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Original HOWTO
StarOffice 3.1 Mini-HOWTO
Matthew Borowski (mkb@poboxes.com )
v1.1, 28 November 1999
Information on installing the StarOffice 3.1 Office Suite by StarDivi
sion.
______________________________________________________________________
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1 Motif info
1.2 History of this document
2. Obtaining the StarOffice Office Suite
3. Installation of
3.1 Libc Issues and Fixes
3.2 Installing the tar Files
3.3 Setup und Configuration
3.4 COL (Caldera OpenLinux) setup bug
3.5 Fixing the LANG variable problem
4. Running StarOffice
5. StarOffice Tips
6. More Information
7. Contributions
8. Disclaimer and Copyright
______________________________________________________________________
1. Introduction
This document deals with installing StarOffice 3.1. The current
version of StarOffice is 5.1. Version 5.1 is considerably easier to
install and less buggy than version 3.1. In fact, in my opinion there
is no need for a HOWTO for version 5.1, since StarDivision has written
a fairly complete installation guide. The StarOffice mini-HOWTO was
useful while it lasted, but it is now being archived only for the few
who still wish to install StarOffice 3.1. For information about
StarOffice 5.1, check StarDivision's site at
http://www.stardivision.com.
The StarOffice Office Suite is a collection of office tools for Linux,
written in C using the Motif toolkit.
StarOffice includes:
· StarWriter, a word processor
· StarCalc, a spreadsheet
· StarImage, an image editor
· StarDraw, a draw program similar to Corel DRAW
· StarChart, a chart-making program
· StarMath, a math editor
The StarOffice Office Suite for Linux is free for non-commercial use.
Commercial use requires a license. The cost for a commercial license
seperate from Caldera's OpenLinux system is currently undecided.
1.1. Motif info
StarOffice is written using the commercial Motif 2.0 GUI toolkit. The
dynamically linked version will *not* work with Motif 1.2/LessTif.
The static version (with Motif 2.0 linked in) will work regardless of
whether or not you have Motif. However, performance drops.
I run StarOffice on a Pentium 100 with 48 megs RAM, running Redhat 4.1
and Motif 2.0. Dynamically linked StarOffice takes about a minute to
load. However, it is noticable that, once it loads up, StarOffice
dynamically linked takes up much less resources than the static
version.
1.2. History of this document
· Version 1.1 991128 - updated URLs and changed references to
StarOffice 4.0 to the new 5.1
· Version 1.0 980602 - added information on StarOffice 4.0 and about
how this document is now outdated
· Version 0.8 971109 - added tips, installation w/o libc upgrade,
etc.
· Version 0.7 970707 - changed section 3.1.1, changed license
· Version 0.6 970609 - added fix for the LANG variable problem
· Version 0.5 970608 - updated info to StarOffice 3.1 final
· Version 0.1 970505 - the initial release.
2. Obtaining the StarOffice Office Suite
The release of StarOffice 3.1 for Linux is available for FTP at
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/staroffice
The file README.StarOffice contains information on downloading
StarOffice 3.1 final. You will need to get three files:
· StarOffice31-english.tar.gz (english) templates/demo docs or
· StarOffice31-german.tar.gz (german) templates/demo docs
· StarOffice31-dynbin.tar.tgz (dynamically linked) or
· StarOffice31-statbin.tar.gz (statically linked) binaries
· StarOffice31-common.tar.gz
There is also version of StarOffice, available from Caldera. Check
their website at
http://www.caldera.com
for details on this. Caldera also makes a StarOffice CD-ROM available
for $ 7.99 US.
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
then run the ldconfig command.
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="
Perl will give the error message
" 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.
4. Running StarOffice
The StarOffice binaries are located in the directory:
/usr/local/StarOffice-3.1/linux-x86/bin/
The applications are: sdraw3, swriter3, scalc3, smath3, schart3,
simage3
The program svdaemon must be executed in order to use online help.
The program svportmap must be executed to enable application
communication features between StarWriter, StarCalc and StarDraw.
5. StarOffice Tips
Contributed by Patrick D'Cruze (pdcruze@netpal.com.au)
1. Instead of sourcing the .sd.sh (or .sd.csh) file in my
.bash_profile script, I instead copied the .sd.sh script, renamed it
to swriter and copied it to /usr/local/bin. I then modified it by
adding a:
#! /bin/bash
at the start of the script and a:
exec swriter3 $*
at the end of the script. Now all I have to do is run swriter and it
automatically sets up the appropriate environment variables and then
runs StarWriter. Saves having those environment variables pollute
other applications/environments.
2. I noticed that for a lot of people, StarOffice takes quite a while
to load (upwards of 60 seconds). The consensus on usenet was that a
large chunk of this time was due to the symbol relocations that the
dynamic linker has to do. ie, for each new symbol the dynamic linker
has to locate the appropriate library. StarOffice dynamically links
against quite a few libraries so the dynamic linker spends quite a bit
of time searching through lots of libraries.
There is a solution to this. I run StarOffice in a chroot'd jail. In
the jail, I just put the binaries and libraries that StarOffice uses
(all the libs out of /usr/X11R6/lib, libc/libm and libg++/libstdc++).
StarWriter takes approximately 15 seconds to come up on my P133/32MB.
This is due to the fact that the only libraries present are the ones
needed by StarOffice and hence the dynamic linker spends
proportionately less time searching through all the libraries on the
system (ie, it doesn't search through all the useless libs in /usr/lib
etc looking to resolve symbols).
6. More Information
More information on StarOffice for Linux is available directly from
StarDivision. StarDivision maintains a website at
http://www.stardivision.com
StarDivision runs a news server with support and user groups related
to StarOffice for linux. These newsgroups are the best place to find
up-to-date information on StarOffice and to ask for help. Using a
newsreader, connect to news://starnews.stardivision.com or follow the
support link on the StarDivision homepage.
7. Contributions
Thank you to Werner Klaus (wklaus@metronet.de ) for translating this
document to sgml.
If you can contribute any additional information for this mini-HOWTO,
please contact me via internet e-mail. My address is located at the
top of this document. You may also wish to take a look at my web page,
located at http://tarp.worldserve.net/ or http://tarp.linuxos.org/
8. Disclaimer and Copyright
This document is (C) 1999 by Matthew Borowski.
Redistribution of this document in electronic form is permitted under
the condition that the document remains unchanged. If you wish to
include this document in a CD-ROM or book, please obtain permission
from me beforehand (I prefer requests to be sent via e-mail).
The author claims no responsibility in anything that may occur
directly or indirectly as a result of using this document. The author
is not an employee of StarDivision, GmbH or Caldera, Inc.
Comments and questions may be directed to the author at
mkb@poboxes.com.