[cw-discuss] Installing MS Office 2000 on Fedora Core 6

[Phil Schaffner]

On Thu, 2007-01-18 at 09:27 -0600, Jeremy White wrote:
> > Missed the 2nd one.  Running with selinux=disabled already, but modified
> > grub as suggested.  Ran "tune2fs -O ^dir_index  /dev/hda8" (the /home
> > filesystem).
> 
> You may want to recheck that; the file system in fc6 by default
> is now set to a funky /Vol/Group/Whatis/thing.
> 
> Doing my /dev/hdaX didn't do it for me; I had to do the funky one.

Nope - I bypassed LVM2 at install time and did my own partitioning due
to past problems dealing with funky LVM filesystems.

> You'll know you've succeeded if/when an
>   ls -f
> returns . and .. as the first two entries.

It does.

> > No.  Work-around for me was to boot the machine under CentOS 4.4 which
> > is also installed, install CrossOver 6, IE6, and Office 2000, and reboot
> > to Fedora Core 6.  (Seems to be working MUCH better than the earlier
> > kludge of trying to restore an earlier CrossOver install and upgrading
> > which messed up menus and associations badly.)  Not an option for
> > everyone.  Hope you can fix this.
> 
> Fedora Core is deeply frustrating; we may have to move it into
> the same category as Gentoo - unsupportable.

Would be sorry to see that - Fedora is still very popular, but then so
is Gentoo, for very different reasons IMHO.

> We worked with FC through the fall, and it was quite maddening.
> 
> One day it worked, another day a glibc bug broke everything,
> another day we got a kernel version that kernel paniced
> the box on boot (had to revert).
> 
> I think a real problem is that there isn't a single 'FC6' - instead,
> there is 'FC6 updated as of this exact moment in time'.

Fedora is a "rolling-beta" distro - I sympathize with your support
issues with it - but it is still a fun OS for those who want to surf the
leading edge of the Linux wave.

> I know
> that on an FC6 box updated as of December 1, 2006, all of our
> supported applications install and function, so long as you
> use the workarounds we provide (actually, only the tune2fs and
> audit workarounds are known to be required, but turning off selinux
> is almost always a good thing to try as well).

Agree - I have gotten into the habit of disabling it at install time and
counting on two levels of firewalls (organizational and local), keeping
current with security patches, and other security measures (such as
solid passwords and disabling unnecessary services) for end-user
machines.  Still use it on servers.

> So I, too, hope that it works.  However, until the Fedora engineers
> give a *bleep* about maintaining compatiblity with Wine,
> I'm afraid there isn't much hope.  Frankly, a lot of that is simply
> the bleeding edge nature of Fedora Core; I'd honestly recommend
> something like CentOS for any sort of production use.

Agree++.  Only running FC6 on this machine because the the RHEL4/CentOS4
Evolution version is seriously buggy.  Hoping for CentOS5 Beta - with
much of the good stuff from FC6 - any day now.  Will be trying out
CrossOver on it when it hits the street.

> With all that said, it's worth doing a full update as well,
> and trying again; what we found through the fall was that there
> was always a bug fix waiting in the wings (the trick was to get
> the bug fix, but not get the next bug :-(  ).

I'm perennially up-2-date but will try reinstalling CrossOver 6 and
Office 2000 on a dummy account again if any applicable new updates come
through the channel.  Meanwhile my dual-boot workaround has me back to
work.

> Cheers,
> 
> Jeremy

Cheers and thanks,
Phil