Install Openoffice headless as a service in Ubuntu

It's taken me forever to figure out to get this going so now that I've found it out here's the solution (thanks to this post: http://code.google.com/p/openmeetings/wiki/OpenOfficeConverter#Starting_OO_in_headless_with_Version_OpenOffice_3.0_++)

First of all install the headless openoffice from the repositories:

sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-headless openoffice.org-writer openoffice.org-draw

The 2 latter packages are required or you will get an error message: This url is not supported

Now you need to create a script to start it as a service:

sudo nano /etc/init.d/openoffice.sh

Paste the following code into that file:

#!/bin/bash
# openoffice.org headless server script
#
# chkconfig: 2345 80 30
# description: headless openoffice server script
# processname: openoffice
#
# Author: Vic Vijayakumar
# Modified by Federico Ch. Tomasczik
#
OOo_HOME=/usr/bin
SOFFICE_PATH=$OOo_HOME/soffice
PIDFILE=/var/run/openoffice-server.pid

set -e

case "$1" in
start)
if [ -f $PIDFILE ]; then
echo "OpenOffice headless server has already started."
sleep 5
exit
fi
echo "Starting OpenOffice headless server"
$SOFFICE_PATH -headless -nologo -nofirststartwizard -accept="socket,host=127.0.0.1,port=8100;urp" & > /dev/null 2>&1
touch $PIDFILE
;;
stop)
if [ -f $PIDFILE ]; then
echo "Stopping OpenOffice headless server."
killall -9 soffice && killall -9 soffice.bin
rm -f $PIDFILE
exit
fi
echo "Openoffice headless server is not running."
exit
;;
*)
echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop}"
exit 1
esac
exit 0

 Exit the nano text editor saving the file as you do. 

Now make the script executable:

sudo chmod 0755 /etc/init.d/openoffice.sh

Make it start automatically on reboot by executing this command:

sudo update-rc.d openoffice.sh defaults

Now start the service by running

sudo /etc/init.d/openoffice.sh start

Now all should be good!