Administrative, Technology and Society

My Office Is Broken

52 Comments

Open Office, that is, on Fedora 14. I click on a document to open it, or try opening from the menu, and it says “starting open office,” spins an icon for a few seconds, and then nothing. I tried removing and reinstalling, and no change. I recently did an update on my Nvidia drivers, which included a new kernel. I of course had to reboot (something I am always loathe to do). I think that’s when the problem started. Any ideas out there? This is really an emergency. If I can’t get it fixed, I may have to do a lot of my writing on a different machine, maybe even a Microsoft one, and one not in my office.

52 thoughts on “My Office Is Broken”

  1. try emailing the doc to another trusted person with open office on their machine. if that works try uninstalling/reinstalling open office on your machine? frankly just throwing ideas out. good luck.

  4. Just confirming. Tried opening OO itself? not by clicking on a file, but from the menu, opening to a blank page? Tried opening another OO app like OO Draw in the same way? Confirmed that OO is not already running (Window$ user fere, sometimes a program will be running in the background, but not actually accessible, and has to be killed, then can start it)

  6. if you start it from a command line, what does it say it is failing on? (just typing soffice usually works).

  7. I had horrible slowness with OpenOffice on Fedora 12 using NVidia drivers, but now I’m on Fedora 15 using NVidia drivers (with the same hardware), and LibreOffice, and it FLIES.

  12. well THERE’S your problem.

    does ‘locate soffice’ or ‘locate openoffice’ tell you where one of those was? is it actually there? if you start it with the absolute path does it work?

  13. If the ‘soffice’ symlink isn’t present, then OO probably isn’t installed at the moment. Once it’s reinstalled, still need to figure out why its croaking on start up.

  15. I’m after the same thing Prez is, and suspect that it means oo isn’t installed anymore. You could try narrowing it down with ‘locate bin/soffice’, or just check /usr/bin/soffice, which would be a symlink to the actual location.

  17. right, so if you ‘ls -l /usr/bin/soffice’ it will tell you what the link points at (probably the openoffice exec somewhere), then ‘ls’ that file. It probably isn’t there, which confirms that either it wasn’t reinstalled or got reinstalled in the wrong place.

    So what I would do next is go pack to your software manager (I forget how to do that in fedora/gnome these days) and install again, with a ‘force install’ option of some kind.

  18. Try executing ‘soffice’ again and then checking the end of the following logs (should be the same locations across distros):

    /var/log/Xorg.0.log (for the X window system)
    /var/log/syslog (general system log)
    /var/log/dmesg (kernel log)

    To check for a response, open up another terminal window and execute ‘tail -f /var/log/’, then execute ‘soffice’ on your first command line. Hopefully that’ll generate something interesting.

  19. @jrman: Rand’s definitely got the openoffice executables there, and the symlink’s working (or he’d get a broken symlink error). As it stands, he’s not getting anything on STDERR, so either

    1. OO is choking and exiting silently,
    2. there’s a system error in user land, or
    3. there’s a system error at the kernel layer.

  20. Prez is probably right.

    I just checked, on my system soffice (the actual file, not the /usr/bin/ version) is a script that calls the actual executable. I noticed that it does check for nvidia and fglrx, but I didn’t take the time to figure out what it is doing.

  21. That might actually be the problem.

    Rand, what’s the output of the following?

    $ lsmod | awk ‘/^(fglrx|nvidia)/ {print $1}’

    Should be nvidia in your case. If it outputs nothing, then this is why it’s failing.

  23. $ lsmod | awk ‘/^(fglrx|nvidia)/ {print $1}’
    bash: $: command not found…
    Failed to search for file: Invalid input passed to daemon: char ‘$’ in text!

  30. Damn. Would’ve been nice if that was it.

    In any case, you mind checking your logs latest output? From before:

    /var/log/Xorg.0.log (for the X window system)
    /var/log/syslog (general system log)
    /var/log/dmesg (kernel log)

    To check for a response, open up another terminal window and execute ‘tail -f /var/log/’, then execute ‘soffice’ on your first command line. Hopefully that’ll generate something interesting.

  33. [root@linux-host ~]# tail /var/log/Xorg.0.log
    [ 98717.595] (II) NVIDIA(0): Config Options in the README.
    [101144.441] (II) NVIDIA(0): Setting mode “nvidia-auto-select”
    [101144.521] (II) NVIDIA(0): ACPI: failed to connect to the ACPI event daemon; the daemon
    [101144.521] (II) NVIDIA(0): may not be running or the “AcpidSocketPath” X
    [101144.521] (II) NVIDIA(0): configuration option may not be set correctly. When the
    [101144.521] (II) NVIDIA(0): ACPI event daemon is available, the NVIDIA X driver will
    [101144.521] (II) NVIDIA(0): try to use it to receive ACPI event notifications. For
    [101144.521] (II) NVIDIA(0): details, please see the “ConnectToAcpid” and
    [101144.521] (II) NVIDIA(0): “AcpidSocketPath” X configuration options in Appendix B: X
    [101144.521] (II) NVIDIA(0): Config Options in the README.

