Oh wow... prayers do get answered just like that huh? :P

Lovin' the sig, qole! Nice to see it's working; now all my predictions of impractical slowness may be verified...

The weird thing is that OpenOffice Writer doesn't feel any slower than any of the other word processors on the tablet. The other interesting thing is that that there seems to be some level of java support in this OpenOffice package. I did a bit of poking around, and it installs the Debian open source replacement for Sun's java. I installed classpath and gappletviewer, and I was able to run the clock demo applet on the Sun website, but with the same graphical problems that I got when I tried to run it with Jalimo. The fact that I got the same graphical problems suggests that the problem is with gappletviewer, not the java implementations.

This thing wasn't difficult at all to install and if I could manage to do that, after qole explanations in the wiki, it will be a breeze for 90% of people on this forum. After installing the debian root, apt-get updating and upgrading, and installing OOO, it is some 1.2 gigs large on my second partition on my n810 extarnal mmc.
And, OOO is absolutely usable. Of course is slower than on a modern machine, but who cares...! I can do *all* of my things, now, wherever.
Heartily thanks, Qole. And - this debian thing has definitely a lot of potential :-)

Seriously, this is super awesome. I'm sure future releases can be optimized, but for the moment, it shows that it IS possible to run on the tablet in a very usable way. I look forward to trying this out later today!

Ok, I'm starting to find some problems. Anyone tried making a PDF from a document yet? I got a "drive full" error. Also, I had a big crash of Writer. And I was wrong, OpenOffice Writer is definitely slower than AbiWord.

Same here. Very very simple text docs are converted to pdf, but when they are longer than a few lines, pdf conversion crashes "resource exhausted, no more space on device". This even if I enlarged my swapfile to 256M.
Speed is enough for me, though.
I can also confirm that abiword is quicker and converts to pdf without problems (by now :-) ).

To debug if the pdf problem is due to insufficient resources or to some bug in the port of OOO, I think it should be tried on a beefier machine. Do you think it's possible to use qemu to emulate an arm processor on my hardy box and run the debian armel port?


However, this experience makes me crave for a more powerful tablet, with x86 processor, enough ram, and same battery life. I want a portable OOO!

I think I know what would cause the "no more space on device error." The tmp file is being used to build the pdf. To change the size of the tmp file would (afik) require rebuilding the kernel. Is there an option in OOo to use another folder for tmp storage?

OOO uses /tmp when converting to PDF. In OS2008 /tmp is a very small ram (512KB) drive. If debian chroot uses the same /tmp, it might be the problem.
Try moving /tmp to a filesystem with more room, or a larger tmpfs.

Hmm, I had just started to partition a new 8gig card for mmc booting. I made the Boot partition 1.87 GB and was planning on installing KDE (They recommend 2.3GB I think) so I may have to re-partition. I'm assuming that OOO is OS2008 and not KDE Compatible, so it's either OS2008 and OOO or KDE is that correct? If I have to choose (I probably won't choose and format an 'old' 2Gig card for OOO)

What boot partition size should I make? So that I can re-format the partition once I have a favorite without wiping the whole card in the future (next year or so).