How do I mend Openoffice?

[D. Michael McIntyre]

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