x instance of office suite through linux?

[cbrowne20]

Hello there,

Currently we have our gateway server that provides desktop environments (solaris 10) to our thin clients. From there users ssh to the productivity servers they need access to and open an x instance of whichever program they need.

Boss wants Microsoft Office installed so that reports can be created on the productivity servers (all running Fedora 9). I have a few ideas about how to make this work, but looking for insight.

1. Partition one of the servers and load windows on it as well as office (not excited about this one as I'm not entirely sure how anyone would access this to run)

2. Use virtual box and basically same as above, but unsure if they would have access from the virtual environment to the data saved on the file server)

3. Use an emulator like Cross Over to install it directly on the server, but unsure if it would be able to be called up through an X instance.

Any advice would be greatly welcomed. I'm basically trying to have Microsoft Office available (mainly .PPT) as to draft reports.

OpenOffice.org is great and powerful, but some dogs just can't learn new tricks.

[Rubberman]

1. Not a great idea.
2. Feasible - I do this frequently. With VBox's Guest Additions installed on the VM you have access to the host file system from the Windows VM.
3. Not feasible - newer versions of MS Office don't do well on Wine.

One other option is to use LibreOffice, which can easily read/save documents in MS Office formats. If this doesn't work well for you, then see #2.

[cbrowne20]

Thanks Rubber,

So I am going with option 2, and have been battling installing it this morning. I've addressed some of the dependency issues with installing OpenSSL, but it is still failing with:

error failed dependencies:
libcrypto.so.6()(64bit) is needed by VirtualBox...

I've created a symlink for:

/lib64/libcrypto.so.6 -> /lib64/libcrypto.so.0.9.8g

I believe that is correct, as there is another link:

/lib64/libcrypto.so.7 -> /lib64/libcrypto.so.0.9.8g


Sorry for having to type it out, our servers are stand alone. Am I fouling this up?

[cbrowne20]

I've found an older instance of Virtual Box and have successfully installed it, but it will only run as Root on the server console. When I am stationed at my thin client as a user (I have added the users to vboxusers), I get the error of

"License not found /usr/share/doc/VirtualBox..."

Any thoughts on why VBox is having issues, I can see and get to the license folder and it is in the correct path.

[Rubberman]

You should run either VBox 3.2.12, or 4.x. How are you trying to install VBox? What are the hosts you want to run it on again?

[cbrowne20]

Thanks for the response Rubber, you are quite the repository and I as well as many others appreciate your diligence on these forums.

I'm running it on Fedora 9. I tried installing the 4.x package, but it keeps saying the missing dependency of libcrypto.so.6 even though I have a symlink for it in the lib64 folder.

When I try installing the 4.x I do
rpm -iv VirtualBox....
error failed dependencies:
libcrypto.so.6()(64bit) is needed by VirtualBox...

Ideally, the users at their thin clients will ssh to the server and $VirtualBox to open the session. It's quite annoying being on a stand alone server, as I can't yum to install all the dependicies as I need, but I would have thought a symlink would do the trick.

[Rubberman]

Well FC9 is very old now. Any chance of updating to a more current RH distribution? Scientific Linux and CentOS are both great, and free, clones of RH Enterprise Linux. I run SL6 (clone of RHEL 6) these days, very happily.

[cbrowne20]

Just wanted to say, thanks again Rubber. I ended up solving my issue by doing a -nodeps argument and vbox 4.xx installed. Easy to install the others after that. Hardest part was figuring out the permissions for the thin client users and then being able to map to the printer.

Again, thank you for your assistance.