openoffice: Unknown error forking main binary / abnormal early exit

[Sascha Morr]

When i start OpenOffice.org (no different which component) i get the OpenOffice.org Startscreen and than it crash. Into the terminal i get the following output:

sascha@workstation:~> oowriter
Bus error (core dumped)

** (process:5673): WARNING **: Unknown error forking main binary / abnormal early exit ...
sascha@workstation:~>

I use Ubuntu 7.10 with all updates. After the installation and before updating OpenOffice.org runs very well.

My PC has a AMD Athlon XP 3000+ processor, 1024 MB RAM, a GeForce 6600GT Graphic Accelerator (with installed OpenGL support), 2 60GB HDDs over IDE and some external Hardware. Hope this helps.

Not happy about this on a stable System :-(

Cheers
Sascha

[Pete (eptel)]

Hi,

I had the same problem with a fresh 7.10 installation with all upgrades

$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall openoffice.org-writer

helped for me.

Pete

[overdark (marcelo-chocobar)]

In my experience..
I believe that the permissions get lost in the folder/home/usuario/.openoffice.org2. Then reinstalling Office or algun complement is corrected, but not in 100 % of the cases. This serious the point of Analyzing really. The permissions must change on this folder If someone discovers because .. thank you very much

[Neskie Manuel (neskiem)]

I got the same problem recently and wondered what the problem was so I did an strace and found a bunch of grabage. Near the end of the strace I had two access() fail.

The 2 access that failed were trying to access:
/var/spool/openoffice/uno_packages/cache/registry/com.sun.star.comp.deployment.configuration.PackageRegistryBackend/registry/data/org/openoffice
/.openoffice.org2/user/uno_packages/cache/registry/registry/com.sun.star.comp.deployment.configuration.PackageRegistryBackend/registry/data/org/openoffice

I had to created the directories from here onwards:
/var/spool/openoffice/uno_packages/cache/
/.openoffice.org2/user/uno_packages/cache/registry/registry/com.sun.star.comp.deployment.configuration.PackageRegistryBackend/

That seemed to get everything working. Sorry I don't have the strace output I wrote over it in haste.
I can delete the directories and run ooffice again.

I was looking at this bug http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=2568329 and the strace that was attached had a similar problem probably for a different reason. If missing files or directories Open Office should point that out instead of giving a cryptic message. like forking main binary.

[pid 5899] open("/usr/lib/charset.alias", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
.....
Process 5898 detached

[sv2dgi (sv2dgi)]

I also face the same problem. Tried both the reinstall and the make directory and still face the same problem.

One thing I did and may have to do something with the bug, is that I installed Ubuntu, added ALL updates (186) and then I tried to run OpenOffice for the first time. Is there anything changed, in a patch, that does not permit it to start first time? I noticed that it did not create a .openoffice.org2 folder, so the crash must be prior to making the settings folder.

Tried also to uninstall scim - nothing changed.

When running ooqstart under strace, I noticed that it searched for a file /etc/lib/charset.alias which did not exist. Does it need this file?

Is there any command, in OpenOffice, I can FORCE it just to re-create settings folder?

[Jeremy Jackson (jerj)]

I have the same issue, I hadn't tried open office for a while, and I noticed that I had a version from gutsy-updates installed. manually downgrading to base gutsy repository version for all openoffice and python-uno pkgs, OO is again working, FYI