I am having trouble installing Apache Open Office for Centos onto my VMware workstation 9. I have CentOS-6.4-i386-LiveCD installed as the OS on there and went to the open office website and downloaded the office file to install. The file downloaded but I can't get it to install.

The file that I downloaded is is labeled:

" Apache_OpenOffice_incubating_3.4.1_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz "

Those are *.deb files inside that tarball. CentOS uses RPMs.

According to the OOo website, they do have RPMs available for download.

You would need to decompress the appropriate tarball; there should be a README file inside with instructions for installing the software.

First, though, I would check in the CentOS software center (I forget exactly what they call it); OOo might be in the repos. If it's not, almost certainly LibreOffice will be; LO provides the same functionality.

CentOS uses RPM packages.

download this:
Apache_OpenOffice_incubating_3.4.1_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US.tar.gz

Centos comes with LibreOffice as part of the 6.x series. Just install from cli using yum.
The group is 'Office Suite and Productivity' ; see

hmm installing stuff on linux based OS is very confusing, guess I need to look up how to.

Using the yum tool is much easier that .tar.gz and or src code.
Use
to get a list of groups then
You can install specific pkgs by specifying the pkg name. See here for yum options http://linux.die.net/man/8/yum.
The nice thing about yum is it automatically deals with dependencies.

To be honest, I'm not sure what the Yum tool is yet. I'm still new to and don't know a whole lot. I'm looked through links and downloaded the suggested .pdf for helpful tips and such. I am slowly looking through them when I get time. I currently have my VMware workstation running Ubuntu 12.04.2, Debian 7, CentOS 6.4, and RHEL 6. Trying out the different flavors, I still don't know how to install programs and can navigate them fairly well.

Just follow the steps in the link. Installing OpenOffice in CentOS cannot be more easy than this... just copy and paste commands in terminal and hit enter.

Install Apache OpenOffice 3.4.1 on Fedora 18/17, CentOS/RHEL 6.4

That was an interesting experience but I think I got it. I didn't know I had to use a terminal to install software. That's how much a newbie I am. Thank you to everyone for the helpful tips and information.

You don't have to use the terminal to install software in CentOS and most other Linux distributions. They commonly have a GUI-frontend for the software installation/uninstallation tool. This link will tell you more about the CentOS GUI software tool.

Debian-based distros use aptitude and apt from the command line and the Synaptic Package Manager from the GUI.

At LQ, many persons will go right to telling questioners about command line tools because they are the lowest common denominator, while GUI tools might vary from distro to distro. This is especially likely with a distro intended primarily to be used as a server, such as CentOS and RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), because they are frequently installed without a GUI.

Slackware relies primarily on the command line, and Slackware does not resolve dependencies. Some of the Slackware-based distros, such as SalixOS, do resolve dependencies and provide a GUI package management tool.

Here are a couple of references that I have found particularly useful:

http://linux.about.com/. It's oriented to Ubuntu, but it's full of good info.

http://tille.garrels.be/training/tldp/. Machtelt Garrels's Intro to Linux.

You will find an overwhelming wealth of resources at The Linux Documentation Project.