Installing WordPerfect 8.1 on Mandrake 9.1
Written by Joe Skaggs on 29-Oct-2003
My company uses Wordperfect for almost all of its word procesing needs.
Although I've ben a linux convert for some time now, I still didn't
have a good way to do work on my old Gateway laptop (Running Mandrake
9.1) and easily transfer it back to our other machines (running an OS
from Redmond WA).
I recently stumbled across an old boxed set of the Corel Linux Operating
System (CLOS) on eBay that included the full version of Wordperfect 8.1.
Figureing that it would save me from re-formatting documents every
time I got back to the office, I bought it. $10.50 and a few days
later, it was mine. As soon as I got my hands on it, the install CD
went onto /mnt/cdrom so I could find the Wordperfect files.
Uh-oh. Turns out CLOS was a Debian-based distro, and I'm running
Mandrake. The five packages I needed to install were Debian .deb, and
Mandrake uses .rpm packages. Not wanting to spend a bunch of time
installing a new distro on the old laptop, I decided to see what could
be done to install WordPerfect 8.1 from the CLOS cd's. This is how I
got it done.
Note to readers: This is a bit of an ugly kludge -- I had to do some
things that would probably curl a few toes at good ol' MandrakeSoft.
But it works, and I've got WP 8.1 installed and working now.
Before the step-by-step listing of what I did, first I want you to go
look here. Leon Goldstein did a
nice job of explaining how to install WP 8.1 from .deb files, and all
we're going to do is tweak his instructions a bit. Leon used alien to
convert the .deb packages to .tar.gz or .rpm. However, I found that
alien V8.36 choked on the .deb packages on the CLOS CD's. Therefore,
a workaround was needed that wouldn't need alien to unpack the .deb
packages. Throughout this procedure, I'm assuming that you're
comfortable on the console and that I don't have to explain what ls and
cd are.
Without further fussing, here's what I did.
1) Obtain the support libraries WP 8.1 needs.
The support libs libc-5.3.12-35mdk.i586.rpm and ld.so-1.9.5-13.i386.rpm
were both located on freshrpms.net. Note that ld.so-1.9.5-13.i386.rpm
is not a Mandrake-specific rpm, but hey, linux is linux. Download and
install the libraries via rpm, urpmi, or gurpmi -- whichever you like
best. This is probably the most trivial part of the installation.
2) Copy the .deb packages from the CLOS CD to someplace convienent.
There are five .deb packages you need from the CLOS CD. They are
fonts-115_1.0-4.deb, fonts-69_1.0-4.deb, wp-full_8.1-12_i386.deb,
fonts-16_1.0-5.deb, type1inst_0.6.1-6_i386.deb, and
wp-manual_8.1-3_i386.deb. For my install, I copied all the packages
into ~/wp/ for use.
3) Unpack the .deb packages using ar.
I used the ar utility to "open up" the .deb packages, via:
[joe@hagrid wp]$ ar -xv wp-full_8.1-12_i386.deb
x - debian-binary
x - control.tar.gz
x - data.tar.gz
The data.tar.gz tarball contains the "payload" ie the binaries. The
control.tar.gz tarball contains the metadata describing dependencies and
other info. Since I'm not installing via rpm or dpkg, the metadata
isn't that important -- what counts here is the payload.
After ar'ing the files, copy the data .tar.gz to the root directory, and
extract it via
[root@hagrid /]$ tar -xzvf data.tar.gz
Note that you need to be root (via su or sudo) to have permissions be
right. That will extract the binaries and place them in the appropriate
locations. THE TARBALL MUST BE ON THE ROOT DIRECTORY FOR THIS TO WORK
RIGHT. I know this is unorthodox, but it works.
So for each of the five .deb packages you need from the CLOS distro, you
need to do the following things:
a) Copy the .deb file to an appropriate location (I used ~/wp/)
b) Unpack the .deb using ar -xv filename.deb
c) Move the data.tar.gz to the root directory (su or sudo to root for
this step)
d) Unpack (as root) the data.tar.gz using tar -xzvf data.tar.gz
Order probably doesn't matter. I unpacked and installed the fonts
first, then the wp-full package, then the wp_manual package.
4) Edit (as root) /etc/ld.so.conf, and add /usr/lib/wp8/wpbin to the end
of the file. Exit and execute (as root) ldconfig.
5) Install the fonts. cd to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 and execute
(as root) type1inst
6) Execute (as root) /usr/X11R6/bin/mkfontdir
7) Execute (as root) /usr/lib/wp8/shbin10/wpfi
8) Test the install. Exit from root and execute xwp from a terminal.
Here's a few things to keep in mind. First, this method means your
package manager won't know anything about wp's installation. Removal
could be difficult. When I untar'ed the data.tar.gz files, I redirected
the output to a text file, so I could store the file locations for later
reference. Second -- this worked on a Mandrake 9.1 install -- I can't
vouch for it working on any other distro. Third, there's a lot of
mucking about as root here, so observe the usual precautions -- double
check your commands before executing them and so on. If you break your
system, it's YOUR fault.
Good Luck!
