All of a sudden I can't get OpenOffice to launch for a normal user. Before it always did.

Now I have to do "sudo swriter" or use "su".

The permissions and ownership on the OOo executables seem unchanged from before (i.e., user.root, 100755), but I must have done something somewhere.

After trying to launch swriter as a user, I get no error message. Nothing happens. And when I check running processes, I see that soffice.bin is indeed there, but "sleeping".

Thanks for any help.

After trying all sorts of things, most of which I won't admit to, I found out how to make OpenOffice 1.9.104 start for regular users:

(1) Go to /tmp/mcop-username
(2) Delete the file named "secret-cookie"

(Or such is the case with Slackware 10.1, at least.)

Simple enough. Obvious? No way. Not to me, at any rate.

However, I confess that I did read something a while back about the role of this secret-cookie file in controlling user access. So I suppose that's what it was doing, though it was doing it a bit too well in my case.

Hmm...I've never had this happen (at least, I don't think so), but I bookmarked this just in case it does. I know I'd p'bly tear my hair out trying to fix it too!

Thanks

Hmm. I'm not so clever after all. While I'm sure that the fix I cited above did take care of my no-start-for-user problem with OOo, the problem has now come back after a week or so of not bothering me. And the fix doesn't fix it this time.

In addition, this time I've tried reinstalling 1.9.104, I've tried zapping my user configuration, and I've tried zapping a few tmp files that maybe I should have left alone.

At any rate, if there are any OOo-Linux gurus out there who know how to get OOo 1.9.104 working again for a normal user, I'm all ears.

I can get it to launch as root, but not as user.

I'm an inveterate tweaker, so I imagine in my fiddling with this or that in the past week, I've broken something somewhere.