Comment 13 for bug 271283

A quick & dirty workaround at least for x86 and for now is to use cairo and pango from hardy-updates. I apologize for misusing this bug for a sort of a howto:

1. Download the packages from

http://packages.ubuntu.com/en/hardy-updates/libcairo2
http://packages.ubuntu.com/en/hardy-updates/libpango1.0-0

2. Unpack them

dpkg -x libcairo2_1.6.0-0ubuntu2_i386.deb .
dpkg -x libpango1.0-0_1.20.5-0ubuntu1_i386.deb .

3. Copy the content of the resulting usr/lib/ directory somewhere where ld.so won't find it, like

sudo cp -r usr/lib /opt/

4. Load libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 and libcairo.so.2 prior to running ooffice, maybe by placing something like

#!/bin/bash
LD_PRELOAD=/opt/lib/libpangocairo-1.0.so.0:/opt/lib/libcairo.so.2 \
/usr/bin/ooffice $1 $2
exit 0

as /usr/local/bin/ooffice and making it executable (please replace this wrapper with a better one).

It is required to load libpangocairo prior to libcairo, otherwise OpenOffice.org will crash opening the GTK filepicker. I haven't tested with the amd64 Intrepid.