[OT?] StarOffice

[John Lewis <jayell mcmail com>]

I received in my (snail)mail this morning a copy of Sams 'Teach
Yourself StarOffice 5 for Linux'. I haven't had time to look at
it yet to be able to give it a proper review but it has around
500 pages covering most aspects of using SO, it specifically says
StarBASIC is not covered nor can I see any reference int the
contents or index to Star Base, although using the spreadsheet
for database work does seem to be covered.

For anyone not used to using the M$Office package it looks to be
a good buy at $19.99 USA, $29.95 CAN or £17.95 UK. I was charged
$25.95 incl P&P from Amazon USA, which worked out at £16.47 on my
Mastercard statement. Good value indeed.

The reason for posting right now though is the hints on
installation which might solve the problem some people have had
with RedHat 6.0 and SO.

The book suggests installing the libc6 files, supplied in the
tarball in a lib directory in the SO installation directory.

So the proceedure is put the downloaded file in a temp directory,
unpack the tarball with tar xvf /tmp/so501.tar (or whatever the
file you downloaded is called). 

1. Log in as the user for which you are installing SO and start
XWindow

2. open an xterm

3. cd to your temp directory containing the SO archive

4. change to the glibc2_inst directory (in my case it was
/tmp/SO50/misc/glibc2)

5. make sure you are running a bash shell as the installation
scripts expect a bourne compatible shell

6. run the installation script ./soprep

7. respond to the first prompt by entering the name of the
direcrtory in which the new SO libraries wil be installed.
/opt/Office50/lib or /home/user/Office50/lib or wherever you
want. The main thing is that the lib directory must be in the SO
installation directory. This way what ever version of glibc
install later, SO will use the version it expects to find.

8. change to the main SO installation (/so501_inst or in my case
it was /tmp/english/prod_lnx) directory and run the install
script ./setup 

After a few seconds the installation commences. you will be asked
for your customer number and registration key (I wasn't asked for
this until I ran SO the first time) and given a choice of where
to install and which components to instal. The book says that due
to the 'integrated nature' of StarOffice you cannot leave out a
large component such as StarImpress. So your options are whether
or not to install graphics, templates help files etc.  

Make sure you install it in the same directory you chose to place
your /lib directory.

Among other things you will be asked for user data. It is
important that you use the _same_ data you entered to obtain your
licence key from StarDivision.  

If you install as root, when you try to run SO as a user it will
think you have installed a networked version and go through the
setup again to put 3-10mb of files in your home direcctory.
Normally you do a network installation by using the /net option

ie ./setup /net  

and then install users. Note that you will need different
customer number/registration key for each user. 

Hope these details will be of use both to newcomers to StarOffice
and resolve the problem of using SO with RH6and by placing glibc
libraries in the installation directory. It is probably worth
deleting the old installation and starting afresh to ensure SO
knows where to find its libs

-- 
John Lewis - from Bournemouth, UK
(using RedHat Linux 5.2 with kernel 2.2.5, AfterStep-1.6.6, 
    Netscape-1.50, StarOffice 5.0 and GeneWeb-2.01)