Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Installing StarOffice 8 on a Solaris NFS client (workstation)

As you are all away StarOffice 8 is now out it looks good, but you may find out that integrating the software into GNOME/CDE on a Solaris/OpenSolaris workstation after install the software on a NFS server. If you are happy to install the whole (400MB+) on every workstation then you don't have to worry about this problem.

With StarOffice 7 you could install the software once on your network and then run the simple command on all workstations "/usr/dt/bin/dtappintegrate -s /opt/staroffice7" which would integrate it with your windows system. This feature was replace in the new version with packages, which seems a better idea, but it does not work 100%, since it needs a bit of manual work.

The procedure you will require is:

1) Install StarOffice 8 on your NFS server. (Keep the unpacked files, usually located in
/var/tmp/unpack_staroffice/packages)

2) On your workstation mount the software filesystem i.e.
# mount server:/opt/staroffice8 /opt/staroffice8
# mount server:
/opt/adabas /opt/adabas

3) Install the following packages if they don't already exists on your system (location can be found from step 1): Solaris 10 already has then installed so you can skip this.
SUNWj5cfg JDK 5.0 Host Config. (1.5.0_03)
SUNWfreetype2 FreeType2 Font library
SUNWj5rt JDK 5.0 Runtime Env. (1.5.0_03)

4) Install the following packages:
SUNWstaroffice-desktop-integratn Desktop integration for StarOffice 8
SUNWstaroffice-shared-mime-info shared mime info updates for StarOffice 8

5) Next step is a manual process to merge the contents of /etc/mailcap and /etc/mime.types on the client with the ones on the server. This was automaticly done on the server installation, since the package "
SUNWstaroffice-desktop-int-root" did it. But this can not be installed on a client: [I just copied it from the server]
/etc/mailcap
/etc/mime.types
6) Finally, add a link:
cd /etc
ln -s /opt/staroffice8 staroffice8

I have talked to Sun about this problem and I belive they are going to look into it. I guess they did not bother about this setup thinking that we would install all the software on all workstation,
which I guess what the PC people are going to do, but UNIX people don't do this!

Hope this helps others.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Get a life!

Anonymous said...

Hi, I have created some videos of how to install the Staroffice 8.0 in the following operating systems:

Opensuse, Fedora Core, Mandriva, PCLinux, Ubuntu,Kubuntu, Solaris 10 y Windows.