3. Installation of StarOffice

Installation of StarOffice consists of:

• Untarring the distribution files as root in /usr/local
• running the setup program as a user
• sourcing the .sd.sh or .sd.csh
• reading section 3.5!!! (do this)

3.1 Libc Issues and Fixes

StarOffice is linked with libc 5.4.4.

StarOffice 3.1 *will* work on Libc 5.3.x. Unfortunately, the setup program requires 5.4.4 or higher. If you have libc 5.3.x, you might be able to get around this by acquiring a copy of libc 5.4.4+ and adding it to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable before executing the setup script. I haven't tried this, however, so you're on your own.

If you attempt to run the setup script on a libc older than 5.4.4, you will get the following error message:

line 1: Syntax error at token 'I' expected declarator; i.e. File ...

To upgrade your libc, FTP to sunsite.unc.edu and look in the directory /pub/Linux/GCC for the file libc-5.4.33.bin.tar.gz (or whatever the latest libc is). Extract the contents of this file in a temporary directory. A new lib/ directory will be created. Su to root and copy the file libc.so.5.4.33 from this directory to your /lib directory. Now, make the symlink from libc.so.5 to libc.5.4.33 with the command:

ln -sf /lib/libc.so.5.4.33 /lib/libc.so.5

Dr. Romano Giannetti ( romano@iet.unipi.it ) says:

...I want only to add that I could install (like you suggested) StarWriter in a redhat 4.2 system which has a libc5.3, without doing the upgrade.

The exact steps are:

1. get a libc.so.5.4.x. If you have a redhat rpm package (as the one you find in the contrib directory), you can extract the library by going in a scratch directory and doing: rpm2cpio libc.so.5.4.x-y.rpm | cpio --extract --make-directories The library will appear in ./lib subdirectory

2. move libc.so.5.4.x in your home directory. Then (assuming a sh-like shell): ln -s libc.so.5.4.x libc.so.5 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME:/lib:/usr/lib

3. Now you can run setup.

3.2 Installing the tar Files

After downloading StarOffice, su or login as root and place the archives in /usr/local/. Change directory to /usr/local/ and extract the files. An example command to decompress a gzipped tar file would be:

tar -xzvf filename.tar

Older systems may require you first use the gzip -d command to unzip the file, then use the tar -xvf command to untar it.

The files will extract to their locations within the newly created usr/local/StarOffice-3.1 tree.

3.3 Setup und Configuration

After you have extracted the StarOffice files as root, you will need to login with your userid. Change directory to /usr/local/StarOffice-3.1 and execute the setup program. This program will install non-shared files and symlinks needed for each individual user. The standard installation is recommended. There *could* be problems if you do not accept the default installation path.

StarOffice makes use of environment variables. The files .sd.sh (formatted for the Bourne Shell) and .sd.csh (formatted for the C Shell) provide the environment variable settings for StarOffice. These files are located in your home directory.

If you use bash, edit your .bashrc and add the line:

source  /.sd.sh

After doing this, restart bash to bring the environment variables into effect.

If you use a different shell, consult that shell's man page for information on sourcing a file.

3.4 COL (Caldera OpenLinux) setup bug

Phil Reardon ( pcr@busprod.com ) says:

" I found a bug in the setup script for StarOffice that came with my Caldera COL standard release. It produces // in a path where there should only be one /. To fix it, remove the first slash from this line:

exec ${pfad:='.'}/linux-x86/bin/$name;;

There should be no / before linux-x86."

3.5 Fixing the LANG variable problem

The .sd.sh and .sd.csh files set the LANG variable. This causes problems with perl and man. Man will give the error message

" Failed to open the message catalog man on the path NLSPATH="

" warning: setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "")..."

The .sd.sh file contains a line that sets LANG=us and another that exports a bunch of variables, including LANG. Remove the LANG=us line and remove LANG from the list of variables, and this will be fixed.

In the .sd.csh file (which is formatted for the c shell), you need to remove the line that says "setenv LANG us".

Thanks to Adam L. Klein ( alklein@adelphia.net) for informing me of this fix.