Office Suites

OpenOffice (formerly StarOffice)

Starting OpenOffice

Staroffice is located in /s/std/bin and can usually be started simply by typing soffice at the command prompt. The first time OpenOffice runs it will install a standard environment in $HOME/OpenOffice1.0 (unless you specify an alternate location). This will take up about 3 MB.

Note:Do not select the complete install option; this will attempt to copy 300MB of files into your home directory.

Getting Help With OpenOffice

OpenOffice has extensive on-line documentation which should be consulted first. The next step would be to check the online documentation on the OpenOffice web site. If it is a problem which involves CSL supported facilities such as printers, or your questions were not answered elsewhere, send mail to lab@cs.wisc.edu, and we will look into the problem.

CrossOver Office for Linux

Crossover Office uses the wine Windows emulator to run Windows OS software on Linux.

Starting CrossOver Office

The startup scripts for supported Crossover Office applications are added to /s/std/bin, so they should already be in your path. The currently supported applications and their startup scripts are:

Other Windows applications

We can not install/support all windows applications on Linux. However, if you know of a software package for which a native Linux version is not available, there is a signficant research or instructional need for the software on Linux and it is an application that is supported by CodeWeavers (the people who make the Crossover Office product), you can submit a request to the lab for support.

Known issues with Crossover Office applications

Video codecs for Quicktime and Windows Media player

We try to include all available audio/video codecs for quicktime and windows media player when we install the latest version of Crossover Office. However, there is no way we can keep up with all of them and unfortunately, there is no support for user-installed codecs. If a video does not play due to a missing codec, please try another encoding of the video (if possible) or try viewing it on a windows pc.

Printing in CrossOver Office

Crossover Office uses the CUPS printing system. If you have your PRINTER environment variable set to the printer's official CUPS name, the print dialog should default to the correct printer. To find the official CUPS printer names, run the command lpstat.cups -a on your Linux machine. If PRINTER is not set, or you have it set to one of the older (non-CUPS) printer names, crossover office will default to zzzz-cx-default, which will result in an email asking you to select a printer and try again. The exception to this rule is with PowerPoint (powerpnt); due to a bug, we had to disable this functionality in order to get printing to work for all of our users. When printing from powerpnt, the print dialog will always default to the zzzz-cx-default printer regardless of your PRINTER setting. Please be aware of this and select the correct printer.

Navigating the filesystem (Crossover and AFS)

Crossover Office automatically maps your home directory as the Y: drive and the Linux root drive (/) as the Z: drive.

Crossover Office does not seem to recognize symlinked directories. As such, getting to places in AFS outside of your home directory (e.g. /p) is tricky. Navigating the AFS filesystem using the Z: drive is not recommended, as it will try to stat every AFS cell in the world and essentially hang your application... Instead, if you need to open a file in AFS that is not in your home directory, you should open it on the command line, not via the GUI interface. e.g. If you want to edit the word document /p/myproject/letter.doc, do not try to navigate there via the "Open File" dialog, but rather run this command: winword /p/myproject/letter.doc User mapping of network drives is not supported in our installation.

Other problems and potential solutions

If you run into some other problem with a Crossover Office application (e.g. the application freezes or behaves strangely), you should first try starting over with a fresh Crossover Office config.

Getting a fresh Crossover Office configuration

• quit any Crossover Office applications
• quit your web browser (lab supported web browsers have Crossover Plugin installed, which uses the same config files as Crossover Office)
• rm -rf ~/.cxoffice

The next time any Crossover Office application starts up (or Crossover Plugin starts via your web browser), it will take much longer than normal because it is setting up your Crossover environment.