Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, and appears to be celebrating that release with, well, server dysfunction. The mailing lists are buzzing with anger over the slowness of the automatic up-dating routines. This morning, I spent several hours on a high-speed connection trying to down-load a disc image (and finally gave up). A few days ago I was being denied access to any downloads as if I had no active subscription. Their bugzilla tells me that my password has expired, but the link that they sent me to up-date it results in some sort of proxy error.

Barring some remarkable act of contrition on the part of Red Hat, I won't be buying any more subscriptions from them. I'll switch to something such as CentOS.

Yester-day, I installed version 8.11 of the ATI Catalyst™ Linux Graphics Driver on my RHEL 5.2 system. When I later booted to Linux after restarting the computer, the GUI was grossly dysfunctional. What it displayed was little more than a few simple rectangles — no text, no icons, an a largish square for the mouse-cursor.

It took me some time to get at a solution, but I present it here for the sake of anyone in a similar fix.

The problem seems to have been with /etc/X11/xorg.conf, configured for my system when it was running an earlier version of the software, and simply renaming this file is apparently sufficient to resolve the problem (though initially I reinstalled version 8.10 of the driver, and version 8.11 seemed not to have a problem with the version of /etc/X11/xorg.conf created anew by version 8.10).

Because the GUI wasn't really usable, I booted an RHEL installation CD, entering

linux rescue text

at the boot: prompt; this gave me a Linux CLI session that could access the Linux partition on the HD. I had the Linux partition mounted as /mnt/sysimage; that put xorg.conf at /mnt/sysimage/etc/X11/xorg.conf, whence it could be mv'd.

I notice that a number of people have found their ways to this 'blog because they've installed OpenOffice under RHEL, but OpenOffice doesn't seem to launch.

This is probably an SELinux issue. If so, then it should be resolved either if one goes to the directory containing libvclplug_gen680li.so.1.1 and (as root) runs

chcon -t textrel_shlib_t libvclplug_gen680li.so.1.1

to get SELinux to accept the interface, or if one up-dates to OpenOffice 3.0.0.

If you're actually trying to install another version of OpenOffice, then click on the OpenOffice tag, as there may be an entry on that other version.

Here's my suggested procedure for installing OpenOffice 3.0.x under RHEL 5.x:

1. If you don't have a JRE installed, then install one. OpenOffice 3.0.0 is being distributed with JRE 1.6.0 update 7; Sun is already at update 10. (I suggest that one use jdk-6u10-linux-xxx-rpm.bin, rather than jre-6u10-linux-xxx.bin.) The remainder of these instructions assume that one has a JRE installed.

2. Remove any earlier installation of OpenOffice. As root, enter these two commands:
   

   rpm -qa | grep openoffice | xargs rpm -e --nodeps
rpm -qa | grep ooobasis | xargs rpm -e --nodeps

3. Unpack OOo_3.0.0_LinuxIntel_install_wJRE_en-US.tar.gz (or the version appropriate to a devil-language, if you use one of those) to your filespace.

4. Go into resulting OOO300_m9_native_packed-1_en-US.xxxx/RPMS/ (or to the OOO300_m9_native_packed-1_xx-xx.xxxx/RPMS/ corresponding to your devil-tongue).

5. As root, run

   find . -maxdepth 1 -name "o*.rpm" | xargs rpm -U

6. As root, run

   rpm -U desktop-integration/openoffice.org*-redhat-menus-*.noarch.rpm

   (NB: You will need to log-out and back-in for the Applications menu to be up-dated and list the OpenOffice components.)

7. As root, run

   rpm -U userland/*.rpm

8. Tell OpenOffice which JRE to use:

   • Launch OpenOffice:

     /usr/bin/openoffice.org3

     (It will not be listed on the applications menu unless you have logged-out and back-in.)
   • Select

     Tools | Options… | OpenOffice.org | Java | Use a Java runtime environment

   • Choose one of the environments that is then listed.
   • Click the OK button.
   • Shut-down OpenOffice. (The change will be in effect upon next launch.)

