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.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

My First Blog

This is nothing to read here, but give me time and I am sure there will be more.