RoboGeek

Installing Star Office 8 on Ubuntu 5.10 A couple weeks ago I made a couple postings about having a new-to-me laptop, and wondering what OS to use.  I've been using Ubuntu the last couple weeks, and am relatively pleased.  The overall system works well, and it's especially impressive how the update system automatically detects new module versions and offers to download/install them.

Being a Sun employee, Star Office is important to my health.  We use Star Office, of course, as the preferred documentation format and all sorts of company documents and presentations and spreadsheets use Star Office documents.  For example I'm reviewing the Sun PLC (Product Life Cycle) materials, and all of them are in Star Office format.

Unfortunately installing Star Office turned out to be nontrivial, not hard, but not trivial.

First, I should point out that in Ubuntu 5.10 you can easily install Open Office 2.  Run the Synaptics package manater, and you'll find it in the editors section.  Select the package(s) and install just like any other package.

With OOo2 why would I need Star Office?  Well, I have two reasons.  First is there might be some special juju that's in Star Office that isn't in OOo2.  Second is a known example of the special juju, namely the Sun-specific fonts.  Sun has some special fonts we use in presentations, and when using Impress if those fonts aren't available then presentations that require the fonts will be a little screwy.

I could have downloaded just the fonts and worked out where to put them.  But then I would have missed out on any other special juju, plus there wouldn't be a blog posting to write.

Now let's start the process:

Get Star Office information here.  Click on the Get It button and it offers you several ways to get it, including a download.  The download is very large, but the Internet is fast now so it evens out.  This is a paid product so if you keep using it beyond the free trial you'll have to pay some money.

You download an installer.  The System Requirements do not mention anything other than a minimum kernel version number.  So you'd think the installer would just work on any Linux version, yes?

I ran the Intstaller and while the GUI came up and did a few things, it crapped out.  Turns out the installer requires an RPM system, and Ubuntu is a Debian system for which RPM is alien.  When the installer crapped out it left me with a bunch of RPM's in a temp directory.  And that left me wondering what to do.

Inside Sun we have an excellent Linux oriented mailing list to which I turned for help.  The following steps came from there.

Ubuntu has a command, alien, which allows you to install RPM's.  It's not installed by default but a few clicks of the excellent Synaptics Package Manager got it onto my system.

Next you do this: alien -i -k RPMS/*.i586.rpm

Quickly the RPM's turn into installed bits, which you can verify as so:

But then, it didn't automatically show up in the Applications menu.  Further it didn't show up in the "Add Applications" window.  So, how to run the application and where did it get installed anyway?  This part was a little klunky, but there's a decent solution.

First was to find the installation.  I know that one file which is installed is named 'soffice' so that's what I looked for:


Then I tried running it directly from the command line, and it worked fine.  Next the question was how to nicely integrate it into my environment on this computer.

First I right clicked on the top menu bar and select Add To Panel.  The next window gives several sources of things to add, and I selected Custom Application Launcher.  That switches you to a different window into which you enter the Name (e.g. "Star office 8"), the Command (the path found above) and the Icon.  For the Icon a useful one is included with the Star Office installation, just click the Browse button, go to the directory found above and search around for the icons.

That gives you a clickable icon which launches the application.  This is around 90% as useful as entering choices into the Applications menu.

I don't know how to tell Nautilis to associate Star Office with the Open Document file formats.  There isn't any preferences for associating applications with given file formats, and the Preferred Applications system preferences window doesn't cover this issue.

I did get Firefox to remember an association with Star Office.  When downloading a file with Star Office, select the open in application choice, click on Browse, browse to the application as found earlier, and select that.  From then on Firefox will open the Open Document files using Star Office.

BTW, the new OOo/Star Office user interface is fabulous.

(2005-11-17 00:54:20.0) Permalink Comments [6]