LibreOffice in OpenSuse 12.3: bouncing cursor, then nothing

Have just done an (online) upgrade from 12.2 to 12.3. When I attempt to start LibreOffice, I get a brief splash screen and the bouncing cursor for about twenty seconds, then nothing. trying to start it from Konsole produces no error message, nothing happens at all. Must say I had the same problem in 12.2 for a few days (complete out of the blue) before upgrading, circumvented it by installing LibreOffice 4. Have tried deleting the LO .config files, makes no difference.
Any ideas anyone?

Now, what is easier then copy/paste this here (between CODE tags of course, you get them clicking on the # button in the toolbar of the post editor). Thus we can see for ourselves what happens and what not. Thiis because I do not think tthat "nothing happens’. Don’t you get a new prompt? Showing it is much more illustrative then telling a story and/or your conclusion.

@op - If you create a new user and open libreoffice,do you face the same issue ?

True, something happened in that I got the command prompt back. Not much else though :slight_smile:

Now why didn’t I think of that myself? It was late in the evening though… I’m at work now but will try that as soon as I get back.

It is nice that you think my remark being true, but you do not follow it. It still see not what I asked for and the only technical answer you give is “not much else”. I am not interested if you think that what comes back is “not much else”. I am only interested in your copy/paste of what the computer says.

No, then it works. I gather that means something in my settings has survived the upgrade from 12.2 to 12.3. But what? Deleting the LibreOffice .config file makes no difference.

Henk, I appreciate your general point re providing output in code tags. But I’m not a complete newbie and when I write that it returns me to the command prompt without anything else happening that seems clear enough, given that what one’s really looking for is some sort of error message. But anyway, here is what you asked for:

hgm@linux-mjmo:~> libreoffice
hgm@linux-mjmo:~> 

Here’s some background info that might be relevant (or not):

This is my main desktop computer (see signature, which does not yet reflect upgrade to 12.3 though) which I hadn’t used for over two months because of a house fire. LibreOffice is my most frequently used application and it had worked fine until the event. Once I’d restored everything and turned the computer back on again, LibreOffice (3.5 I think under 12.2) refused to start with the “bouncing cursor then nothing” symptoms. As I needed to use Writer urgently I simply uninstalled LO 3.5 though YaST and replaced it with LO 4 which worked fine. Now, after the upgrade to OS 12.3, the “bouncing cursor syndrome” is back… Maybe something in this rings a bell with someone?

Sorry, but I read it as I saw it:

  1. nothing at all;
  2. oh yes, the prompt, but not much more;
  3. only the prompt and nothing more.

So you used three different expressions to explain the same thing. It is only the human way to express oneself in a loose way (like at the coffe table or in the pub) that makes all the confusion. That is why I try to get people to copy/paste the things they have before their very eyes and then maybe add their conclusions. And I do this regardless of the fact that you have a lot of experience (which I may know or not) also to show the best practices to others coming here but having no experience at all. It wouldn’t be the first time that we “believed” what an OP said and only after a factual post of computer text we found out the problem was completely different from what we all thought for days.

No harm done, Henk :).
I really really need to get LO going tonight. Think I’ll go away and install LO 4 again to get some work done. But if anyone can think of a solution to the above, it might help someone else with the same issue, or even me in future…

The bouncing icon is only eye candy from your DE for people who can not wait for one millisecond to happen something when they click somewhere. It will bounce for a maximum amount of time, or shorter when the DE sees a window is opened. In this case the window does not open, so you see it for that max. time.

Thus the bouncer is unimportant, the fact that you call the program and exits immediatly is the real problem.

All I can say from here is that I have a 12.3 fresh installed. It has LibreOffice 3.6 and starts as expected (clicked on Writer in Kmenu).

There is a

man libreoffice

but a quick glance did not reveal any option for verbosety or debuging.

It proves that there is no issue with Libreoffice installation :slight_smile:

On 2013-05-08, gminnerup <gminnerup@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
>
> vazhavandan;2554698 Wrote:
>> @op - If you create a new user and open libreoffice,do you face the same
>> issue ?
>
> No, then it works. I gather that means something in my settings has
> survived the upgrade from 12.2 to 12.3. But what? Deleting the
> LibreOffice .config file makes no difference.

This suggests to me the problem is confined to something in your /home/you/ directory (a .*rc file?). I don’t know
what, because I don’t use LibreOffice. Can I suggest you backup all your data in /home/ and try this (at your own
risk):


sh-4.2$ cd ~/
sh-4.2$ mkdir %/
sh-4.2$ mv .* %/
sh-4.2$ exit

Then log out and in again. Then run LibreOffice. If that works, that at least confirms the cause is a ~/.* hangover from
your 12.2 installation. Your can restore things (if necessary from a virtual console) back to as it was using:


sh-4.2$ cd ~/
sh-4.2$ rm -r .*
sh-4.2$ cp -r %/.* ./
sh-4.2$ rm -r %/
sh-4.2$ exit

Then log out and in again. If the experiment above worked, then you should probably output:


sh-4.2$ ls .*

…to the forum and perhaps also…


sh-4.2$ find ./ -name libre*

… but as I say I don’t use LibreOffice so I can’t be sure!

Good suggestion, and many thanks for your trouble, but I’ve now installed LO 4 and everything is fine so I’m happy now :wink:

I do have the file .libreoffice in my home directory. What about moving it to a different name?

This looks to me like a failed upgrade, but we have been given no details about the upgrade process other than that “zypper” was involved. And although this is as desktop failure we do not know which desktop environment.

Should there be a problem with the user profile, try


:~>  mv  ~/.libreoffice  ~/.libreoffice-old

The upgrade should have been performed with something like:


:~> sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/12.3/repo/oss/  OSS-12.3
:~> sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/update/12.3/  Update-12.3
:~> sudo zypper dup -l  --from  OSS-12.3  --from Update-12.3

with no unresolved dependencies or errors. If you did something different, try the above. My guess is that you used a “zypper up” variation.

To resolve installation problems we would need the output of:


:~> zypper lr -d

Make sure that you have the appropriate “libreoffice-kde4” or equvalent installed.

{My users all use LO-4.0.2.1 from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/LibreOffice:/Stable/openSUSE_12.3/ }

Nowadays this is in ~/.config/libreoffice so that should read:

:~>  mv  ~/.config/libreoffice  ~/.config/libreoffice-old

Sorry, I did not handle this with all care needed.
I talked about a 12.3 system I used earlier for comparison with the OP’s system, but the~/.opeoffice file I found in an 12.2 system. Caught!

Thanks (this bit is because “short” replies are not accepted.)