NeoOffice NeoOffice® is Mac OS X office software funded entirely by the time and money donated by our users

Introduction

Building NeoOffice is not for the impatient or for those who are not comfortable using Unix build and debugging tools like cvs, make, gcc, and gdb. This is largely due to the fact the NeoOffice build is very dependent on the OpenOffice.org build. So, if you find the OpenOffice.org build too complex or irritating, you will find the NeoOffice build equally complex and irritating.

A side affect of the above is that if, for some reason, you cannot get NeoOffice to build, you are on your own. There are way too many things that can break the build ranging from changes in the OpenOffice.org code to using a new version of Apple's developer tools.

Requirements

• The fastest machine you can find and a minimum of 512 MB of memory. A slow machine will work but you can't reduce the memory and you won't really be able to use a slow machine for anything else while you are building NeoOffice.
• Mac OS X 10.4.x. NeoOffice can only be built this version of Mac OS X.
• A minimum of 20 GB of free hard disk space for the source and build files and another 400 MB of free disk space for installing the build binary.
• Lots of free time and/or patience. The build, if it doesn't break, can take up 3 days to finish even on a fairly fast machine.

Getting NeoOffice Sources

First, create an empty directory in a volume that has the minimum free disk space. The instructions in this document will refer to this empty directory as "$NEO_HOME".

You can get the NeoOffice sources by checking out the source from the NeoOffice CVS repository.

To checkout the source from the CVS repository, open a new terminal in the Terminal application (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and execute the following commands:

1. cd "$NEO_HOME"
2. cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.neooffice.org:/cvs login
3. Enter the password anoncvs
4. cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.services.openoffice.org:/cvs login
5. Enter the password anoncvs
6. cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.neooffice.org:/cvs co -r NeoOffice-2_2_3 NeoOffice

Building NeoOffice

After you get the source code, you will need to take some steps to setup a build properly. The required steps are listed in the "$NEO_HOME/README.txt" file. You must follow all of the required steps before you start building NeoOffice.

Once you have followed all of the required steps, run the build by opening a new terminal and executing the following commands:

1. cd "$NEO_HOME/neojava"
2. cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.services.openoffice.org:/cvs login
3. Enter the password anoncvs
4. make all

Important: make will check out and build the OpenOffice.org sources. Not only will this take quite a long time (between 24 and 36 hours), but it may fail if OpenOffice.org goes down or you lose your internet connection.

Installing NeoOffice Binaries

If the build was successful, you should find the following directories: $NEO_HOME/neojava/install/*2.2.3*.dmg. These directories are the same directories that I make available on the NeoOffice download page.

Releasing NeoOffice Binaries

To create a complete CD distribution, open a new terminal and execute the following commands:

1. cd "$NEO_HOME/neojava"
2. make build.cd_package

The $NEO_HOME/neojava/cd_install/*2.2.3*.cdr.dmg directory created by the build is the actual distribution that I put on CD distributions.