StarOffice Installation hangs on systems with NFS mounted home directories.

Support knowledgebase (sadrian_soffice_nfs)
Applies to

SuSE Linux: Version 6.2, 6.3
This article refers to an older version of SuSE Linux. Therefore some of the informations given in this article may be outdated or the article may contain stale links.

Symptom:

When trying to install StarOffice 5.1 on a system where the home directory is mounted via NFS, the installation procedure hangs at the dialog box that asks you which Java package should be used.

Reason:

This is connected with a problem whereby the NFS server cannot release the 'lock' on some files.

Solution:

You need to install StarOffice in such a way that the Office51 directory is physically on the local machine in a directory which is linked to the user's home directory. In the following it is assumed that the name of the user is `rose': replace this by your username. You have already used YaST to install the so_en package. It has therefore have placed the necessary files to install StarOffice in /opt/Office51
  1. Become root
    rose: /home/rose > su 
  2. As root, create the Office51 directory where you want it to be, for example /usr/local/Office51
    root: /home/rose # mkdir /usr/local/Office51/
  3. Then create a subdirectory for yourself - this will allow other users to follow the same procedure
    root: /home/rose # mkdir /usr/local/Office51/rose
  4. Change the ownership of this directory to rose:
    root: /home/rose # chown rose.users /usr/local/Office51
  5. Go back to being yourself:
    root: /home/rose # exit
  6. Create a directory in /tmp
    rose: /home/rose > mkdir /tmp/rose
  7. Change to that directory:
    rose: /home/rose > cd /tmp/rose
  8. Create the files sofficerc and .sversionrc, for example:
    rose: /tmp/rose > touch sofficerc .sversionrc
  9. Change back to your home directory:
    rose: /home/rose > cd
  10. Make a symbolic link to the /usr/local/Office51/rose directory
    rose: /home/rose > ln -s /usr/local/Office51/rose ./Office51
  11. Create the following links to the files in /tmp/rose:
    rose: /home/rose > ln -s /tmp/rose/.sversionrc .

    rose: /home/rose > ln -s /tmp/rose/sofficerc Office51/
  12. Now change to the installation directory of StarOffice
    rose: /home/rose > cd /opt/Office51/bin
  13. Begin the installation of StarOffice
    rose: /opt/Office51/bin > ./setup
Installation should proceed normally and once installed StarOffice should run correctly.
Keywords: STAROFFICE, STAR, NFS

SDB-sadrian_soffice_nfs, Copyright SuSE Linux AG, Nürnberg, Germany - Version: 02. Sep 1999
SuSE Linux AG - Last generated: 07. Apr 2000 by sadrian (sdb_gen 1.40.0)