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Dear "distributors",

as has also been mentioned in another posting: Please, insert an
INSTALL file in the top directory at least of the tar.gz RPM
distribution for Linux. It is what command line users simply expect. I
have been working with all OpenOffice releases (and candidates) at least
since 1.0, but never installation was harder than now. For me it was NOT
obvious that I have to read the SETUP_GUIDE (since I know how to setup
OO :-). It should have been named INSTALL_GUIDE.

Before all: For a newbie it is NOT clear what she shall do after
installation! You find "rpm -Uhiv *.rpm" and nothing else after
the first search how to install OO ...

You can well insert a link to the setup guide in this file but it 
should contain some simple information necessary for straightfor-
ward installation. Proposal (my own comment are marked with [XXX...]):

- ------------------------------------------------------------
This file describes the simplest case for OpenOffice2.0 installation.
For more information, see .../SETUP_GUIDE.pdf [XXX or include it in
the distribution; by the way, I think that it can be made much smaller,
there are empty pages, and the PDF looks quite large].

After unpacking the archive (what you have just done), execute
the following commands as root:

cd RPMS
rpm -Uhiv *.rpm

This will install the complete application.
After this, you can do the following:

cd desktop-integration
rpm -i *debian*

if you use a desktop under Debian - Suse Linux users have to type
"rpm -i *suse*" and so on. Look whether your system is contained there
[XXX explain shortly what "freedesktop-menus" means - I don't know it
exactly].

Then you can call OpenOffice2.0 with the command "soffice" or
"soffice _document_name", or of course by clicking on an icon.

If your system is not contained there, you may discard the rpm files
in desktop-integration/ and call OpenOffice2.0 with

/opt/openoffice.org2.0/program/soffice [_document_name]

(write a one-line shell script for this purpose).

[XXX Optional: Please give a short explanation where the files reside -
in /opt/openoffice.org.2.0, and after desktop installation also in
/etc/openoffice.org.2.0. This was important for me to exclude files from
Tripwire scanning.]

[XXX Optional part]
You can also delete some rpm files you do not need before installation.
[XXX Please explain the meaning of the file names in a short table,
similar to the setup guide of p.35]
- ------------------------------------------------------------

I think the last paragraph can be ommitted since the base and core files
have 84% of the size of all files and are obviosly needed. Hence storage
should not be an issue.

I would very estimate to have a profound guide what to do as non-root.
This is the situation I had yesterday: As guest in a company, I found a
preview-2.0 OO release on Novell's SuSE 9.3 (heavily broken, among
other's outline numbering, paragraph formatting). I urgently needed the
corrected release 2.0.1 to work, but there was no administrator
available.

To this end, I transformend all rpm's with rpm2cpio to cpio archives,
observed that all entries had relative pathnames, and unpacked in some
directory $WORK. After starting with
$WORK/opt/openoffice2.0/program/soffice, anything worked nice (because
"soffice" is a "relocatable" shell script). I still should correct some
BASIC paths (I don't understand what they are needed for).

If this is the legal way, I would add this receipt to the INSTALL file.
I would finish this file if you give me the missing information and
possibly correct some details. One really needs installations as
non-root.

One could also provide a simple shell script to automatize the
operations but I think: If someone has "succeeded" in unpacking a tgz
file, she can also type these short command lines which is more
bullet-proof than any automatizm.

I estimate OpenOffice high and wish that more people use it in a
more qualified way, but the first step has become too hard after the
switch from 1.x to 2.0.

Best greetings

Reinhard Wobst

(working as a one-man company in security consulting and UNIX
programming, having no Windows partition on any of my computers ;-)

- -- 
The difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.

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