I need software for equipment maintenance tracking, I am thinking of designing an Openoffice.org base database for this but It would probably save me a lot of time if something already exist to do this that is freely available. I would be happy if someone could point me to something, even if the software was not designed specifically for equipment maintenance tracking but could be repurposed in some way.
What I believe you are looking for is a fixed asset management system, you can find plenty of Linux based fams, but a lot of them are designed for enterprise so you will find that they are interesting to set up and most likely web based.
I recommend checking out some of the items in this list:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fams/