is created from configure.in using the autoreconf command. The perl script set_soenv is created when you run configure from set_soenv.in.

If you need to modify or create a correct configure you would run commands like the following: 

$SRC_ROOT> cd config_office
config_office> cvs update configure.in
config_office> autoreconf
To update the configure script. If you only use code from the snapshot releases on the web, you don't need to be concerned about this.

To create the build tools, type the following command: 

$SRC_ROOT> ./bootstrap

The bootstrap utility creates the tools required for building. This involves already building some modules and will take a few minutes.


Build Instructions

Building a Full Build of the Office Suite

Now you are ready to build OpenOffice.org. To build the entire suite, all you have to do (after having created the environment as described above) is to run dmake from the top-level directory. This may take several hours. 
$SRC_ROOT> dmake

If you decide to rebuild a module or build each module individually (mind dependencies!), you will have to use the build tool. A subsequent deliver will copy all created binaries, libraries etc. into the solver tree: 

$SRC_ROOT/(module)> build
$SRC_ROOT/(module)> deliver

The following table shows the time required to build on a system with a particular specification. You can use these details to estimate the time required to build on your system.

Architecture Intel
Processor Pentium III
Processor speed 600 MHz
RAM 256 MB
Hard disk size 4 GB IDE
Time ~12 h

Note that using ccache can reduce your compile times.

Building Individual Projects with a Prebuilt

OpenOffice.org is organised in several projects. For example, the Word Processing Project. These in turn consist of several modules, organised in separate directories. The source contains approximately 90 modules.

You can build any project or module individually. Building modules individually should not be misunderstood as reducing OpenOffice.org to a special application, say, for instance, the spreadsheet application. The program will always consist of the entire office suite: text processor, spreadsheet, drawing application, etc. Building individual modules comes in handy if you want to develop on a certain module. Most modules will depend on other modules to be already built. In other words, all modules must build in a particular order. To avoid building all modules which are prerequisites of the module of your interest, you can make use of a prebuilt solver tree against which you can build any module.

For more information on modules and on the sequence that they build in, and on the dependencies, see tools.openoffice.org/modules.html.

You have to download the solver tree as a tarball. For example solver643B_linux_intel.tar.gz from the Download page at http://download.openoffice.org/index.html, use a current release 643 is very old and only used as an example, and unpack it in the $SRC_ROOT directory, e.g.: 

$SRC_ROOT> tar -xzvf solver643B_linux_intel.tar.gz
In order to create the build environment and build tools (bootstrap), you also have to check out the modules config_office, dmake, external, xml2cmp, mkdepend, sal, solenv, vos, tools and rscpp.

To build a project, you build each of its modules individually in their directory with the build tool, followed by deliver to copy the created libraries, binaries etc. into the solver tree: 

$SRC_ROOT/(module-name)> build
$SRC_ROOT/(module-name)> deliver
Files called build.lst in the directories (module-name)/prj contain all information about the subdirectories to be build (each of them containing makefiles makefile.mk), about internal dependencies, and also about modules the current module depends on. The files (module-name)/prj/d.lst control the actions done by deliver. The last or second to last directory to be build is usually module-name/util which is responsible for linking one or more shared libraries.


Building a Project with Debug Information

To rebuild a complete project with debug information, remove all object files by removing the unxlngi4.pro directory. Then run build with the debug option set to true: 

$SRC_ROOT/(module)> rm -rf unxlngi4.pro
$SRC_ROOT/(module)> build debug=true



Instructions to Build an Installation Set

The build process (started with a top-level dmake or build --all in $SRC_ROOT/instsetoo) will create installation sets in English and German. A simple build in $SRC_ROOT/instsetoo will also create the installation sets, provided all other modules are already built.

If you have built an installation set earlier and want to re-build it, please delete the local outpath first: 

$SRC_ROOT/instsetoo> rm -rf unxlngi4.pro

The English installation set will be located at $SRC_ROOT/instsetoo/unxlngi4.pro/01/normal. Execute the setup binary to install: 

$SRC_ROOT> cd instsetoo/unxlngi4.pro/01/normal
normal> ./setup
The 01 in the path names indicates that the localisation is American English. This number corresponds to the international phone code for the USA. The German installation set will be located in a subdirectory 49. This scheme holds true for all localisations you may have chosen explicitly (see next section Building Localised Versions of OpenOffice.org).

For a network installation, use the -net option to setup. Details on the network installation process can be found at http://installation.openoffice.org/proposals/netinstall.html in the installation project webpage.

For information on creating an automated installation script and create a response file.




Building Localised Versions of OpenOffice.org

Running the configure script with the --with-lang option will introduce the build of additional language resources. This option will introduce a command in the environment settings file which in turn after execution sets a variable like, for instance, RES_FREN to TRUE in the case of french (You can also set this variable by hand in order to introduce another language). It is also possible to build more than one language at once. One language resource, however, will not be introduced that way: the help content! Clicking on 'help' would still open English help documents.

There is no automatic procedure yet to implement non-English help, but the additional manual effort is rather minimal: After building the source as described above, but before building the installation set, a zip-file with all help-content for the language of choice has to be unzipped into the directory 

$SRC_ROOT/solver/641/unxlngi4.pro/pck.

The filenames of these files contain a number code for the language, corresponding to the international phone code of a country in which that language is mainly spoken. For instance, the file helpcontent_34_unix.tgz contains all help content for the Spanish localisation. The zipfiles themselves are available at http://ftp.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/contrib/helpcontent/.

Having unzipped the helpcontent files in there, building of installation sets can be resumed or repeated (in case you already have build some), as described in the previous chapter. English installation sets will be located in

$SRC_ROOT/instsetoo/unxlngi4.pro/01/normal,
where 01 corresponds to the international phone code of the USA. If you have chosen, for instance, French (by configuring with the --with-lang=FREN option) you will find an additional directory called 33: 
$SRC_ROOT/instsetoo/unxlngi4.pro/33/normal.

Similarly, you will find 49 for German, 34 for Spanish, etc.

Localised help content is not yet available for all languages. In such cases, the English helpcontent will appear in the installations. For instance, when Danish is set with configure, you will find installation sets under the directory 45, but the help files will appear in English.