OpenOffice across NFS

I used to use samba for sharing files on my home network (most of my data is on a “server”) but it seemed to have nasty problems with wireless. It turns out NFS copes far better and allows mp3’s to stream nicely, so I fixed my IP address and got that setup (pretty easy actually).

The only problem I have found so far is that by default OpenOffice.org does not like to edit files across NFS as it wants to be able to lock files. I am not sure if you can allow file locking across NFS or not, but I found a workaround for OpenOffice, and I am not going to have a problem editing the same file from two places anyway.

Simply edit /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice (or /opt/openoffice2/program/soffice on non-debian distros) and comment out the lines

# file locking now enabled by default<br /> SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING=1<br /> export SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING

and you can now open documents across NFS in write mode!