This is the strangest thing I've ever seen...

From the terminal, I can enter in any of openoffices programs, swriter, sbase, scalc, soffice, etc,etc,etc. However, I can "not" use the menu to start them. Actually the only way I figured out that error was by using CTRL-ALT-F1.

While searching around I had found one place that said to copy ooffice to the home dir, which I did... Here's the link https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...uncher-536433/

However, since I installed 3.0.1 changing the file to any series of 3.0.1, 2.1, or 3.0 doesn't work. Another very odd thing, also. I created a script file
Of course this didn't work, but after I copied soffice to the user directory, voila, it worked.

I even renamed soffice to ooffice and copied soffice from ooffice, which, in my noob brain, showed that the permissions were set, however, that didn't work either...

After I figured out that soffice was just another name for ooffice, I added that to my openbox menu, which works just fine, even before copying soffice to the home dir.

Anyway, this is the darnest thing I've seen...Anyone know why?

My best guess is that for some reason your OpenOffice installation belongs to your user account (therefore it can be launched from a terminal on that account), but doesn't work from the system menu, because the script or application behind the system menu act as some other user behind the scene.

Check the permissions, ownership and executable flag for the OpenOffice suite. Maybe it gives some hints.

Arch Linux

<Edit>

Ok, I found out what was wrong. I really hate having to edit the menu.xml file so I downloaded and compiled obmenu and have been using it to edit the menu. It turns out, I guess, obmenu doesn't modify the openoffice files. Instead it kept copying them as ooffice -writer/-base/etc and wouldn't change them to soffice, swriter, etc.

However, when I manually edited the menu file, soffice -writer/etc didn't work. I had to change the commands to swriter, sbase, etc...

(Note to self: Quit using GUI tools...Dab nabbit)...LOL

Anyway, thanks for your help...