[5255] in testers
X display problem with Star Office 6 help on Linux-Athena
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Wed Jul 3 21:57:30 2002
Message-Id: <200207040157.VAA01453@dit.mit.edu>
To: testers@MIT.EDU
cc: alexp@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2002 21:57:26 -0400
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
Hi folks,
I've run into a perplexing problem that seems to be associated with
the X display on Linux-Athena machines. It shows up when you run the
help system for Star Office 6 (as well as the help system in Open
Office 1.0). To see the problem:
add soffice_v6.0; soffice
When the GUI opens, pick Help -> Contents, them try to select various topics
from the left side pane; the window on the right will contain garbled
information; typically icons and graphics will appear, but text will be
missing; if you try several topics the problem should be obvious.
I've done a fair bit of digging- the problem doesn't show up on Suns (although
printing help topics doesn't work there, perhaps due to the same issue of
printing not working from Java that I reported a number of months ago; the
help system in Star Office 6 appears to be Java-based).
The problem does show up when you run on a Sun and display on a
Linux-Athena machine- but it doesn't when you run on Linux-Athena and
display on Sun (or SGI); I also tried running on Linux-Athena and
displaying on my home Linux machine (straight RedHat 7.3)- the problem
doesn't show up. So it seems to be associated with our Linux-Athena
displays. (I tried on 9.1 and 9.0; no difference- the problem is
identical; logging in with Dash interface made no difference).
When I ran on Sun and displayed on Linux-Athena, I got the message:
"display can do XRender, but no libXrender.so.1 is installed" but
I think this is bogus, since this library actually is installed; I
also got the mesasge when displaying on my home straight Linux machine,
where the problem doesn't manifest. I tried various Java versions, including
a jre supplied with Star Office 6- makes no difference which I used, so
I don't think the problem is in Java. That's about as far as I got-
Alex
PS- also tried a complete local install, in case AFS is an issue- makes no
difference.
