Applications

This page is hopelessly outdated and is retained for historical purposes only.

For now this section will just be some notes about odd things I've run into while running various applications. To be expanded later.

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SIAG Office

Submitted by Beau Carper

You asked for a review on Siag Office. It is a very low key yet effective suite. For the Word Processor it has many of the general features as Word or WordPerfect (i.e. spell check, font/paragraph formating.) While I haven't had time to put it through some hard paces it looks effective. It can save in .pw (native siag format) .txt, .rtf, and unix formats. The Spread sheet program is good as well. Although it is hard to enter data (ie you have to right click the cell and then sleck label/data/numbers/etc) It can save in .siag format as well as comma delimited format (a general format used by many spreadsheets) however you may lose some formating. I haven't had time try Egon, the presentation program. You can import the different formats interchangeably (i.e. spreadsheet into a word processor file). The office itself seems to be more useful if used for printing documents than trying to be multi-system/multi-program. Hope this helps.

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KLyX

( http://www.devel.lyx.org/~ettrich/klyx.html)

The first time I ran KLyX, I started following the Tutorial. I tried to view the Tutorial with File -> Preview -> View DVI. Well, it worked, but it had to run through about 1500 fonts, apparently it was creating them right then. Good thing I used my trick of starting X programs from the terminal in the background. I ran KLyX like this:

[user]$ klyx &

This allowed me to switch to the terminal and read the output of the program so I could tell what was going on. Otherwise I would have been just staring at the little clock and wondering if the program was locked up. It wasn't, and after more than 5 minutes it finished what it was doing. (Meanwhile I popped open Netscape Composer to make this note.) Happily, this only happens the first time you use the DVI viewer on a document. The next time it took only a couple of seconds to view the document, even after closing the application. However, when I tried it on another (much shorter) document, it went through the whole font thing again. Apparently this is normal, but it's annoying. The longer the document, the longer it takes to do this.

Later I discovered that in my version (0.9.6) the File -> New menu option doesn't work right, so I gave up trying to use it for now. This version is now out of date, so these problems may have been fixed already. The current version (I believe) is 0.9.8. Rather than download another version, since my S.u.S.E. Linux distributions came with LyX (the original on which KLyX was based) on the CD I installed it. It uses Xforms rather than Qt, but it works, and I'm happy.

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kppp

( http://www.kde.org )

Keeps reporting that the "lock" option is enabled in /etc/ppp/options, even though it has been commented out. I gave up and just removed the word "lock" from the file and the message stopped popping up.

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Netscape

By default, Netscape looks for its support files in /usr/local/lib/netscape... The Red Hat RPMs install Netscape in /usr/lib/netscape instead, and Netscape can't find its help files or the dictionary (Spell button is grayed out). To correct the problem you need to export an environment variable called MOZILLA_HOME containing the actual path where Netscape lives. This can be done in /etc/profile to cover all users, or in ~/.bash_profile for specific users. On Red Hat systems you could also add this line to the top of /usr/bin/netscape, the script used to start Netscape.

[user]$ export MOZILLA_HOME=/usr/lib/netscape

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Star Office

( http://www.stardivision.com )
A Linux office suite that's available free for personal use. Very cool program, without doubt, IF you can get it installed. Those of us using Red Hat 5 and up (or any other distribution based on glibc instead of libc5) have to jump through some nasty hoops to get Version 4 of this thing installed. Star Office 5 has now been released. Like version 4 it is free for personal use, but it has none of these problems. It is based on the new C libraries found in Red Hat 5, and the setup program works like a champ. Just follow the installation instructions that come in the package, they're pretty thorough and the setup is actually quite easy. Basically you untar the package and run a script called setup.

Trouble is if you're using Red Hat 5 and installing Star Office 4 you'll get a bizarre error when the setup begins that reads something like "Script Error line 1: Syntax error at token 'l' expected declarator, i.e. file...". I searched the 'Net for hours before I found an answer to this one. The message lies, there's actually nothing wrong with the script at all. The problem is that some of the libraries required by the setup.bin aren't available. Here's how to fix it. Change to the office setup directory and run this command:

[user]$ ldd setup.bin
        libXt.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.so.6 (0x40005000)
        libXpm.so.4 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXpm.so.4 (0x40048000)
        libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x40055000)
        libXmu.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXmu.so.6 (0x400ec000)
        libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x400fe000)
        libSM.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libSM.so.6 (0x40109000)
        libICE.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libICE.so.6 (0x40111000)
        libdl.so.1 => /lib/libdl.so.1 (0x40125000)
        libm.so.5 => /lib/libm.so.5 (0x40128000)
        libc.so.5 => /lib/libc.so.5 (0x40130000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x401f0000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.1 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x00000000)

The command gives you a list of libraries that are required to run the program. On the left is the library that setup.bin wants. On the right is the file on your system that's doing the job. If any of them say "not found" or something like that, you've found the problem. The most likely culprits are libc.so.5 and libm.so.5. Red Hat includes older versions of these libraries in it's 5.x distributions. If that's what you're missing, download the libc-5.4.??.bin.tar.gz from UNC's MetaLab (formerly SunSITE) or one of it's mirrors. ( http://metalab.unc.edu ) You'll probably find it under /pub/Linux/GCC/, but look for the GCC directory in any case. You'll need to get 5.4.22 or higher.

Once you've got the package, untar it into the /tmp directory. I can never remember the syntax for tar, so check the man page (type man tar). Since I have KDE installed I always use kzip, a most handy utility that takes all the work out of it. Once you have the archive unpacked, become SuperUser. Locate the libraries in question (they should be under /tmp/lib if you unpacked them right). Copy each of them into the /lib directory using the cp command. Then change to the /lib directory and run this:

[root]# ldconfig

This causes Linux to create the proper links for the new libraries to work with applications. Become a normal user again and test your work using the ldd command again. If it still reports missing libraries, go back and check your work, you missed something. If it doesn't, you have only one step to go. Issue the command env or printenv. This will print a list of the current environment variables. Look for one called LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Make sure it contains /lib. If it doesn't, or if you don't see it:

[user]$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/lib:/usr/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Now you can run the setup script per the instructions, no more errors. (Don't forget to type ./setup to run the one in the current directory! Otherwise you'll start the Red Hat setup utility in /usr/sbin !) Good Luck! [Special thanks to Thomas E. Dodd, whose Usenet posts provided most of the info in this article. Sorry it took me so long to credit you Thomas!]

Star Office 5 is a very slick looking program, but after I used it for a while it started crashing inexplicably. It never lost any of my data, and I'm thankful for that, but I've had to stop using it due to instability.