Re: Crossover Office on FreeBSD

On Sun, May 11, 2003 at 12:57 -0800, Beech Rintoul wrote:
> 
> I'm attempting to get Crossover Office to install on 5.1 Beta, but the
> script errors with the following:
> 
> chown: 0.0: illegal user name
> This installation doesn't support glibc-2.1 on FreeBSD / x86
> 
> I think it needs the 2.2 libs in /compat/linux, but I have no clue how to
> point it there.

There are two things to consider here:

Is the second error ("doesn't support glibc...") separate from
the first one ("illegal user name") or is the "user friendly"
print out just the consequence of the failed chown(1) operation
(due to a lack of a better classification)?  IOW:  Is the chown
command meant to prepare or check the glibc support?  The answer
has quite dramatic an influence on the severeness of your
problem. :)

To catch and squish the first bug:  For ages it has been (IIUC)
the correct way to specify "user:group" to the chown command
(watch the semicolon!).  While the "user.group" syntax (with a
dot) was supported merely for convenience or compatibility
reasons.  After a rather long notice the not necessarily legal
second syntax was removed and is invalid now (it does not allow
for dots in user names and makes the syntax ambigious in this
scenario while being unpredictable is a behaviour you cannot
accept from an essential system tool).  Ask your software vendor
to correct the installer (and/or correct it locally yourself and
feed back the improvement to the vendor which raises the chance
for being accepted and integrated).

> Anyone have any suggestions on where to start on this? How do I get the
> script to use the linux libs, etc... Codeweavers wasn't very helpful, told
> me to install Linux!

Do they ship their application with one?  Do they support this
base system or at least make sure that this combination will
work?  The problem with "Linux" is that there are so many flavours
of it and some of the distributors cannot even handle version
numbers correctly (do not label patched version as such or call
totally mangled conglomerats(sp?) by their originals' names, which
confuses both the users and the service personnel -- since it's
hard when you don't know what is really inside from the look on
the package/cover).  You probably don't want to fight these
problems, too, when you actually have some other things to do.

Yes, I have seen office packages come with SuSE distros here.  And
one might assume that the two components cope well with each other
when they come in one box from one source -- in contrast to simply
having been thrown together by a salesman in the market.  This
bundling approach isn't even too sick when you simply want to
setup an office workstation instead of installing an office suite
to an already existing production system.  Linux licensing makes
the OS shipping even easier than it would be in the Windows world
(imagine Windows applications bringing their suggested or required
OS with them :] ).  VMware can even be cheaper and more space
efficient than a second machine.  And it definitely is handier
than a dual boot setup.  But I still assume that you don't really
have a library problem but a simple typo/braino (or Linuxism) in
the install script.


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Gerhard Sittig   true | mail -s "get gpg key" Gerhard.Sittig_at_gmx.net
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