I’ve been tasked with getting OOo 3.0.x up and running on some servers at work. Servers that don’t have X11, of course. Why? Because apparently it’s the best conversion engine around on Linux systems for reading .docx and the other newer Microsoft Office formats.

OpenOffice includes a -headless switch that supposedly works. It even seems to work for other folks. But for me, on CentOS 5.2, it just causes the app to silently fail. Oh, yes, it dumps a crash log into ~, but it contains no useful information that I’ve been able to discern.

So, back to the bad old days of Xvfb and letting OpenOffice think that it has an X11 display.

At least with puppet and supervise (yes, we still use supervise, and not only that, I kinda like it) getting it to cooperate once I’d decided on the X11 path wasn’t too onerous.