Using NeoOffice Outside of /Applications

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Revision as of 08:23, 21 January 2005

Running NeoOffice/J from a location other than /Applications

Officially, this cannot be done. /Applications is the only supported location for installing NeoOffice/J.

There are two very important reasons for this:

First, a bunch of the underlying OpenOffice.org code expects things to be installed in a single known place and never moved, so there are lots of hard-coded pathnames in the app.

Secondly, because of the above and because searching an entire large disk for the NeoOffice/J install location could take "forever," the patch installers only look in /Applications for the NeoOffice/J app to update.

That said, unofficially, if you're really adventurous and careful, you could probably get it to work.

N.B.: Put the NeoOffice/J app on a drive that does not have any spaces in its name and only in folders that do not have spaces in the folder names. Parts of the OpenOffice.org code do not handle spaces in pathnames.

1. Install Neo/J in /Applications for the first time (Don't launch it).

2. Immediately move Neo/J to your USB key or other disk.

3. Never rename your USB key or other disk once you have ever launched Neo/J.

4. Copy ~/Library/NeoOfficeJ-1.1 to your key and then into ~/Library/NeoOfficeJ-1.1 on other machines if you want your settings to remain the same/in sync on multiple machines. Repeat after each session.

5. Move Neo/J back to /Applications before opening the patch update .pkg, then immediately move Neo/J back to the same place on your USB key or other disk (Don't launch Neo/J).

If you have /Applications symlinked to your USB key or other disk, some of the complexity is removed (Neo/J more-or-less supports situations where /Applications is on a second drive/partition and where /Applications on the main drive has been replaced by a UNIX symbolic link to its location on the second drive).

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