Open Office 3 can be a bit more of a pain to install. I don't think you will find it in Synaptic because it was not officially included in the 8.10 release. It should be noted that Open Office 3 is still in Beta so proceed at your own discretion. Anyway, I recently reinstalled 8.04 on my laptop (long story) and I've been wanting to do this upgrade to OO3 as well. Here's how I did it...
EDIT: I posted this before I saw the link containing a method that adds the OO3 repository. This method should still work but I would try the repo first since it should be much less involved to do so. I don't know the 8.04 repo so I still have to do it this way:
Step 1:
This line will remove any existing version of openoffice, note the use of 'sudo'. This command gives me administrative privileges to perform this remove action. You will need to know your root password (should have been setup during installation). If you do not know how to get to a terminal, go to menu > accessories > terminal.
Open a terminal and use this command:
sudo apt-get remove openoffice*.*
Enter your password and if prompted with an 'Are you sure', select 'Y'.
Step 2:
Now that we've removed your old version, we can install the new one. You'll want to go to the open office site and select the appropriate file:
http://www.openoffice.org/
If you are using a 32 bit installation of Ubuntu, you want the 32-bit Enlglish
DEB package. Otherwise if using the 64 bit installation you want the 64-bit Enlgish
DEB package. Download the appropriate package to your desktop. Once the download is complete, right click and select 'extract here', this should extract the archive to a folder.
Step 3:
Now we want to go back to the terminal. By default this should open to your home directory. If you type the command 'ls' you should see a folder named 'Desktop' which is where we saved the installation. You want to change to this folder, to do this type 'cd Desktop'.
Next we want to change directory again into the folder you just extracted. An easy way to do this is to type 'cd OO<tab>'. The tab should auto-complete the rest of the folder name.
We need to change directories one more time, this time type 'cd DEBS'
Once in the DEBS folder if you type 'ls' you will see all of the different package files that make up the open office 3 installation, we want to install all of these. To do this:
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
This will again prompt you for your root password then install every package in the folder. Lastly we want to go to a sub-directory and install the menu integration package which is in a different folder. You should still be in the DEBS folder, to get to where we want to be type
cd desktop-integration or just
cd desk<tab> to auto-complete the rest of the folder name so you don't have to type it all out. Once in this folder we're going to do this command again:
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
After this command successfully completes, you're done! Go to menu > office and you should see all of the different Open Office 3 applications. If you need any clarification or have any trouble during this process, let me know.
