About wps-2019-snap

Packaging WPS Office 2019 for SNAP with all languages translations available and Internet plug disabled.

WPS Office is a light-weight office for Linux developped by the Kingsoft corporation. This software is free to use, but under commercial licence.

This repository share the sources for SNAP packaging of an unofficial WPS 2019 release. It includes available languages interface translation and spell-check dictionnary.

To prevent leakeages of private data, the plug for internet is disabled, which prevents WPS to call home in China. Enjoy WPS securely !

PS: I revert back to 9125 version of WPS office, because of annoying bug of copy/paste in the latest 9505 version which makes it impossible to use in production.

Availability

This package is available from SnapStore.

Post install configuration

For security reasons, printing from SNAP is disabled by default. (see: https://ubuntu.com/blog/a-guide-to-snap-permissions-and-interfaces)

In order to have printing, audio and removable-media from WPS working you need to either give the permission from the Snap-Store permission panel or execute the following commands:

sudo snap connect wps-2019-snap:cups-control :cups-control
sudo snap connect wps-2019-snap:alsa :alsa
sudo snap connect wps-2019-snap:pulseaudio :pulseaudio
sudo snap connect wps-2019-snap:removable-media :removable-media

How to rebuild this Snap package

For credit reasons, I do not share the complete binaries of WPS here. Yet you can download the official package from http://linux.wps.com/ .

To reproduce this Snap, you should

1. Unzip the package in a folder and then unzip the data.tar.xz. Copy all the content of the data.tar.xz into the binaries/ folder of this repository.
2. Then, copy the content of the extra_binaries_custom/ folder into the binaries/ folder and over-write the files that are in common in both folder.
3. Then launch the snap building process snapcraft. Wait a bit. It is a big snap!

Credits

Thanks to wachin for mui & translation : https://github.com/wachin/wps-office-all-mui-win-language

Thanks to andreaspreuss for German mui translation: https://github.com/andreaspreuss/firejail

Thanks to galgalesh for his clear tutorial on GTK-2 integration for Snap : https://snapcraft.io/docs/gtk2-applications

Issues & Known bugs

Issues still to be fixed

• After closing the program, it seems that it continues running in the background for a while. I think it is intentionnal from WPS developpers to keep it alive for faster reopening. I need to check.
• Accessing to the skin center makes the program crash. The general settings seems not to be accessible.
• Do not override the doc/docx icon of the file explorer with the WPS icon. The problem seems to be in the MIME, but the XML file is allright. I need to investigate this.

Issues I would like to fix bu It can't

• This package does not allow to open file from temporary folder /tmp in memory. It seems this is not possible for Snap to share /tmp with host as it is seen as a security loophole by snap developper. Yet it is usefull for temporary opening of a document from Thunderbird/Firefox...
• Similarly, the multi-tab opening from file explorer does not work. If you have WPS open and click on file from file explorer, it will open a new WPS windows and not a new tab. Experimenting with firejail, it seems this behavior comes from /tmp containment. I cannot fix it unforunately...

Intentional Behaviour

• When you launch this snap from the command line ex. wps-2019-snap.et you see some warnings comming from the GTK-2 integration. It seems to have no effect on the program.
• For personal use convenience, PDFs do not get automatically associated with WPS when installing WPS from this snap. It is on purpose, as I do not like the PDF reader so much. For me it is missing the very important "Save as" function which is important when reading a temporary PDF from the web. It is not a bug but was done intentionnally. I can easily revert that change if users don't like it.
• The opening page is not translated into local language. There is no available translation for this front page.
• Accessing the WPS official website from the application results in a blank page. It is normal, internet plug is disabled for privacy. ^_^