Gnumeric and RHEL3

[Martin Donald <mhd slac stanford edu>]

Can anyone help me get a properly working gnumeric installed on top of
RedHat Enterprise Linux 3? I have tried and, so far, have failed.

At work I have had to upgrade from RedHat 9 to RHEL3 and desparately
need a working gnumeric to speed my work. Emacs, octave, emacs-calc,
and awk do good work but sometimes a speadsheet is the better tool to
handle a subset of data. Paste to gnumeric, manipulate, paste back
out. 

I have installed gnumeric-1.2.8-1.i386.rpm along with

 libbonoboui-devel-2.4.0-1.i386.rpm
 libbonoboui-2.4.0-1.i386.rpm
 libbonobo-devel-2.4.0-1.i386.rpm
 libbonobo-2.4.0-1.i386.rpm
 libIDL-devel-0.8.2-1.i386.rpm
 libIDL-0.8.2-1.i386.rpm
 ORBit2-devel-2.8.2-1.i386.rpm
 ORBit2-2.8.2-1.i386.rpm
 GConf2-devel-2.4.0-1.i386.rpm
 GConf2-2.4.0-1.i386.rpm
 libgnomeui-devel-2.4.0.1-1.i386.rpm
 libgnomeui-2.4.0.1-1.i386.rpm

I had also tried compiling gnumeric-1.2.13 from source along with
libgsf-1.10.0 and rplay-3.3.2 which are still in my stock RHEL3 system

Both the compiled gnumeric-1.2.13 and the packaged gnumeric-1.2.8-1
worked but I was unable to paste from emacs or xterm into gnumeric. I
can import a file but the widget to parse the data is a big ugly nasty
thing, nothing like I had used before on RedHat 9 (gnumeric-1.0.12-3).

I have also tried 

 gnumeric-1.0.12-3.i386.rpm
 gnumeric-1.2.5-1.i386.rpm
 gnumeric-1.2.1-1.i386.rpm

without success

Even though I was able to successfully rpm gnumeric-1.2.8-1.i386.rpm I
suspect that I do not have all the library packages that I need. One
clue is that when I try to import data I get the messages

warning: failed to load external entity 
"/usr/share/gnumeric/1.2.1-bonobo/share/gnome/help/gnumeric/C/gnumeric.xml%20is%20not%20installed"
Writing ld-id2831715.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2831753.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2834297.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2834371.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2834412.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2834501.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2833460.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2833581.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2833704.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2834297.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2834371.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2834412.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2834501.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2833460.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2833581.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2833704.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2834297.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2834371.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2834412.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2834501.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2833460.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2833581.html for imagedata
Writing ld-id2833704.html for imagedata

The library

  /usr/share/gnumeric/1.2.1-bonobo/share/gnome/help/gnumeric:

does contain 

  -rw-r--r--    1 root     root        19030 Oct 14  2003 gnumeric.xml

Can anyone please help, otherwise I shall have to use Excel via the
Windows Terminal Server!!!!

-- 
            Martin Donald               mhd slac stanford edu