Frozen Open Office; hibernate only way out
 

My OOo has frozen when trying to save a file as a Word-6 document. I
tried different destination folders and drives and different file
extensions (without knowing their exact meaning). This resulted in the
following situation:

i) OOo remains inactive; sole action possible: resizing OOo window.

ii) Error warning:
"OpenOffice.org 2.0: Error saving document Unknown1. General Error.
General Input/Output Error." This window cannot be closed by clicking
OK or the closing cross in the upper right corner.

iii) "Save" dialog window: The only one of the three persistent
windows where I can make inputs. However, whether I change the
destination folder, the file extension or any other options, the
action buttons "Save" or "Cancel" or the closing cross remain without
effect.

a) A new instance of OOo cannot be opened.
b) Other applications like firefox or Control Center applications or
saving screen shots to an USB stick function properly.
c) Ctrl+Alt+Del does not do anything.
d) Only Hibernate works among the four log out options.


How can I get my OOo back and get rid of those sticky dialog/error
fields? Could anybody think of a possible reason for this frozen
situation?

1. What version of OpenOffice are you using?

2. If you save as something other than Word 6, do you still get the error?

3. What do the people at www.openoffice.org say?

4.

Open Suse 10.2

I do not know what would have happened if I had started saving the file as something other than Word 6. But having done that, it does not matter what other file extensions I try. It is and remains frozen (by the way, the file is a screenshot plus some text explaining it).

I will post it with them. But I still would like to get some advice from Linux experts because I am strongly discouraged in Linux supporting material to use the Reset button and I ask myself as an intimidated Linux newbie how serious I have to take this advice. Not being allowed to use Reset I see the only resort in hibernating in order to be able to continue working with my windows partitions. But for Linux it is not a viable option as the hibernation function stores the frozen situation with the three windows cluttering the display and preventing the use of Open Office.

Whenever I get a frozen app, I do a "ps auxww" and see if the app is sleeping or if it's spinning its wheels with 95% of the CPU being taken up. Most probably, this is your situation. Trying to save the doc as a Word 6.0 doc probably involves grabbing a library function or something that your version of OOo doesn't have.

Try doing a "ldd soffice" and see if your dependencies are all good, to start out with. Also, check the "ps auxww".

As to simply "getting OOo back," I don't know if that's possible. It depends on whether OOo spawns a child when it tries to save the document. If it does, you can "kill -9 #", where # is the process ID (PID) of the child. Otherwise, you could probably wait until "infinity - 1" for the process to time out, or perform the little trick you learned.

You could also try running "strace soffice". That might show you something dreadful, but probably not...

--vonSt