[PLUG] OpenOffice will not load

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Sun Dec 1 16:58:33 UTC 2002


On Sat, 30 Nov 2002, Roderick A. Anderson wrote:

> I've been out of town a few days but I wanted to let you know also have
> started having problems with OOo starting on my system.  (I haven't made
> it to the OOo lists yet.)  At first I thought I'd upgraded something that
> may have broken something that OOo relied on but after some research I
> found there was no correlation between the two.

Rod, et al.:

  On the OO mail list I learned that others have had this experience, too. I
suspect the cause is related to the developers slavish devotion to making it
as Microsoft-like as possible. Ergo, no longer loading probably emulates
some Microsoft "feature" (such as having them shut down your software
remotely). All my opinion, of course.
 
> >   But, when I get it figured out I'll post the solution here.
> 
> Appreciated!

  I fixed it. Let me explain my initial situation, then the fix.

  Copies of the OO tarballs were downloaded to /usr1/open-office/. When I
installed the application, it created the complete directory tree
OpenOffice.org-1.0.1/ under this directory. But, because I had specified
--prefix=/usr/local/, there was a duplicate tree there, too. I don't think
it was supposed to work that way, but there we are.

  The command string attacted to an xfce panel icon used to launch OO was
/usr/local/bin/soffice. This worked fine for just shy of thee months; from
the RH 7.3 upgrade on September 5th (and following couple of weeks) until
last Monday or Tuesday, right after I sent a proposal to a client. Whew!
Then, like Congress, the application decided to go home for the rest of the
year.

  So, I took my few template files and copied them to ~/oo-backup. Using the
verable and reliable 'locate' command, I found every instance of soffice and
removed them. Both directory trees were cut for sale as Christmas trees
using 'rm -rf'. Then I downloaded a new copy of the tarball as I hadn't kept
the old one around.

  This time I more closely read the linux install instructions on the Web
site, and I followed the recommendation to do the installation in /tmp. I
still used the --prefix=/usr/local, and let 'er fly. Then I did the
workstation installation and removed the entire /tmp/OpenOffice.org-1.0.1/
source tree. The final change I made may or may not have been significant.
The Web site's instructions for those of us not using Gnome as our GUI front
end is to invoke OO as '~/OpenOffice.org-1.0.1/soffice'. I _had_ been
invoking it as '/usr/local/OpenOffice.org-1.0.1/programs/soffice'.

  Now it loads once again. When I diff the two soffice files, nothing shows
up. Why there are two copies, and why the developers recommend one over the
other I've no idea.

  Unfortunately, I was not able to produce invoices yesterday because my
restored template files are still not visible to Writer. I'm working on this
today; have to, so I will get them working again.

HTH,

Rich





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