CTRL + Z will kill the open-office automatically and give you your cursor
back.. Alternatively, space and type "&" without the quotes after your
command to open it in the background to have your terminal cursor
immediately come back to you.

To fix your error, use the command "ooffice -writer" to launch the word
processor with a new document... or add the file name of the document you
wish to edit after that command if it is in the directory your terminal is
currently at.

ooffice-writer does not work on my system. It gives the error saying bash:
ooffice-writer: command not found



I found another command from the internet, soffice -writer & swriter, both of
them does not work.


I installed the latest version of open office, i think 3.2 from their website.
Do you reckon that might be the culprit, and it might need some other command?

Openoffice won't work without a GUI environment.

I was reading on the internet that using open office in terminal gives u more
control e.g. printing the doc without opening open office, opening open office
without splash screen etc etc. They also said that soffice -writer is the
command for it, but it does not work for me.


I am sure there must be a way, but I am just so stupid.

I thought you meant you were trying to
launch openoffice without a graphical environment, which would certainly
give an error - but if you are launching it from a terminal session on a
GUI desktop, then it should work.

On my system (which has the openoffice which came with the OS) when I
type "openoffice.org blah.doc" it does what one would expect - that's
why it sounds like something is wrong with your particular install.

If you downloaded a tarball from openoffice.org, then it would
definitely be better to remove it, and install a proper openoffice
package from the ubuntu repositories.

Apologies for previously not understanding your post. Yeah, I have got a GUI
environment.



I will uninstall and install from the repos and give it a go. But, i think, in
repos, there is an older version of open office

There should be a space between ooffice and -writer. If that doesn't work, just
right click in one of your menus, select edit menus, navigate to the open office
writer menu item. Highlight that menu option. Now click properties or edit,
depending on your version. Write down what it says in the "command" box and use
that to launch the program. Hopefully that will work for you.

But you still may want to reconsider reinstalling oofice from the
repositories...

You are a genius. It worked perfectly fine. The command was slightly different,
I found it with your method. However, I am still getting that error "**
(soffice:22407): WARNING **: unable to get gail version number"


I read on the internet that it is not harmful or anything, but, its slightly
frustrating. Do you know what might be causing this error? Or does everyone has
to live with it for the time being?

Glad that worked for you. It looks like this gail error is a known bug and
the fix is planned for release in V 3.3

See --> qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=101458

(btw, the genius, I suppose, would be whoever the helpful soul was that
first told me about that)