From ATLAS-TRIUMF

[edit] Open Office 2

Open Office 1.x can be installed with yum, but if you want to read files created with Open Office 2, you need to install that. Download from http://www.openoffice.org/ and follow installation instructions. The problem I had was with the rpm jre-6u3-linux-i586.rpm which will not install. Everything else appears to install fine, but I can't open anything with OOffice2, and it seems to be a java problem.

Try yum remove yum remove java-1.4.2-sun-compat-1.4.2.90-1jpp.i586

Now I can do rpm -Uivh jre-6u3-linux-i586.rpm

cd /root/3rdParty/OOG680_m9_native_packed-1_en-US.9238 (where I installed from)

chmod a+x setup

./setup

accept licence etc.

Still bad, ps -fu itrigger | grep office shows:

itrigger 31230 1 0 14:12 ? 00:00:00 /bin/sh /etc/openoffice.org2.3/program/soffice -impress file:///home/itrigger/Desktop/AnalysisUserSupport-20Feb08.odp itrigger 31238 31230 0 14:12 ? 00:00:00 /etc/openoffice.org2.3/program/javaldx

and nothing opens.

cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

ln -s /usr/java/jre1.6.0_03/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so .

ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so .

cd /usr/local/Firefox2/firefox/plugins/

After much searching, I find that I can get it to work "fine" by looking for the pid of the javaldx process and killing that.

Permanent solution is (from OpenOffice.org forum):

Needed to alter the starter script because of an error in the program ' javaldx'

cd /opt/openoffice.org2.3/program vi soffice

Search for the the following line:

java_ld_library_path=`"$sd_prog/javaldx" $BOOTSTRAPVARS`

and replace it with:

java_ld_library_path=""

[edit] Plugins for 64-bit Firefox on 64-bit SL4

I now have working Java, Flash, etc.

I installed 64-bit versions if available. If not, I used nspluginwrapper. Instructions and download are in the link.

Before I forget, the crucial bit which did not seem to be documented anywhere and is probably because I installed Firefox 2 by hand, is that it was fairly easy to make all the plugins work for Seamonkey, but they were not being picked up by Firefox. In the end, as root, I made softlinks:

cd /usr/local/firefox2/firefox/plugins/
for i in `ls /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins`; do; ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/$i $i; done

I suspect this will be painful to maintain...

--Isabel 16:13, 11 October 2007 (PDT)

[edit] Below here is very old and mostly obsolete

[edit] Rough notes on upgrading from SL(C)3.0.X to SL4

this can be done with Anaconda.

I did succeed in installing the whole thing from CD:

get the images (4 CDs) for SL4 from https://www.scientificlinux.org/

insert disk 1 and boot

and just follow the instructions, mostly taking the defaults.

It messed up the first time because I didn't have enough disk space, but it is clever enough to check this before overwriting the old installation, so I was able to ditch one very big package (I believe it was internationalization stuff for open office, roughly 600 MB) and fit everything else in.

I had to do a bit of messing around after the installation was complete to switch from apt to yum as my default package updater, mostly because the upgrade was from SLC3 to SL4.

The installation was quite successful in most respects (sound works much better on my 3-year-old Acer laptop) but since then I have had several mysterious crashes in the middle of the night, probably around the time yum runs its updates, and occasionally the disk starts spinning and can only be stopped by a hardware reboot...

I did not succeed in doing an NFS install:

insert SL4 boot disk

at boot prompt type linux askmethod

select nfs image for installation method

select dhcp

NFS server name: mirror.triumf.ca SL directory: /public/scientificlinux.org/40/i386

hmm.. it claims installation media do not match directory. but it definitely thinks it is an SL4.0 disk when it boots up. Will come back to this some other time. --Isabel 09:53, 14 December 2005 (PST)