I recently upgraded to OpenOffice 2.3 and was in for a little surprise. Nopes there was not any bright lights coming in. The program simply could not start and would give out an error “no suitable windowing system found, exiting.”
As always the next step was to Google about it. After some googling I did find an solution for this. Open Office 2.3 had a problem if SELinux was enabled and SELinux was enabled by default in my Fedora Core5 and may be later versions of Fedora
The solution was to run the following command in the ‘program’ directory where OpenOffice is installed. In my case i had installed it under /opt/openoffice.org2.3
cd /opt/openoffice.org2.3/program
chcon -t texrel_shlib_t *.so
This did solve the problem and i was able to start the OpenOffice application correctly.
Moral of the story:
Be ready for surprises whenever you upgrade as things may not work out smoothly always.