[Libreoffice] Installing lang packs on Mac PPC

[Alexander Thurgood]

Hi all,

A user on the French mailing list has just related how he managed to
overcome the problem of installing the French language pack on Mac PPC.
There has been an issue with lang pack installation on this OS for a
while now, but I don't think anyone had a test PPC machine to be able to
investigate further. I'm going to translate the essence of his message
here :

"I've been having problems installing the French language pack with
LibreOfice 3.4.0 on PowerPC Mac OS Tiger 10.4.11.

The language installer just seems to quit without actually installing
anything. Here's how I managed to solve the problem.

Looking at the logs via the Console.app, I found this line:

/Volumes/LibreOffice Language Pack/LibreOffice Language
Pack.app/Contents/osx_install.applescript:2089:2267: execution error: sh:
line 1: /usr/bin/mdfind: Permission denied (126).

So, looking at mdfind attributes :

----------   1 root  wheel  22892 Mar 26  2005 /usr/bin/mdfind

Ah, so not executable. A quick :

chmod +x /usr/bin/mdfind

and then restart the installer. This time it gets a little bit further
but stops with an error message saying that there are insufficient
rights and asking me to put my admin password and try again. If I answer
YES, and give the admin password, the installer quits abruptly again.

So next step, I open Terminal.app :

sudo open LibreOffice\ Language\ Pack.app/

enter the required admin password and then the installation proceeds as
normal, and I get the "successful installation" message at the end.


So it looks like the installer script attempts to use mdfind and this is
only available to the admin account on Tiger PPC. In fact mdfind is only
available to admin on OSX 10.6.7 as well, but in that case, why doesn't
the script baulk on Intel as well ?


The line in osx_install.applescript is :

set the found_ooos_all to (do shell script "mdfind \"kMDItemContentType
== 'com.apple.application-bundle' && kMDItemDisplayName ==
'LibreOffice*' && kMDItemDisplayName != 'LibreOffice Language
Pack.app'\"") &


I was wondering whether the user in question might have activated the
root account, which on Tiger as I seem to recall from my own experience
changes the permissions for many of the commands, even if the normal
user has admin rights. When I had Tiger with root activated, I had to
log in as root on many an occasion in order to install apps that used
commands called from AppleScript requiring root access. I have asked the
user for more feedback on this point.



Alex