I'm a novice user of Mandrake 10.0 Linux ver. Painfully and slowly I get done all the things I want to get done on my system. However, I'm a bit deterred by the fact that Openoffice and it's printing capabilities are being loaded 'forever'. It takes a really long time to start up Openoffice and there is a great deal of waiting before the printing window appears. And, I was wandering if that is how it should be or there is a way to speed things up. I will be greatful for patiennt and clear explanation (like to a 5-year-old :-) ) and any helpful suggestion.

Thanks a lot
Artur

Define "endless" and "really long" please. It also
would be quite beneficial to know what CPU and
how much RAM you have. For me OO takes under
10 seconds to start, and I find that more than acceptable.


Cheers,
Tink

You can always use the OOquick start. Takes a whole second to open OO then.

I have both OO1.1.4 and 1.9.109 and both take under 10 seconds to open. Even on my laptop with a P3 700mhz.

Thatks for your replies.
I've got a Pentium IV 1.4 G and 256 MB of RAM DDR. As for the loading time it's over 4 min!!!! The same goes for printing capabilities the printing window comes up rather quickly but once I make changes to the print mode and such things I have to wait about a minute by the time the printer starts printing. I can hardly complain about other things in linux, everything works pretty fast. But, I teach ESL in school and I prepare or print additional materials for the lessons and with such timing it's annoying.

Something else is going wrong if it is taking over 4 minutes. Nothing should take that long. On an old 350mhz clunker I could get OO.org started in 12 seconds using Vector Linux 4.3.
How much RAM do you have free after a fresh boot? Are you using a heavier window manager? And at 0% CPU usage OO.org takes 4 minutes to start, or is this with other things running in the background?
If you can't get whatever problem fixed that is causing the slowdown, you can try a faster alternative like Abiword.

Try installing prelink, then uninstall and reinstall OpenOffice. It should ask if you want to prelink say yes.

You can also run prelink as root in a terminal $prelink -av
will link all available libraries.

If you are using KDE or Gnome there is a quickstart app that basically launches a hidden process and puts an icon in the taskbar.

Thanks for all the replies with hints and suggestions. The proplem was due to memory shortages and ver of the OO.o. I've uninstalled the old version of the programme and downloaded the 1.1.4 ver. It flies now, loades in under 10 sec and printing capabilities are ok. I need to get Polish languages support but that's not a priority right now. Once again thank you for all the helpfull hints and suggestions.

Take care
Artur