Open Office GUI problem or bug

knox · n00b Joined: 17 Jan 2003 Posts: 18

I am having a very strange problem with Open Office. I emerged Open Office 1.0.1 and it seemed to build and install just fine, but then when I went to use it the graphics were totally skrewy. Basically ... most of the gui components seemed to be drawn wrong or not drawn at all.

I tired downloading the standalone installer from openoffice.org and I have the same problems with the installer. The link below is to a scaled down screenshot of the installer, and as you can see all the text in the dialog box, buttons, and background seems to be missing.

http://www.agilliland.com/linux/openofficeinstall.html

Is there any obvious reason why this is happening? I haven't been able to track down any information about this problem.

thanks.

Kabuto · l33t Joined: 01 Aug 2002 Posts: 701

Do you have the LD_PRELOAD for freetype? If so OO has a problem showing fonts < 10 pt.
If not try removing freetype from your XF86Config and then running.

knox · n00b Joined: 17 Jan 2003 Posts: 18

I actually hadn't even been using freetype, but I added it to my config and it didn't seem to make a difference.

I also tried setting the LD_PRELOAD as well and no luck with that either.

I also thought the problem might be something to do with fonts, but I don't really know enough about fonts on linux. I am just using xfs to serve fonts right now.

roan · n00b Joined: 11 Jul 2002 Posts: 22

My openoffice had worked perfectly for quite some time. I have been using
the installer from openoffice.org and not used the openoffice-bin. I dont use it very often but a couple of days ago when I started it there were no fonts in the menus or in any other part of the gui except fot the actual wordprocessor field. The widgets were just flat. I tried the openoffice-bin version but had the same problem. But when I removed the load freetype from the XF86Config file as indicated above the fonts returned. Are you sure that you doesn't have a line in your /etc/X11/XF86Config file in Section "Module" that says:
Load "freetype"
If you have, remove and see if it works. I dont no what repurcussions this could have for font handling in general though.

Does anyone no what may have changed, so that it stopped working?
I've had that Load freetype line there for quite some time
Robert

knox · n00b Joined: 17 Jan 2003 Posts: 18

actually ... I never had that module loading in the first place. I tried adding it, but I have the same problem. The big thing is that Open Office doesn't report any problems or indicate that I don't meet some requirement to run the software.

I am assuming it is a problem somehow with my system, but I haven't the slightest idea where to start looking since everything else works fine.

I installed from the Gentoo 1.4_rc1 cd and I use WindowMaker by itself, so without Gnome or KDE. I just recently upgraded my system with "emerge -u system" so I know that most of my packages are up to date. I am using Xfree 4.2.0 with WindowMaker 0.80.1

And I took another screenshot of what the application looks like.

Here's a bit from my XF86Config file if it helps:

human_shape · n00b Joined: 06 Jan 2003 Posts: 43

Hi,

I had the same problem some days ago. Here's the way I fixed it:

I started ooffice with a strace:
strace -o [outputfile] ooffice
then I grepped the outputfile for error or permission messages:
cat outputfile | grep -i error
and
cat outputfile | grep -i perm

and then I saw where the problem was:
the user who wanted to start ooffice hadn't no read permissions on the font directories in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts.
So I set the read permissions for OTHERS and then it worked fine.

For some better Font display I set the LD_PRELOAD var:
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libfreetype.so

hope this helps....

Kind Regards....

BTW: I dont't know why or how the permissions were changed so that no "normal" user (except root) can't access the dricetories. May there is an otherone who figured this out ?

knox · n00b Joined: 17 Jan 2003 Posts: 18

I never figured out exactly what the problem was, but someone at OpenOffice must have known because the problem was fixed with 1.0.2 release.

I have the 1.0.2 release installed now and it is working fine.

werpu · n00b Joined: 10 Oct 2002 Posts: 24

I've had the same problems (according to the screenshot link posted)
I know what the cause is, OpenOffice relies on a running xfs server if the xfs server is not started (it is kicked out if you emerge to xfs2 and you have to add the init.d file again to your list of loaded startup scripts) you get those weird results of fonts being neglegted by OpenOffice.