INSTALLING WORDPERFECT 8.1 ON FEDORA CORE  1
Written by Joe Skaggs on 3-Feb-2004

I recently got a copy of the first two disks of Fedora Core 1 included with a British Linux Magazine that I sometimes read.  Since my circa-1998 Gateway Solo2500 needed re-partitioning to correct space problems in the / filesystem, I decided to give Fedora a whirl.

Fedora itself installed successfully, except for soundcard detection problems similar to those I previously experienced with Mandrake.  Since the Gateway laptop I use is a low-power machine, I've chosen to leave sound unsupported.   So far, so good.

Since my company uses WordPerfect for all out internal word processing, I wanted to make sure my full version of WordPerfect 8.1 would install and run properly on Fedora.  I followed the instructions I wrote in Installing WordPerfect 8.1 on Mandrake 9.1, with the following changes:

1)   Before attempting to install, I did some digging around to make sure the various utilities and support libraries I needed were there.  The 'ar' executable that I use to unpack the .deb packages wasn't installed by default, so I downloaded the binutils-2.13.90.0.2-2.i386.rpm from redhat.com and installed it.

2)  My libc libraries were up-to-date, so nothing needed to be done there.

3)  The dynamic linker ld.so was not installed.  I had trouble locating ld.so-1.9.5-13.i386.rpm on freshrpms.net, but a Google search found a copy in a public download area from Wolfram Research.

After downloading the binutils and ld.so packages, I installed them via rpm.  Afterwards, following the same instructions I wrote for installing on Mandrake 9.1 at wp81mdk91.html, I had a successful install and a working WordPerfect 8.1.

Happy word crunching!