Installing WordPerfect 8 Under Mandrake?

AntiNorm asks: "I recently installed Mandrake 8.0, and after taking much time to get it working, I found that the free version of WordPerfect 8 would not install. The same thing happened under Redhat 7.0, although it installed and worked fine under RH 6.2. It appears that the binaries (wpinstc and wpinstg) that are called by the installation scripts are unable to find a particular file or library that they need, but I haven't been able to figure out anything beyond that. Has anyone else had this problem? If so, is there a way to get around it?" Update: 05/10 04:27 PM by C : Another similar question hit the bin, today, except this one is about Wordperfect 2000. Are the same problems from WP8 inherited in the latest version? Read more, below.

eadint asks: "I've been using Linux since 1996 and about a year and a half ago when Corel Office 2000 for :inux was released I finally got rid of my Windows partition and started using Linux as my sole operating system. Recently I upgraded to Red Hat 7.1 and I haven't been able to install it on my computer. I'm hoping for some advice on this and also hoping that I don't have to downgrade my OS. I can definitely notice a difference in speed with 7.1"

Re:yeah, use rh 6.2

[Tet]

"strace binaryname" to see what they are _doing_ when they say what they say, and "ldd binaryname" to see what (dynamic) libs it wants

That would be the obvious plan of attack, but it doesn't work. ldd complains with the same error as you get when trying to run the binary directly. Similarly, strace fails because it can't get as far as trying to exec the target binary.

I solved this problem some time ago for RH7.0 by installing some RPMs from RH6.2. From memory, I think it was the glibc-2.1.3 RPM, and possibly one other.

You need libc5 (like from RedHat 6.2)

[Chronoforge]

I tried to install WP under both RedHat 7.0 and 7.1. Lo and behold, it failed. The problem is that 7.0 and 7.1 don't include libc5. This is damn stupid and should be considered a bug.

The solution for me was to install two rpms from RedHat 6.2. Specifically, libc-5.3.12-31.i386.rpm and ld.so-1.9.5-13.i386.rpm. They installed for me without any complaining under both RH 7.0 and 7.1. Nothing needed beyond "rpm -ivh".

This is also nice for my little old notebook, as I can now run Netscape 3 instead of 4.

I don't have a Mandrake box to play with, so I don't know if those two RH rpms will install, but Mandrake should have libc5 rpms in one of their older distributions.

Want more info? Mail me at [e-mail]

Yes

[bconway]

There are updated install scripts on Corel's site [corel.com]. I don't recall if the problem is with any glibc 2.2-based distros or something else, but there's documentation there to go along with it, as well.

yeah, use rh 6.2

[StandardDeviant]

:-) unless there's something in the newer stuff you can't live without. and 6.2 is hardly ancient tech. for the binaries try running them individually to see what they say (and then running "strace binaryname" to see what they are _doing_ when they say what they say, and "ldd binaryname" to see what (dynamic) libs it wants (is ldd just dynlibs? seems to make sense but I don't recall and it's 4am so I can't be buggered to go find out)). This may require a good bit of spelunking on your part to fix, but that's the joy of unix. One good source of rpms is rpmfind.net (aka rufus.w3.org), for all your obscure rpm-finding needs.
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Requires glibc 2.0 backward compatibility

[dorzak]

There is an RPM in Mandrake 8.0 for backward compatibility with older Mandrake releases. Mandrake 8 by default only installs 2.2,and not the backward compatibility. Go into rpmdrake and search for glibc you will find it.

Re:You need libc5 (like from RedHat 6.2)

[AntiNorm]

Downloaded both of these RPMs from a RedHat mirror, and they installed without trouble. WP worked perfectly after that. Thanks for the help.

BTW, in case anybody else out there is having trouble with this, I had to modify install.wp so that, instead of looking at the output of uname -r, it would just look at the string "2.4.3". Apparently, the tail end of custom versions like 2.4.3-20mdk makes install.wp barf. If you are getting an "Integer expression expected" error, this is the likely cause.

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Re:You need libc5 (like from RedHat 6.2)

[AntiNorm]

Here are some links to the necessary RPMs:
ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/redhat/redha t/redhat-6.2-en/os/i386/RedHat/RPMS/libc-5.3.12-31 .i386.rpm [purdue.edu]
ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/redhat/redha t/redhat-6.2-en/os/i386/RedHat/RPMS/ld.so-1.9.5-13 .i386.rpm [purdue.edu]

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Re:You need libc5 (like from RedHat 6.2)

[flikx]

Under Mandrake, I recall a "compat-glibc" or "campat-libc5" package. I don't remember seeing them under Mandrake 8.0, but under 7.x, they were there.

I'd say install the older rpms first, then install the newer ones with 'rpm -ivh' .. shouldn't be any problems after that.

I had some of the same binary incompatibilities when I upgraded this notebook from mandrake 7.2 to 8.0 .. quite a few problems in fact. A few recompiles and some old libraries installed fixed everything. Needless to say, I'm not installing Mandrake 8.0 on a production machine [utah.edu].


BTW- Nice to see someone from the UofU.
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Here's how to fix it...I hope

[spacewhale]

I have not had this problem with WP, but I have with other precompiled binaries. The problem is one or both of 2 things:
1: You have the libraries it needs, but they are the wrong version.
2: You don't have the libraries it needs

Simple enough so far? Good.

Now use the ldd util. to see which libraries the binaries need (ie what they are linked to). For example:
$ ldd wpinstc
This outputs a list telling what libraries it is linked to, and what they point to on your system, or "missing" if they are missing. So see what libraries are missing.

Most likely, there will be a library marked missing, called "something.so.version". This name.so.version is a symlink to the real library, name.so.

Why? To prevent incompatibilities caused by linking to a library that is too new or too old. The version in the symlink is the version of the actual library, so binaries are linked to the symlinks instead of the actual library. So when you don't have the version it "needs", it doesn't work.

BUT you probably have a newer version of the library, in which case it will probably be okay. Even if you have an older version, it's worth a try. To fool the linker, make a symlink from whatever name it says it needs to the actual library, in the same directory as the library (usually /lib, /usr/lib, or /usr/local/lib). Then run ldconfig to examine the new stuff. Now run the binary and see if it works.

One last thing if it doesn't work: ldconfig may remove the symlink you make, so see if anything happened to it when you ran ldconfig, and if it's gone make it again and don't run ldconfig.

Also, the problem may just be a bad symlink, ie a symlink that points to a nonexistant file. Or sometimes just running ldconfig helps :-)

Good luck, tell me if it works! :-)

Libs..

[von_brandt]

Are you sure that mandrake 8.0 has the libs required for WP 8?? i heard some people have problems with libc etc...