[plug] DTP Software

[Peter Wright]

On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 02:05:20PM +0800, Anthony Jones wrote:
> > I'm running Debian potato with a hand compiled 4.0.3 on my desk and
> > 4.1.0 on my laptop. Both work flawlessly for SO5.2, SO6 and all the
> > openoffice builds. Perhaps you have a driver problem as you suggested,
> > or perhaps a library issue.
[ ... ]
> That is very interesting. We (Peter Wright and myself) managed to get
> StarOffice6.0beta running on my machine on his X3 server but it crashed
> his X4 server. It also didn't run on my X4 server (on the local machine).

To clarify -

We were attempting to install SO6beta on Anthony's laptop (running XFree86
4.1). The (graphical) install process bombed out on his display, completely
locking the machine and forcing a hard reset. Repeatedly. No variation.
Despite us trying a number of tricks, mainly a number of different window
managers, we simply couldn't get it to work and were on the verge of giving
up when I had what turned out to be a moderately bright idea of trying to
run the install on Anthony's machine and export the display over to one of
my desktops (which was using XFree86 4.0.3). This worked flawlessly
enabling us to both install and run StarOffice from his machine (but still
using the remote display) without any further hassles.

Of course, what he actually _wanted_ (strangely enough :) was to run the
program on his own machine on his own display. There didn't seem to be an
obvious way to manage this - the same problem of total machine lockup
occurred when he tried to run SO using his own X display. After making a
few other pathetic attempts to work around the problem, I suggested that he
try installing XFree86 3.3.6 on his system (knowing that despite its
limitations, the older X has rather better support for some older and
dodgier video cards) and using that as the display when needing to run
StarOffice. From his indication in an earlier email I think that must have
(sort of) solved the problem *wry look*.

The point where Anthony refers to it crashing my X4 server (I only have
X4 servers, not an X3 server) only happened once and was really caused by
something else - namely, the Nvidia XFree86 driver, which is known to
(occasionally and unpredictably) cause X lockups under heavy system load.
Something I'm unfortunately quite used to, as I have two machines with
Nvidia-based cards and using the Nvidia X4 driver. Hey - the cards are
great, and the video drivers perform very very nicely almost all of the
time... it's just a bugger than I rarely get over a couple of weeks' uptime
before I get an X lockup. *sigh* Oh well, them's the breaks. :)

I'd say that Anthony's problem is a fairly unusual one closely related to
his particular video chipset and is perhaps exacerbated by the general
diceyness (is that even a word? :) of laptop video. In general, SO6 (and
OpenOffice) _should_ work fine both on XFree86 versions 3.3.6 and 4.*.

Assuming you've got a pretty damn hefty machine with a decent amount of
RAM, that is. :-)

> Anthony

Pete.
-- 
http://akira.apana.org.au/~pete/

-- 
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