Sunday, January 25, 2009

Quick mini-howto: OpenSuse11.1 OpenOffice Impress TwinView Presenter Console 64bit

The insanely long title is required as I've experienced that all mentioned items contribute to the issue of the whole setup not working. If you're using OpenSuse's 11.1 version of OpenOffice with an Nvidia (binary driver from the repo) TwinView setup and want to run a presentation on the external monitor you'll find it doesn't work. The multiple monitor section in slide show settings is grayed out. Oddly enough this does work with the packages directly from Sun. I'm assuming that TwinView is already properly set up.

  1. uninstall all openoffice packages from openSuse (search for openoffice, select package > all in this list > delete).
  2. download the relevant openoffice package from Openoffice.org (other systems). I'm using the linux 64 rpm without Java JRE, which you get by unchecking the checkbox above the table.
  3. create a folder to hold the installer files, move the installer file there and unpack it (on the command line 'tar -xvpf ')
  4. Add this folder to your repositry list (in the software manager Configuration > Repositories). Click 'add', select 'local directory' give it a name, point to its location and specify that it is a 'plain rpm directory' by checking the checkbox under the line where the location is specified.
  5. Apply the changes, search for OpenOffice and install what you need. Check with the version tab whether you've selected the version from the local rpm directory and not the repository version. If you have the files for both the i586 and the x86_64 version in the directory (like I accidentally had), check whether the x86_64 will be installed for all packages, as by default it seems to create a random mix.
  6. Also select the OpenOffice_org-ure package from the repositories. I needed the repository version to get the presenter console working.Optionally this step can be delayed until the Sun Presenter Console is installed (see step 9 if the presenter console ends up not working). Apply all the changes.
  7. Download the Sun Presenter Console (in my case the linux x86-64 version towards the bottom of the list). Save it somewhere on your system. You can try adding it directly by opening the file with openoffice, but likely it will complain that the extension 'Sun Presenter Console' doesn't work on this computer. If it does work fine, you're done. If not:
  8. Unzip the package (the .oxt file you downloaded) (command line 'unzip ') and fire up your favourite editor to edit the file description.xml. Two things need to be changed: the tag that lists 'identifier value' and the tag that lists 'platform value'. Both should contain 'linux_x86', which should be 'linux_x86_64'.
  9. Optionally check that the required libraries are present: in a terminal run 'ldd PresenterScreen.uno.so' and check whether the output complains about any missing files. If there are some files missing you probably didn't install the OpenOffice_org-ure package from the repositories.
  10. Zip the package back to an .oxt file (or zip and rename to .oxt) (in a terminal 'zip -r sun-presenter-console-fix.oxt *')
  11. Open the new .oxt file with openoffice and it should pop-up with a dialogue about adding the extension. Installation should procede normally and after installation the presenter view should pop-up when you've configure a presentation to run on a specific monitor via the slide show > slide show settingsmenu.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

awesome ! it works !