Unfortunately, the 1.6-2 version does not yet appear in Synaptic, despite refreshing. It is indeed now in YouCanToo's repository nevertheless, so I was able to download it from there directly and install it with rpm -Uvh. Perhaps the applicable repository package list should be updated accordingly; aside from that, however, I do wish to thank YouCanToo for this particular package addition!
Pinoc, your script performs flawlessly, and I wish to thank you as well. I selected the en_GB locale, the install ran smoothly, and OpenOffice seems so far to be running properly. An Excel spreadsheet of 533KB in size opened from a fresh start in 35 seconds, which seems about usual for a 701 EeePC with the original 512MB of system memory.
Well done, pinoc!