Re: will WordPerfect8 clobber Debian Sid system?
> I've been trying to use OpenOffice Writer for a project requiring a
> multipage table. Unfortunately, OOWriter cannot make (or display!)
> multipage tables, and apparently *will not* until version 2.0. This kind
> of stinks, but now I'm looking at alternatives. I've heard some people
> rave about the old WordPerfect 8 and its capabilities (wordprocessor
> preference is a subjective thing, I know). I know there are .debs for it
> out there to be had, since a version of it came packaged with some
> versions of (the Debian-based) Corel Linux. What I'm wondering about is
> the feasibility/advisability of attempting to install WP8 to my Debian Sid
> system. There are probably at least 2 aspects to this question: 1)
> potential dependency problems and their resolution; and 2) potential for
> harming my current setup by some files (say, older libraries) overwriting
> others. I am also not sure about WP8's ability to use truetype fonts.
> Can anyone please comment on these matters?
For general background about WP8 for Linux see
http://www.linuxmafia.com/wpfaq/.
I've been running WP8 for Linux on my Debian testing/unstable box. I
installed it into its own directory, /opt/wp8, so it couldn't overwrite
any of my system files. In addition, you'll need to install the ldso,
libc5, xlib6, and xpm4.7 packages, all from the "oldlibs" category,
before you can run WP8. In particular, the WP8 installer won't even run
("./wpinstc: No such file or directory") until you have ldso installed.
All of this worked just fine until just this week, when I upgraded my
KDE to 3.2. In order to do that, I had to grab xlibs from experimental,
and this conflicted with xlib6, which I therefore had to uninstall,
breaking WP8. I think this is a bug, since xlib6 depends on xlibs >
4.0, and the experimental xlibs is version 4.3. There shouldn't be a
conflict. But anyway that's where things stand for now.
Good luck,
Andrew.
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