Why does OpenOffice take so long to load?
 

It's an absolute bitch(X) to load, any way of speeding it up?

Oh, and can it handle footnotes like Word97?

thx

Not sure about the footnotes as I haven't had to use them yet but I would see why not, check the extensive help section.

As to why you are having a problem with the load time of OO I have no idea. On all my distros (Fedora, Mand 9.2, Suse 9.0,FreeBSD5.1) it loads within 3-5 seconds.

rberry88

It takes forever to load up on mine also. I've read in some places that it loads up faster/slower on different distros. Besides rberry88's fast time of 3-5 seconds, I hear it loads real fast on slackware, but since you have slackware, maybe the distro thing has nothing to do with it. My computer is old too: 500 MHz, 192 sdram, embedded video and sound. Perhaps that has something to do with it. Especially since I'm running KDE, which I'm sure takes up a lot of memory and stuff.

Actually I haven't installed it on Slackware 9.1 yet. I'm reluctant to download it (it's about 80 megs) after my experience with it (version 1.0 I think) on Mandrake 8.0.

I'll give it a shot though.

1.1.0 runs like a charm on lfs and suse 8.2. Fast, no problems with ms files. I do have plenty memory, 512Mb/1,5Gb. Guess that will speed up things a bit.

The previous version had startup problems and didn't like ms word files (who does ;) ).

You need to install the newest version (1.1.0). They solved this problem.

I wonder what's the thing then, because it still takes about a minute to load. And I have 1.1. I bet, mac_phil. it's because you are using IceWM windows manager. I'm using KDE which is a memory hog. I'll try later loading oo from IceWM.

AFAIK, one big factor in OO startup time is disk speed.
I'm reluctant to describe my sys (p2 400Mhz, 192M SDRAM) as 'old' (it's 6yo: that would mean I'm 'ancient'), I right now have 3 people working on gnome from old 486-586 xterms, I can run xine while browsing, etc. (you got the idea). OO itself works smoothly, once loaded. Stil it takes 40'' to load the first time! I suppose it reads a lot of small files, and my 10MB/s disk makes this a painful process.

ac1980--good point, I'm not sure how fast my hd is, but I'm sure it's not fast. All these factors probably play a role: slow processor, memory, hd, wm, etc.

Ah, but you see, the point you may be failing to see, is that it works! Try loading something like Office 2k3 or whatever the newest money grubbing incarnation it is on a fat slow old workhorse, and see if it even starts up! :-P

BTW, I just rebooted in IceWM and Open Office loads in a quarter of the time it took under KDE.

Technoslave, you're right. I used to have win98, with it I had officexp. Boy was that slow and it often crashed!!!! Whenever I was writing some document, I was addicted to saving it every few minutes.

I used to use OpenOffice Quickstarter with the previous version of OO - have'nt found it necessary with 1.1.0 and 512mb of RAM. Still, out of interest, here's the link:

http://segfaultskde.berlios.de/index.php?content=oooqs

The best solution is to never close the program and never reboot. Then this isn't an issue. :)

I don't usually close the program, but since I just installed linux, I've been playing around with it using different windowsmanagers and such. Unless I don't know something, I've had to reboot to do that. I usually keep OO open though in another panel. That works well. But it still is a bit sluggish. E.g., when I'm using the spreadsheet and tab or cursor over to the next cell, there's a bit of a lag.

Update: 1.1.0 loads fine... I downloaded it :)

Oh, and it handles footnotes fine, too :D