tonyalfrey@earthlink.net

Introduction

Many of use have used WordPerfect 8 (wp8) in various linux distros for several years. It is no longer sold or supported by Corel but many of us still have our original CDs purchased from Corel, or CDs of "lite" versions of wp8 sold with some wp8 book or have downloaded an rpm of a "lite" version from the web, for example,

ftp://ftp.linux.com/pub/mirrors/caldera/old-products/col2.2/col/install/RPMS/WordPerfect-8.0-7.i386.rpm

wp8 was also supplied with many distros, including Caldera and SuSE, again as 'lite" versions. I have run the Personal version of wp8 on all Caldera distros from 2.2 up through LTP. I have not tried it on eWorkstation 3.1.

Now I wanted to install it on SuSE 7.2 (the boxed version) but on attempted installation of the CD, or on attempted running of the executable xwp after installing the rpm, I got the error message "cannot load library libXpm.so.4".

This has been discussed at length on the SuSE list and the generally-agreed problem is that wp8 needs the old libc5 library to run. This is the same as the packet shlibs5 that can be installed using the SuSE installation tool YaST 2. Along with a symlink to libXpm_wx.so, the problem was supposed to have been solved. But for many of us, this fix did not work. I must thank Gary <medman@mcleodusa.net> for providing a wierd, but quite functional solution to the problem. I was successful both with the rpm and with my CD, so here are the steps that I performed exactly.

Installing wp8 into SuSE 7.2

1. In SuSE 7.2, as root, go to a terminal window (or in KDE, click "File" -> "Run Command" ) and command

yast2

2.  When YaST2 appears, select the Software -> Install/Remove Software -> Group -> System Environment/Libraries  series of window clicks.

3. Go to shlibs5 and install it. You will need CD #2 from the distro to do this.

4. When you are done, then add the necessary symlink (as root) with the following commands from within a terminal window:

cd /usr/i486-linux-libc5/lib

ln -s libXpm_wx.so libXpm.so.4

cd

5. I then installed the rpm of wp8 from the above site, even though I have the CD. I knew that I could upgrade to the full installation later from my CD (you may try the same by starting from your CD if you have one). The executable will be placed in /opt/wp8/wpbin so you may try from a terminal

cd /opt/wp8/wpbin

./xwp

6. However, this will most likely bomb!!! The trick, as provided by Gary <medman@mcleodusa.net>, is to uninstall shlibs5 at this point, leaving /opt/wp8 undisturbed and then reinstall shlibs5, again using YaST2. We do not know why this works, but it does. Even SuSE tech support did not have this trick. Then you may run wp8 as before by commanding ./xwp from the directory /opt/wp8/wpbin or you may make a nice menu entry in KDE that calls this for you.

Search