WordPerfect 8 for Linux is no longer available; however, you can still find a copy out on the network as well as public registrations keys at http://linuxmafia.com/wpfaq/downloadwp8.html#REGKEYS. This particular Web site is full of extremely useful data for using WP8 on Linux. What follows is a nutshell installation overview for RHEL3; however, each of the other versions of Linux needs a similar strategy.

1. Before beginning, we must realize that WP8 for Linux was released around the time when Red Hat 5.0 was out. Also, there is no later Linux version available. So we will need some older libraries installed on the system in order to run WP8. The RPMs for these libraries can be found at http://www.rpmfind.net by searching for ld.so and libc. The RPMs required are ld.so-1.9.5-5.i386.rpm and libc-5.3.12-28.i386.rpm and are part of the Red Hat 5.0 Update series of RPMs. These RPMs will install just fine on a RHEL3 and RHEL4 system and will NOT affect the running of newer applications, since these libraries and tools do not overwrite any existing library tools.

2. After the installation of the libraries, we can continue with the install of WP8 by first unpackaging the compressed tar file.

   tar -xzf wp8.tar.gz

3. Then run the script Runme and answer the questions with the defaults for your answers. There is an error early on but this can be ignored safely.

   [root@ruffian wordperfect]# ./Runme

   Did you unzip and untar the files you downloaded? (y/n) y

     Extracting Files...  Please Wait ../install.wp: line 103:...