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#1 2009-04-23 08:29:39

jarda-wien
Member
Registered: 2008-03-13
Posts: 104

OpenOffice freezing Xorg

I have huge problems while using OOO. Every now and then OOO freezes Xorg or maybe the whole OS (the only thing I am sure of is that there is no kernel panic...). The thing is that once this happens, the only way to reboot is a hard reset. Not even acpid hotkeys on my T41 work. It is especially annoying, because I have not yet been able to reliably reproduce the issue (struggling with it since the 3.0 release), it just happens from time to time. I do not have to stress out that all my unsaved work gets lost when this happens.

What I found out is that it never happens once OOO has been successfully started before (even if it was closed before starting a new session) and that it tends to happen more often if I double-click a MS Office document type. I also remember only writer doing this, but then again, I almost exclusively use writer and from time to time calc. Furthermore it has happened only while opening an existing document (either as a command line parameter, or double click in the file manager).

I already tried removing ~/.openoffice profile completely, but it didn't help. Installed OOO extensions are Czech and English (GB) dictionaries.
I am not really sure how to debug the issue, since it happens unpredictably, from time to time, the computer stops responding when it happens and nothing substantial gets written in the logs.


Specs:
Thinkpad T41 1GB RAM, Radeon 7500 32MB, dualscreen setup using xrandr
usual workspace environment: mounted encfs filesystem in rc.local during boot, Openbox (.xinitrc - startx method), Thunar file manager, thunderbird3 (beta), firefox (beta), opera, dropbox client, OOO, almost all applications run through gmrun

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#2 2009-04-23 08:52:58

toad
Member
From: if only I knew
Registered: 2008-12-22
Posts: 1,775
Website

Re: OpenOffice freezing Xorg

That is a tough nut. I've got a T41 and don't experience any problems (on KDE). Obvious question: Are those two dictionaries the only add-ons you have? Are they from reliable sources?


never trust a toad...
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#3 2009-04-23 09:15:27

jarda-wien
Member
Registered: 2008-03-13
Posts: 104

Re: OpenOffice freezing Xorg

yes, they are the only two and they are from the official extensions web

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#4 2009-04-23 09:19:28

toad
Member
From: if only I knew
Registered: 2008-12-22
Posts: 1,775
Website

Re: OpenOffice freezing Xorg

Which OpenOffice have you got?

extra/openoffice-base 3.0.1-1
    OpenOffice.org - a free multiplatform and multilingual office suite
extra/openoffice-base-beta 3.1.0_ooo310_m9-1
    OpenOffice.org - a free multiplatform and multilingual office suite
extra/openoffice-base-devel 3.2_dev300_m42-1
    OpenOffice.org - a free multiplatform and multilingual office suite
archlinuxfr/openoffice-base-systemcairo 2.4.1-2
    OpenOffice.org build using system Cairo instead of internal one (Fedora patch).

Perhaps worth trying a different one?

Last edited by toad (2009-04-23 09:19:52)


never trust a toad...
::Grateful ArchDonor::
::Grateful Wikipedia Donor::

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#5 2009-04-23 10:11:11

jarda-wien
Member
Registered: 2008-03-13
Posts: 104

Re: OpenOffice freezing Xorg

bash-3.2$ pacman -Qi openoffice-base
Name           : openoffice-base
Version        : 3.0.1-1


I will definitely try the systemcairo version! Thanks for the tip. But still am I the only one experiencing this issue? If yes WTF hmm

Edit: No more systemcairo in my repo + it is the 2.x release, so beta or devel it is...

Last edited by jarda-wien (2009-04-23 10:13:14)

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#6 2009-04-23 18:26:40

Teoulas
Member
From: Athens, Greece
Registered: 2009-03-21
Posts: 70

Re: OpenOffice freezing Xorg

Wow, and I thought I was the only one. I had the same problem with openoffice-calc and took me some time to find out what it was. I was just doing copy/paste work from an XLS file, and all of a sudden, my PC froze. I had to use gnumeric, instead, to keep my computer running. I put the blame on that single file back then, as I've never had any freezes before.

I don't like OpenOffice. Although its compatibility with MS office files is great, it feels like alien software. It keeps using bold fonts for its menus (I use Lucida Grande), and it's own font antialiasing algorithms, even though I've installed the patched -lcd packages (as described in the Wiki).

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#7 2009-05-11 08:06:31

jarda-wien
Member
Registered: 2008-03-13
Posts: 104

Re: OpenOffice freezing Xorg

After using openoffice-base-devel for a while, I can say that it never crashed on me... This doesn't mean that it won't in the future. I have recently installed go-openoffice and bam there it froze everything today!
I was suspecting something else to play a role here: gmrun - every time oo crashed it was either directly run through gmrun, or run from thunar that was itself launched from gmrun. I will now try to use dmenu instead... there must be a way to find a solution to this:(

update: Had a crash even with dmenu right now... trying not to use thunar for now
If I am unable to solve this in a reasonable period of time, I will move back to the devel version from the repos, which doesn't seem to be affected (I hope so...).

what I was wondering, I am I really the only one facing this weird behaviour? Teoulas had an issue as well, but they do not seem related:(

update2: go-oo seems to crash almost every time, therefore it could be suitable to find the source of this issue, I am reverting to oo-devel, because I need a working office right now...

