Portable Office Suites

[figueroa]

What follows is the README.TXT in the root of my USB flash drive containing a variety of portable app-office programs.

OpenOffice:
http://openoffice.org
from: https://apprepo.de/ at: https://apprepo.de/appimage/openoffice

OnlyOffice:
https://www.onlyoffice.com/en/download-desktop.aspx

LibreOffice (Fresh Basic Portable):
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/appimage/

FreeOffice (2018 and 2021):
https://www.freeoffice.com/en/
https://www.freeoffice.com/en/tips-and-tricks-portable-installation

FreeOffice for Linux can also be installed on a USB flash drive. Here's how it works:

Note: FreeOffice2018 and FreeOffice2021 can coexist on the same flash drive. Just adopt a unique naming convention for each of them.

Install FreeOffice on the built-in hard drive of your Linux PC. This lets you work with FreeOffice as usual, even without a USB flash drive. I used MX-Linux-18.3 for FreeOffice2018 and MX-Linux-21 for FreeOffice2021. Both run without apparent error under Gentoo, so the application programs appears to be self-contained. Both were installed from the MX-Package-Installer.

Create a folder on the USB flash drive and copy the entire contents of the FreeOffice application folder (usually /usr/share/freeoffice2018 or freeoffice2021) to this folder:

mkdir /media/disk/freeoffice (Replace /media/disk with the path of your USB flash drive. "freeoffice" can be "freeoffice2018" or "freeoffice2021" or most any other name.)
cd /usr/share/freeoffice2018
cp -Rv * /media/disk/freeoffice (replace /media/disk with the path of your USB flash drive)

In the new freeoffice folder on the USB flash drive, create a file with the name portable.txt. Its content is irrelevant:

cd /media/disk/freeoffice (replace /media/disk with the path of your USB flash drive)
touch portable.txt

The portable.txt file is just a "marker file" that informs FreeOffice that it should run in portable mode and not leave any configuration files on the host operating system.

Launch TextMaker:

textmaker

TextMaker then creates the folder /media/disk/freeoffice/SoftMaker for your documents, templates and settings. Next, TextMaker copies its default document templates and configuration files into this folder. Once the installation is complete, TextMaker starts.

If you want, you can now copy additional documents and templates to the flash drive. Put documents in /media/disk/freeoffice/SoftMaker and templates in /media/disk/freeoffice/SoftMaker/Templates 2018.

To launch one of the programs, open the FreeOffice folder on the USB flash drive and double-click (or click, depending on your file mananger settings) on the program you want to launch.

Run from PlanMaker (TextMaker or PresentationMaker) shell script as follows: