Showing posts with label linux. Show all posts
Showing posts with label linux. Show all posts

23 December 2017

LibreOffice, Linux, Nvidia and OpenGL - A Combination from Hell.

A quick note in the hope that it may save somebody else a little time, stress and trouble.

If you're a LibreOffice user, and you run it under one or other GNU/Linux distribution, and you use the Nvidia Graphics Drivers (rather than some default generic driver), you might be tempted to enable OpenGL rendering for LibreOffice.

DON'T DO THIS.

For reasons that remain largely occult to me, this particular combination of circumstances causes LibreOffice to crash during startup. (For the C/C++ programmer who might care: It seems that there is a method pointer in the Nvidia driver that is null, so when LibreOffice calls this method during startup,... crashity, crashity, segfault, whump.)

The solution is simple: don't enable OpenGL rendering in LibreOffice. The option is there in among the LibreOffice options: Tools >> Options >> View >> Graphics Output >> Use OpenGL. Leave it well alone.

But what if you have already done that and your LibreOffice instance now refuses to run?

I guess there is some configuration file among LibreOffice's many (to be found in $HOME/.config/libreoffice and depths below) that would allow one to delve in with one's favourite text-editor (i.e. anything but nano) and fix it. I could not find it. In the end I simply removed the entire LibreOffice configuration tree and let it create a new one on the next startup (which was entirely and predictably successful, don'cherknow). After all, I tend to keep customisation as lightweight as I can, so it only takes a couple of minutes to put things back the way I like them, and not much harm done. It takes a fair while to discover all this, though...

Hope this helps someone out there. If you found a better way to fix this issue, I'd love to hear about it!

BTW: This seems to be quite independent of Linux distribution. The most help I found in searching for a fix came from the Mint and Arch communities. I use Kubuntu.

31 May 2007

Kubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

Hooray!  My free (in both senses) Kubuntu 7.04 CD has arrived.  Only a couple of weeks since I requested it.

A Thousand Thanks to Canonical and all who sponsor this stuff!  I'm in a space right now where the cost of the download really is significant for me, and I would probably have had quite a lot of hassle inobtaining the latest Kubuntu update if not for their free shipping program.

I've been using Kubuntu on my (HP) laptop ever since I got it, and it mostly "just works".  The only hassle I've had was over non-free video drivers, and that was quite easily solved.  I'll probably load Kubuntu onto my desktop machine, too, in the interests of reducing clutter in my life.  For about 5 or 6 years, now I have had Mandriva on my desktop machine. I have no complaints about Mandriva. It has served me extremely well through the years, but it is one more distro to obtain, update, download bits of, and maintain and I'm into extreme simplification right now.  If I do move the desktop box over to Kubuntu I'll have things about right: down to two distros -- Gentoo for servers (where I want complete control over everything that goes onto the box) and Kubuntu for desktop/office work (where I want everything to "just work" without having to think about things).

Anybody in the South Cape who wants a copy of the Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) CD, please drop me a line and we'll arrange something!
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