Last edited by jarda-wien (2009-05-11 13:35:26)

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#8 2009-05-11 20:46:47

thetrivialstuff
Member
Registered: 2006-05-10
Posts: 191

Re: OpenOffice freezing Xorg

Quick note about system freezups -- often it's helpful to enable the "magic sysrq" key. For some reason it's disabled by default in Arch; you can turn it on by changing the "kernel.sysrq" line in /etc/sysctl.conf (change it to a 1 I think).

Then when X freezes up solid and won't respond to ctrl+alt+backspace, you can type alt+sysrq+r to force the keyboard into "raw" mode, which will let you ctrl+alt+f1. Then you can log in and reset X without having to hard-reboot the machine, which is a lot nicer on your filesystems.

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#9 2009-05-12 07:09:00

jarda-wien
Member
Registered: 2008-03-13
Posts: 104

Re: OpenOffice freezing Xorg

thetrivialstuff wrote:

Quick note about system freezups -- often it's helpful to enable the "magic sysrq" key. For some reason it's disabled by default in Arch; you can turn it on by changing the "kernel.sysrq" line in /etc/sysctl.conf (change it to a 1 I think).

Then when X freezes up solid and won't respond to ctrl+alt+backspace, you can type alt+sysrq+r to force the keyboard into "raw" mode, which will let you ctrl+alt+f1. Then you can log in and reset X without having to hard-reboot the machine, which is a lot nicer on your filesystems.

wow, how come I didn't know about this? At home, I logon to the machine via ssh, but at work I had to use brute force.

Thank you very much for this tip!

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#10 2009-05-15 18:55:21

jarda-wien
Member
Registered: 2008-03-13
Posts: 104

Re: OpenOffice freezing Xorg

I think I might have finally found the solution!!!!

I had the option in Tools->Options->Openoffice.org->View->Use Hardware acceleration ticked ON

After disabling it, I have not seen any freezes so far:lol: if it stays this way a month or so, I will tag the post as solved

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#11 2009-05-15 19:58:24

drelyn86
Member
From: Indianapolis, IN
Registered: 2009-04-10
Posts: 80

Re: OpenOffice freezing Xorg

jarda-wien wrote:

I think I might have finally found the solution!!!!

I had the option in Tools->Options->Openoffice.org->View->Use Hardware acceleration ticked ON

After disabling it, I have not seen any freezes so far:lol: if it stays this way a month or so, I will tag the post as solved

nice find! I remember having the same behavior with my ATI HD3850.

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#12 2009-05-15 21:55:27

jarda-wien
Member
Registered: 2008-03-13
Posts: 104

Re: OpenOffice freezing Xorg

drelyn86 wrote:
jarda-wien wrote:

I think I might have finally found the solution!!!!

I had the option in Tools->Options->Openoffice.org->View->Use Hardware acceleration ticked ON

After disabling it, I have not seen any freezes so far:lol: if it stays this way a month or so, I will tag the post as solved

nice find! I remember having the same behavior with my ATI HD3850.

well I have an ATI card as well, although much older... (RV200 LOL tongue)

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#13 2009-05-16 00:07:37

drelyn86
Member
From: Indianapolis, IN
Registered: 2009-04-10
Posts: 80

Re: OpenOffice freezing Xorg

jarda-wien wrote:

well I have an ATI card as well, although much older... (RV200 LOL tongue)

FGLRX driver, right?

EDIT: ah, just realized that was 2 zero's, not 3, LOL.

Last edited by drelyn86 (2009-05-16 00:08:32)

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#14 2009-05-16 09:29:15

jarda-wien
Member
Registered: 2008-03-13
Posts: 104

Re: OpenOffice freezing Xorg

drelyn86 wrote:
jarda-wien wrote:

well I have an ATI card as well, although much older... (RV200 LOL tongue)

FGLRX driver, right?

EDIT: ah, just realized that was 2 zero's, not 3, LOL.

no no, the old card is not supported any more (since I don't know when:cool:) but anyway, the OSS driver has great support for this old piece:D

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#15 2009-05-21 09:16:00

jarda-wien
Member
Registered: 2008-03-13
Posts: 104

Re: OpenOffice freezing Xorg

so I guess no solved for this one... today a new freeze happened, even with hardware acceleration off.
strangely, the mouse was still working and ctrl+alt+del caused a standard reboot.

there are still some things I suspect to be the problem:
I often receive word documents as email attachments and open them directly from thunderbird (beta) (that would be No.1 suspect-but since the freeze happened even when opening from thunar in the past, this one might be out of question). those documents sometimes have special Czech characters and spaces in the file name (yeah windows users...) (unicode characters would be No.2 and spaces No.3). The last suspect for the moment is (No.4) that I usually do work with such documents only at work and hence the freezes happened only at work, where I have a dualhead setup (pretty standard: 1024*768 laptop screen + 1280*1024 lcd panel on the right). I noticed that the splash loading screen from OOO is showing vertically centered and cut in half across both screens (but since they do not have the same resolution, the halves look disproportional). I am not sure if this could have anything to do with the freezing, but I am slowly getting paranoiac.

I wonder why there is nobody else having those problems. It might be that it is a very specific combination of more factors (old laptop HW, multiscreen setup, sw combination, multiscreen, unicode...)

I will now try the default OOO build (not from the repos, but from the OOO official website) or maybe compile it myself (not sure about this though).

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