    [root@linux-host ~]# tail /var/log/syslog
    tail: cannot open `/var/log/syslog’ for reading: No such file or directory

    [root@linux-host ~]# tail /var/log/dmesg
    [ 18.474236] input: UVC Camera (046d:081b) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:12.0/usb4/4-2/4-2.1/4-2.1:1.0/input/input4
    [ 18.474293] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo
    [ 18.474295] USB Video Class driver (v1.0.0)
    [ 20.202663] EXT4-fs (dm-0): re-mounted. Opts: (null)
    [ 20.463943] EXT4-fs (sda1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)
    [ 20.472506] SELinux: initialized (dev sda1, type ext4), uses xattr
    [ 20.729729] EXT4-fs (dm-4): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)
    [ 20.729741] SELinux: initialized (dev dm-4, type ext4), uses xattr
    [ 21.702770] Adding 5177340k swap on /dev/mapper/vg_linuxhost-lv_swap. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:5177340k
    [ 21.705021] SELinux: initialized (dev binfmt_misc, type binfmt_misc), uses genfs_contexts

    [root@linux-host ~]# tail -f /var/log/
    tail: error reading `/var/log/’: Is a directory
    tail: /var/log/: cannot follow end of this type of file; giving up on this name

    Sorry, a lot of these make no sense.

  35. If you run ‘tail’ with flag -f (i.e., ‘tail -f /var/log/Xorg.0.log’) in one shell, it will progressively update output until you kill it (Ctrl-C). This way, you can watch the log update as you execute commands in another shell (assuming those commands update that particular log).

    But before we get back to that, mind doing an idiot check for me? Try running

    $ SAL_NOOPENGL=true soffice

    This sets an environment variable ‘SAL_NOOPENGL’ that should disable openoffice’s dependency on OpenGL. I still have a hunch that the startup script is exiting silently because it’s poorly erroring on something related to your nvidia driver update.

  37. I’d like to suggest re-synching with your repositories and then doing a full upgrade, and see if the problem persists.

    I don’t know what the fedora equivalent of ‘apt’ is, otherwise I’d give you the commands to do it.

    Good luck.

  38. Another reason to do that: it may be that some support library didn’t completely install or uninstall, so I’d check that beforehand.

  43. I just ran ‘yum update’ and it didn’t find anything except a new flash-plugin.

    $ SAL_NOOPENGL=true; export $SAL_NOOPENGL; echo $SAL_NOO
    NGL
    true
    $

    Still doesn’t work, though.

  45. That results in no return to the command line.

    Here’s the latest tail of Xorg:

    [114824.183] (II) NVIDIA(0): Config Options in the README.
    [117951.503] (II) NVIDIA(0): Setting mode “nvidia-auto-select”
    [117951.590] (II) NVIDIA(0): ACPI: failed to connect to the ACPI event daemon; the daemon
    [117951.590] (II) NVIDIA(0): may not be running or the “AcpidSocketPath” X
    [117951.590] (II) NVIDIA(0): configuration option may not be set correctly. When the
    [117951.590] (II) NVIDIA(0): ACPI event daemon is available, the NVIDIA X driver will
    [117951.590] (II) NVIDIA(0): try to use it to receive ACPI event notifications. For
    [117951.590] (II) NVIDIA(0): details, please see the “ConnectToAcpid” and
    [117951.590] (II) NVIDIA(0): “AcpidSocketPath” X configuration options in Appendix B: X
    [117951.590] (II) NVIDIA(0): Config Options in the README.
    ^C
    [root@linux-host ~]# tail -f /var/log/Xorg.0.log
    [114824.183] (II) NVIDIA(0): Config Options in the README.
    [117951.503] (II) NVIDIA(0): Setting mode “nvidia-auto-select”
    [117951.590] (II) NVIDIA(0): ACPI: failed to connect to the ACPI event daemon; the daemon
    [117951.590] (II) NVIDIA(0): may not be running or the “AcpidSocketPath” X
    [117951.590] (II) NVIDIA(0): configuration option may not be set correctly. When the
    [117951.590] (II) NVIDIA(0): ACPI event daemon is available, the NVIDIA X driver will
    [117951.590] (II) NVIDIA(0): try to use it to receive ACPI event notifications. For
    [117951.590] (II) NVIDIA(0): details, please see the “ConnectToAcpid” and
    [117951.590] (II) NVIDIA(0): “AcpidSocketPath” X configuration options in Appendix B: X
    [117951.590] (II) NVIDIA(0): Config Options in the README.

  47. Do you have openoffice or libreoffice?

    Above you said that ‘openoffice -writer’ was command not found. What about ‘oowriter’ or ‘openoffice.org’, are they found? If not, does ‘libreoffice -writer’ also give command not found? This shouldn’t be happening if everything is installed in the right place, etc.

    Here are a couple of threads with similar sounding issues:
    http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=257242
    http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=254247

    Note the tips about rebooting after uninstalling, before reinstalling.

  50. In the first link, the thread gets hijacked by someone reporting exactly your symptoms (oowriter dies without comment), even though the first post is actually about db problems. See especially #7. The easiest to deal with explanation would be a somehow-broken oo install, because you should be able to force a complete re-install. So I would try to be completely convinced that I have a good uninstall/reinstall before messing around with my video driver or kernel.

    Since you have open, not libre, you could always try a libre installation. I’d probably remove openoffice first.

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