Thursday, October 9th, 2008
For a recent project I needed to perform document translations from DOC to PNG which requires an essential intermediate step to PDF. The transformations required us to go to from DOC to PDF which can easily be done very nicely using openoffice 2.3 in a headless configuration. The downside is you need a process running on a machine which you can connect to to make the transformation.
Here is the init.d script for starting up the soffice.bin (soffice) program in a headless mode:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 | #!/bin/bash # chkconfig: 345 20 80 # description: init.d script for headless openoffice.org (2.3+ for RHEL5 32bit) # # processname: soffice # # source function library . /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions RETVAL=0 SOFFICE_PATH='/usr/lib/openoffice.org/program' SOFFICE_ARGS='-accept="socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp" -headless -nofirststartwizard' SOFFICE_PIDFILE=/var/run/soffice.bin.pid start_soffice() { echo -n $"Starting OpenOffice.org" $SOFFICE_PATH/soffice.bin $SOFFICE_ARGS >/dev/null 2>&1 & [ $? -eq 0 ] && echo_success || echo_failure pidof soffice.bin & $SOFFICE_PIDFILE echo } start() { start_soffice } stop() { echo -n $"Stopping OpenOffice" killproc soffice.bin echo } case "$1" in start) start ;; stop) stop ;; restart) stop start ;; *) echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}" esac |
NOTE: in 64bit the lib path has a ’64′ in it so
SOFFICE_PATH='/usr/lib/openoffice.org/program'
becomes
SOFFICE_PATH='/usr/lib64/openoffice.org/program'
Categories: CentOS5, Fedora, Linux, Web Development
Hi Chris,
I don’t think it’s a good idea to run soffice as root.
I’d suggest creating a user “soffice” and trying something like:
su – soffice -c “$SOFFICE_PATH/soffice.bin $SOFFICE_ARGS” /dev/null &
-jOrGe W.
Whoops… I mean
su – soffice -c “$SOFFICE_PATH/soffice.bin $SOFFICE_ARGS” < /dev/null &> /dev/null &
@Jorge,
Thanks! Agreed 100%; thanks for the update/suggestion!
Also add the param -nofirststartwizard to stop it asking you to register, e.g.:
SOFFICE_ARGS=’-accept=”socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp” -headless -nofirststartwizard’
I’m trying this on fedora 10 w/ oo3 (fedora’s 3.0.1-15.3 version) and i can’t seem to get it to work. i have the following oo3 rpms installed:
openoffice.org-ure-3.0.1-15.3.fc10.i386
openoffice.org-headless-3.0.1-15.3.fc10.i386
openoffice.org-core-3.0.1-15.3.fc10.i386
openoffice.org-brand-3.0.1-15.3.fc10.i386
so my command line looks like:
/usr/lib/openoffice.org3/program/soffice.bin -headless -nofirststartwizard -accept=”socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp;StarOffice.Service”
if i run that as root from the console, it binds to 8100.
if i run the init script (w/ the same commandline) it doesn’t bind to 8100.
any ideas?
So I changed the init script line to run directly w/ the options, no variables:
${SOFFICE_PATH}/soffice.bin -headless -nofirststartwizard -accept=”socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp;StarOffice.Service” > /dev/null 2>&1 &
and it works fine. dunno what the deal is.