Installing Report Manager Designer in Linux is a easy process also, you must have root rights if you want to install to allow all users to execute it or if rpm installation system is used.
See hardware and software requirements before installing Report Manager designer.
You must download the latest Report Manager for Linux version from sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/reportman
RPM Package Installation
May be you distribution uses .rpm packages and a .rpm package is available for download, in this case use your own installation distribution procedure or go to the command line and write:
rpm -U reportmand-1.0.i386.rpm
tar.gz File Installation
If you downloaded a .tar.gz file then you must create a directory and place the downloaded file there:
make /opt/repmand
mv reportmand-1.0.tar.gz /opt/repmand
Note: If you are not root you can place it in /home/youusername/repmand for example.
Change to that directory and untar the files
cd /opt/repmand
tar zxvf repmand.tar.gz
After that a number of files in the current dir will be created.
Execute repmand.sh to start Report Manager designer:
./repmand.sh
System Libraries Issues
When you execute a Linux application it searchs libraries using LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable, repmand.sh set this variable to search the current directory first. To call any command line tool you must set also this option or you can set it system wide. The launcher repmand.bin will set also the variable before calling the application repmand.
Also there are issues with Borland provided qt libraries, see known issues if you have problems starting the application.
Database configuration files
Report Manager Designer will look for database configuration files, it will look first at /home/yourusername/.borland directory, will search for 'dbxdrivers' and 'dbxconnections' files, if there are no files there it will search at '/usr/local/etc' for files 'dbxdrivers.conf' and 'dbxconnections.conf', if this files does not exists it will search in the current executable directory and will copy them to /home/yourusername/.borland. So any user executing Report Manager Designer can own their database connections file or use system common configuration files.
When you execute Report Manager command line tools or applications from other applications (like apache web server) you should copy the database configuration files to correct path following the above explanation.
Printer configuration file
Report Manager Designer will use a Printer configuration file, only used in printer selection, this file will be searched as /etc/reporman, if not found it will create or use /home/yourusername/.reportman
Environment variables
You can define a special environment variable to enable, by default, the use of kprinter to print reports, this will allow to select the diferent options in the kprinter dialog.
export REPMAN_USEKPRINTER=true
Before showing print dialog, the report will be transformed to Adobe PDF, then converted to postcript using pdftops command line tool (so Xpdf package installation is required), the resulting postcript file will be sent to kprinter command line tool and the user will see the kprinter print dialog.
The operations that the engine performs internally are:
printerreptopdf -u yourreport.rep pdffile.pdf
pdftops pdffile.pdf postcriptfile.ps
kprinter postcriptfile.ps
The main diference is when you use kprinter the report must be calculated entirely before showing the print dialog, and if the report is very long and you want to print only one page, a lot of processing time may be not really useful.