There do not appear to be any issues with SELinux this time. I didn't have to use chcon on anything to get OpenOffice working.

NB: This post was edited on 2009:09/13, to improve the procedure, though most readers should not be installing version 3.0.x, as version 3.1.1 is available.

If you're actually trying to install another version of Firefox, then click on the Firefox tag, as there may be an entry on that other version.

[Update (2 Jul): Red Hat has released a Firefox 3.0 .rpm, and I would recommend now using it.]

Firefox 3.0 has been released. I imagine that someone will soon provide an .rpm; but, for now, Red Hat users will have to install things from a tarball.

1. Download the archive, firefox-3.0.tar.bz2.
2. The tarball contains a directory, firefox, which should be dropped-in as a sub-directory of something. If you want to ponder where, then study the FHS. As for me, as root, I put it in /opt:

   tar -xjvf firefox-3.0.tar.bz2 -C /opt/

3. Make sure that you have compat-libstdc++-33 (a Gnome C++ compatibility library):

   rpm -qa | grep compat-libstdc++-33

   If not, then as root install it:

   yum install compat-libstdc++-33

4. To avoid conflicts with SELinux, as root run

   chcon -t textrel_shlib_t /opt/firefox/libxul.so

   (If you didn't install the directory in /opt, or renamed the firefox directory, then you'll need to modify the above final argument to chcon accordingly.)
5. You'll need a .desktop file for Firefox (though you may already have one). As root, edit/create /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop, ensuring that it reads

   [Desktop Entry]
   Categories=Application;Network;X-Red-Hat-Base;
   Type=Application
   Encoding=UTF-8
   Name=Firefox
   Comment='WWW browser'
   Exec='/opt/firefox/firefox'
   Icon='/opt/firefox/icons/mozicon128.png'
   Terminal=false

   (Again, if you didn't install in /opt, or changed the name of the firefox directory, then you'll need to change the above accordingly.)
6. Log out and back in or restart the system (to up-date the GUI).

If you’re actually trying to install another version of OpenOffice, then click on the OpenOffice tag, as there may be an entry on that other version.

OpenOffice 2.4 has been released. Users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x should not run the setup routine. Instead

1. Uninstall any existing installation. If you have yum, then as root run

   yum remove openoffice.org-*

   If you must or would rather use rpm then use the command

   rpm -qa | grep openoffice | xargs rpm -e --nodeps

2. Unpack OOo_2.4.0_LinuxIntel_install_wJRE_en-US.tar.gz (or the version appropriate to a devil-language, if you use one of those) to your filespace.
3. Go into resulting OOH680_m12_native_packed-1_en-US.xxxx/RPMS/ (or to the OOH680_m12_native_packed-1_xx-xx.xxxx/RPMS/ corresponding to your devil-tongue).
4. As root, if you don't have a more recent version of a JRE than 6u4, then run

   rpm -U *.rpm

   otherwise run

   rpm -U openoffice*.rpm

5. As root, run

   rpm -U desktop-integration/openoffice.org-redhat-menus-2.4-*.noarch.rpm

   (NB: You will need to log-out and back-in for the Applications menu to be up-dated and list the OpenOffice components.)
6. Go to the directory in which libvclplug_gen680li.so.1.1 is found:

   cd /opt/openoffice.org2.4/program

7. As root, enter the following to get SELinux to accept the interface:

   chcon -t textrel_shlib_t libvclplug_gen680li.so.1.1

8. If you did not install the JRE above, then
   • Launch OpenOffice.

     /usr/bin/openoffice.org2.4

     (It will not be listed on the applications menu unless you have logged-out and back-in.)
   • Select

     Tools | Options… | OpenOffice.org | Java | Use a Java runtime environment

   • Choose one of the environments that is then listed.
   • Click the OK button.
   • Shut-down OpenOffice. (The change will be in effect upon next launch.)