Thanks to all for the various advice; I eventually gave up and installed
StarOffice on my local Linux box, and then copied the tree over.  It mostly
works, but it appears that it only works for a user who can write to the
files in /usr/local/office52/user/; is there a way to make it duplicate the
relevant subset for each user, and have a proper system-wide install?  Did
I screw this up?

-s