[techtalk] StarOffice:It rings me

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Wed, Oct 11, 2000 at 11:40:26AM +0800 or thereabouts, antonxie wrote:
> Well techtalkers...
> 
> I've installed Staroffice 5.2 too on a separate partition u01.
> I'm complete newbee...not bumblebee nor gonnabe...

:) 

> I have it installed on /u01/staroffice52/
> To run the program, I have to type ./soffice in /u01/staroffice52/program/
> directory
> My guestions:
> 1. How does the command  "./soffice" differ from other, say "soffice", coz
> simply type soffice would run the program.  I don't know about this stuff...

Enough people have answered the "what's this dot-slash" thing for
me to leave it alone. :) I shall mention though, that your shell
(the text interface you type commands into) knows loads of these
abbreviations: dot is "this directory", dot-dot ("..") is "the
one above this directory", and you can mix and match them like
mad, so that "../../some-command" is "some-command which is found
in the directory above the directory above this one".

> 2. How do I create a launcher on gnome desktop then, since the command line
> start with a dot (.)

It only starts with a dot when you are in that directory. If you do
"cd" to get back to your home directory, and type "./soffice", the
shell will look only there, and tell you it can't find it. :) 

So there are two things you can try with this launcher.

First, try a launcher with this in the "command" section:

	/u01/staroffice52/program/soffice

If that "soffice" is the program itself, all will work fine.

Now, I have occasionally had trouble setting up launchers in gnome
where there is a full pathname. This happens with Netscape and Mozilla
a lot. Instead of putting "/some/path/to/program", I have to put
"cd /some/path/to/ ; ./program". I think it's because the "program"
in the case of Netscape and Mozilla is actually a script, and that
script has relative pathnames with "../" in them (see above). So
it goes and looks for files in the wrong place. (Shell people -- 
this possible?) But if nothing happens with your launcher, you can 
try this, too. The semi-colon is a way of separating two commands,
so this is a launcher which does the "cd" and then runs the command. 

	cd /u01/staroffice52/program/ ; ./soffice

I think this should work. I don't have StarOffice so I can't check.

Telsa