Introduction

I recently played with Damn Small Linux and within discovered the Siag Office suite. Because of my frustration with Abiword (it does weird things) I was eager to try this. Unfortunately it has long vanished from any repositories. So I went on a mission to compile and install it myself. This is my story, maybe others can benefit or help me do it better. This is just how it seem to have worked for me. If you run into errors or missing dependencies, do post a comment and I will try to help you. This was done on Debian Testing/Squeeze, but I am rather sure it will be the same on the other branches.

Get the required files

• ftp://siag.nu/pub/siag/siag-3.6.1.tar.gz
• ftp://siag.nu/pub/neXtaw/neXtaw-0.15.1.tar.gz
• ftp://siag.nu/pub/widgets/XawM-1.5u.tar.gz
• fftp://siag.nu/pub/mowitz/Mowitz-0.3.1.tar.gz

Compile and Install

cd into the appropiate directory for each step.

1. First the neXtaw libraries. Just ./configure then make and as superuser make install.

2. Next we have to compile and install the XawM something. Same as above, easy.

3. Now comes Mowitz. And here the fun starts. You have to replace all instances of "X11/Xaw" in the source files to "X11/XawM". I highly recommend jEdit for things like this (but maybe someone will leave a shell oneliner in the comments, heh). This might bring some problems but I think it just gives make the right place to look for the files it cannot find otherwise. There might be an option to configure to do this but I really could not find that in the (terribly geek ;-) ) documentation. Well, once you replace those, do the usual compiling and installing.

4. Now we are ready for Siag Office itself. And guess what, you have to do the same search&replace operation as before. Then again, compile, watch warnings fly by, install. And we are done!

Siag Office

Try the newly installed programs: The spreadsheet Siag, the word processor PW, the animation program Egon, the text editor XedPlus, the file manager Xfiler and the previewer Gvu (this sentence was copied from the Siag Office website.

The usage seems to need some getting used to and egon segfaults right away for me, but I like if a program starts immediately and does few things well. I hope Siag does. I'll comment once I gave it a proper run.