Re How do I mend OpenOffice?
 

>
> Subject:
> Re: How do I mend Openoffice?
> From:
> "D. Michael McIntyre" <michael.mcintyre@rosegardenmusic.com>
> Date:
> Fri, 28 Dec 2007 11:37:02 -0500
>
> To:
> Kubuntu Help and User Discussions <kubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com>
>
>
> On Thursday 27 December 2007, Seakat wrote:
>
>> > 1. THANK YOU kdesudo!
>> > 2. Shouldn't Ooo work anyway without having to do all this, and can't it
>> > be made easier, especially for newbies?
>> > 3. Anyone got ideas about the nitty gritty of why my OOo's screwed up
>> > without kdesu?
>>
>
> I've been watching your plight for a few days. I did the same Feisty -> Gutsy
> upgrade you did, and I've been watching my OO.o for weird behavior. Nothing
> seems to be wrong with it after the upgrade at all, and what you're
> experiencing strikes me as very bizarre and puzzling.
>
> Anyway, if you want to try to find why you need root to run OO.o, I suggest
> you try using strace on it. Perhaps you will see where it tries to open
> files, and permission is denied, and that will be a clue what permissions to
> change. (If you don't have strace, I think the package is of the same name.)
>
> Digging around, looks like this command should work:
>
> strace -f -eopen /usr/lib/openoffice/program/swriter
>
> You'll get a lot of things that show "No such file or directory." That's
> apparently normal and natural.
>
> What you're looking for is something like this:
>
> [pid 19179] open("/etc/qt3/.kstylerc.lock", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0600)
> = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
> [pid 19179] open("/etc/qt3/.qtrc.lock", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = -1
> EACCES (Permission denied)
>
> In fact, you could probably modify the above command like thus:
>
> strace -f -eopen /usr/lib/openoffice/program/swriter 2>&1 | grep denied
>
> That seemed to work. Here's my list on a working version:
>
> [pid 19287] open("/etc/qt3/.qtrc.lock", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = -1
> EACCES (Permission denied)
> [pid 19287] open("/etc/qt3/.qt_plugins_3.3rc.lock", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|
> O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
> [pid 19287] open("/etc/qt3/.kstylerc.lock", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0600)
> = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
> [pid 19287] open("/etc/qt3/.qtrc.lock", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = -1
> EACCES (Permission denied)
> [pid 19287] open("/etc/qt3/.kstylerc.lock", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0600)
> = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
> [pid 19287] open("/etc/qt3/.qtrc.lock", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = -1
> EACCES (Permission denied)
>
> See if you have a longer list than that, and anything in your list that isn't
> in mine is a clue.
>
> It could also be that this .*rc.lock business is the clue you need already,
> though if it is, I'm not sure what it means, or even why there are lock files
> in /etc for this stuff anyway.
>
> One thought that does come to mind is that my home directory dates all the way
> back to Mandrake 8.1, so I might have some local dotfile you lack, and maybe
> that's the difference? Grasping at straws there for sure. I really have no
> idea what's going wrong on your end, and I'm not an OO.o expert by any means
> at all. Nothing of the sort. I'm just trying to help you figure out how to
> fish around and discover the source of what broke, and the effort could very
> well be completely useless.
> -- D. Michael McIntyre
Big thanks to Donn, Graham, D. Michael McIntyre, Neil Winchurst, Martin
Laberge and Alexander Smirnov for all offering help.
I'm a bit snowed under with good advice!

Frankly I've +/- solved the problem personally with kdesudo. I've also
configured links on my kde desktop to run as root, and this works for
Write, Calc and Impress. Curiously, though, if I type sudo soffice I get
a dialog box with the error message, "Either another instance of
OpenOffice.org is accessing your personal settings or your personal
settings are locked." (I think they are somehow still locked.)
Could it be that the problem is caused by having used Adept Manager
(running as Superuser) to install OOo ? I notice that it installed a
directory /root/.openoffice.org2/user with 15 directories, presumably
containing most of the settings. (I did open permissions on this
directory, though: chmod -R a=rwx /root/.openoffice.org2 So why does
kdesudo work, but not sudo?).

D. Michael McIntyre's suggestion of
strace -f -eopen /usr/lib/openoffice/program/swriter
didn't work for me but I compared
kdesudo strace soffice
http://assoc.pagespro-orange.fr/acro/kubuntu/kdesudo_strace_soffice
with
sudo strace soffice http://assoc.pagespro-orange.fr/acro/kubuntu/sudo_strace_soffice
and
strace soffice http://assoc.pagespro-orange.fr/acro/kubuntu/strace_soffice
and the outputs are completely different.

Finally I take Graham's point that Gnumeric and Abiword are far simpler
and more elegant applications able to do most of what one needs to do
with Calc and Write. I will try to use them more.

However I'm a scientist and I have to interact and write articles with
colleagues who mostly still use µSoft-Office standards, and so I have to
remain cross-platform to avoid incompatibility (please understand).

I hope the discussion may help developers to integrate OOo better into
Kubuntu in future distributions, and perhaps some users who have
problems similar to mine, but please excuse me if I now gently love you
and leave this particular discussion, as I have my own work to catch up
with.
Happy New Year, Folks!











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Re How do I mend OpenOffice?
 

> "Either another instance of
> OpenOffice.org is accessing your personal settings or your personal
> settings are locked." (I think they are somehow still locked.)
Hoo boy, that's always a pain in the butt. It's prob. a wee file somewhere
that OOO is looking for and you need to find it and kill it. Can't help
beyond that, try the OOO forums!

> Finally I take Graham's point that Gnumeric and Abiword are far simpler
> and more elegant applications able to do most of what one needs to do
> with Calc and Write. I will try to use them more.
They also, AFAIK, support some of the MS formats.

> However I'm a scientist and I have to interact and write articles with
> colleagues who mostly still use µSoft-Office standards, and so I have to
> remain cross-platform to avoid incompatibility (please understand).
As a scientist, you should have a look at a system called LateX and an app
called LyX in particular - it's simply fabulous for crafting documents of all
kind (math and so forth too). It's *really* worthwhile going up the learning
curve on that stuff. You get to export to PDF and HTML and so on - and I
would not be surprised if it could go all the way to OOO and MS formats.

(It's not a spreadsheet, so that's still up to other apps, but it can totally
replace word-processors when one creates documents like books, letters, a
thesis, magazine articles, etc.)

> I hope the discussion may help developers to integrate OOo better into
Not much chance there, unless you make a fuss where the devs will see it :)

> Happy New Year, Folks!
Same to you, good luck.

d

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