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The Trials of OpenOffice.Org

December 30, 2007 · by Scott Fradkin

I’ve been a user of OpenOffice.Org pretty much since OOO first came out. Even when I was still occasionally using Windows, I was looking for alternatives to using Microsoft products. OpenOffice, to me, offered that alternative. It provided me with the basic functionality that I needed from a word processor, spreadsheet program, and presentation creator. I’m not a power user of the basic office products, so the lack of features that Microsoft Office provides has never been an issue for me.

Fast forward to a couple of days ago. I’ve been working on some articles that I’ve finally decided are good enough to publish to the interweb. I typically write them in OOO. I was looking into an easy way to convert them into HTML and noticed that OOO contains a feature to export a document in XHTML format. I thought that this feature could be pretty handy so I tried to use it. Bzzt! Try again. How foolish was I to attempt such a thing without first telling OOO what Java VM to use. Ouch! OOO depends upon Java for some of its functionality. So I went to the settings to tell it what VM to use. Surprisingly, after I navigated to my /opt directory, it figured out that I had 3 different JVMs installed: 1.4, 1.5, and 1.6. I figured that I might as well use the most recent one I’ve got, so I pointed it to 1.6. OOO gave me a message box that indicated that I’d need to shut down OOO and restart it in order for the setting to take effect. OK. No problem.

It shut down fine, but when I attempted to run it again I got a whole lot of nothing. Nothing? What? It just wouldn’t run. No error messages of any kind. That seemed a bit odd. So, I embarked on a journey to try and figure out how to unset the JVM setting. All I could find was a file that was autogenerated each time OOO was started. So, I asked Gentoo to uninstall OOO. Then I made sure that any OOO related directory was removed. Then I re-installed OOO. I typed in “oowriter” at a command prompt and was greeted with nothing but another prompt. No error, no messages, no OOO starting up. After another fruitless hour of searching and trying everything I could think of, I just gave up. This was going to cause a serious issue. I have Windows installed in a VMWare virtual machine if I absolutely have to use Windows, but I’d rather not deal with it.

I went with Plan B. Plan B was to let my computer spend the time to compile OOO from scratch. Fortunately, I was a bit smarter with my disk partitions on my laptop and actually put enough space in the /tmp partition to be able to perform large compilations. OOO notoriously uses up about 4GB of disk space and on my Core Duo 2 machine took about 3.5 hours to compile. I crossed my fingers and typed “oowriter” into a prompt after it finally finished compiling. Much to my surprise, OOO started right up! Back in business! But, I’ve learned my lesson. I won’t be telling OOO where my JVMs are. I can live without this hassle.

Filed in: Team Member Blog Comments (2)java, linux, openoffice

Comments

#1 - Eric Sorenson said on Jan 3, 2008:
Were you using Sun’s JVMs? I’ve had quite a few problems with GCJ on Fedora 7.
#2 - Scott Fradkin said on Jan 6, 2008:
Yes, I was using Sun JVMs.  I suspect that it was more a problem of the binary Open Office package that I had installed than the Sun JVMs, but you never know.
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