Welcome

Last updated 2005 January 1

LBA-Office R2 ReadMe


This file contains important information about the LBA-Office R2 office suite. Please read this information very carefully before starting work.

We invite you to participate in the development of LBA-Linux at our community website, SOTLinux.org.

Notes on Installation

System Requirements
Linux Intel
Windows
Common Notes
Network Installation: Error when calling the LBA-Office QuickStarter (Windows)
Changing the User Interface Font
File System ReiserFS: LBA-Office Will Not Start for User IDs Larger Than 65536
File Locking
Using Info-ZIP
Used/Modified Source Code
Messaging API
Getting Involved

System Requirements

Linux Intel

Windows

Note: Please be aware that administrator rights are needed for the installation process.

Make sure you have enough free memory in your temporary directory.

Common Notes

You can install LBA-Office R2 alongside of an older version of LBA-Office. If you subsequently uninstall the previous version of LBA-Office, you must then run the newer version's setup program and select the Repair option. This is necessary to ensure that the new version remains correctly registered in your system.

Ensure you have enough free memory in your temporary directory.

Network Installation: Error When Calling the LBA-Office Quickstarter (Windows)

If, when starting the system, you experience problems calling the LBA-Office Quickstarter (e.g. invalid link), this is probably due to the fact that the network drive on which the network installation is installed is not or not yet available.

In most cases, this happens when the network drives are logged in via a login script, thereby establishing the connection for the network drives parallel to running the programs of the autostart group from which the Quickstarter is also started.

To avoid this problem, the network drive should be connected via the system's services. If this is not possible, the link used to call the Quickstarter can be removed from the autostart group of the system, or the Quickstarter can already be disabled when installing the workstation installation. If the system administrator already disabled the Quickstarter during installation of the network installation, then the Quickstarter cannot be selected by the user in a later workstation installation.

Changing the User Interface Font

You may change that font used by LBA-Office for screen display and printing, replacing it with a different font installed on your system. To do this, use the Tools - Options - LBA-Office - Font Replacement function.

To change the font used in the LBA-Office user interface, replace the default font "Nimbus Sans L" a font of your choice, and mark the "always" setting for this replacement.

Refer to the LBA-Office Help for a detailed explanation of the dialog.

File System ReiserFS: LBA-Office Will Not Start for User IDs Larger Than 65535

In versions of ResierFS lower than 3.6, the a bug in the file system prevents LBA-Office from removing temporary files when the user's UID is larger than 65535. This results in the program failing to start. The problem is not a bug in LBA-Office, but rather of early ReiserFS file systems. This bug has been corrected in ResierFS versions 3.6 and higher.

File Locking

By default, file locking is turned off in LBA-Office. To activate file locking, set the environment variable SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING=1 and then export SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING. The soffice script file contains these commands in disabled form.

Warning: Activating the file locking feature can cause problems with Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.7 used in conjunction with Linux NFS 2.0. If your system environment has these parameters, we strongly recommend that you avoid using the file locking feature. Otherwise, LBA-Office will hang when you try to open a file from a NFS mounted directory from a Linux computer.

Using Info-ZIP

LBA-Office uses Info-ZIP to create and unpack the LBA-Office installation, as well as for packing and unpacking the LBA-Office XML file format. Info-ZIP programs (ZIP, UnZip and other utilities) are available free of charge and can be used in the source code and as an executable program. They can be obtained by visiting Anonymous FTP sites such as ftp.uu.net:/pub/archiving/zip/*.

Used / Modified Source Code

Portions Copyright 1998, 1999 James Clark. Portions Copyright 1996, 1998 Netscape Communications Corporation.

Messaging API

Depending on your Windows Platform and your currently used email application it is possible to run into problems with the Messaging API (MAPI), in particular when using the 'Send -> Document as Email' option. These problems manifest as crashes or a hanging LBA-Office. This is related to possibly erroneous MAPI DLL files. Currently this can only be solved by copying a new MAPI DLL file into the system. Newer versions of the MAPI.DLL will typically be delivered with email applications like Outlook Express. You can find more information from the Microsoft Knowledge Base searching for 'Mapi.dll'. (http://search.microsoft.com/)


Getting Involved

The LBA-Office Community would very much benefit from your active participation in the development of this important open source project.

As a User, you are already a valuable part of the suite's development process and we would like to encourage you to take an even more active role with a view to being a long-term contributor to the Community. Please join us at: SOTLinux.org.