Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 2346
Problems with OOo 638c on older PC
Last modified: 2003-09-08 16:54:41 UTC
SO development team: As a test, I have been using OOo 638c on a "throwaway PC" to see how it behaves with slow processors and little video memory. What follows is a laundry list of problems I encountered; feel free to parcel this out into seperate issues for the appropriate teams (I don't expect resolution, this is just my Q/C contribution) -Josh Berkus Marketing Project THE PLATFORM: Whitebox Pentium 2 PC constructed from spare parts Pentium II 233mhz on generic motherboard 128 mb EDO RAM 5200 rpm Quantum IDE drive 4mb Matrox Mystique video card supporting 1024x768 Sony CRT display all components are > 3 years old SuSE Linux 7.3, upgraded from 7.0 KDE 2.1 Desktop using anti-aliased fonts 1-2 apps (Konqueror, XTerm) running conncurrently OVERALL IMPRESSION: OOo 638c on Linux does significantly better than MS Office/Windows would do on the same hardware. INSTALLATION: Installation went without a hitch. No Problems 3-D OBJECTS: I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I could do 3-D objects even with 4mb of heavily taxed video ram. Rotation, light source, and shading all worked fine for up to 3 3-D objects on a Presentation page. PROBLEM #1: PRESENTATION TRANSITIONS Animated page transitions for Impress teneded to freeze in the middle for 5 seconds, then contine. This is probably just a function of the low video RAM, and not necessarily anything you can fix. PROBLEM #2: CRASH WITH TOO MANY FONTS Once I added 100 new TrueType fonts to the system, I noticed problems accessing the Font list. Frequently, I would be able to scroll down the font list about 1/3 of the list, then the application would freeze and I would only be able to close it by doing Kill -9 from the console. This happened in Writer, Spreadsheet, and Impress. On particularly bad occasions, this freeze locked up the whole KDE desktop and I had to ctl-alt-backspace to get back control of the terminal. PROBLEM #3: RUNNING PRESENTATION SWAMPS VIDEO MEMORY I discovered a problem editing an Impress presentation with 9 slides with animated transitions and some other bells & whistles. The presentation would run fine (except for problem #1), but when I went back to edit it immediately after running, KDE would apparently run out of video memory and be unable to display dialogs or pop-ups (they appeared as empty frames and the screen did not refresh), thus locking up the application. On 2 occasions, this locked up KDE entirely and I had to ctl-alt-backspace. On only one occasion was I able to run the presentation and then re-edit it without closing Impress and re-starting it between. The problem seems to get worse the more times I run the presentation. Perhaps a memory leak?
TM->BH: Please have a look at these problems. They all seem to occur within Impress and Draw.
Further testing of similar issues: New Test Platform: Clevo98 Laptop 2.5mb S3/Virge Video supporting 1024x768 LCD screen 256mb RAM AMD K6 300mhz Dual-boot Windows 98 OE and SuSE Linux 7.3 (upgraded from 7.2) Tested with both 638C AND 641B Demo presentation can be found at OpenOffice.org Whiteboard Documentation Marketing Presentations IMPRESS RUNS WELL UNDER WINDOWS: I was able to use Impress to work on a moderately complex presentation under Windows 98. In fact, there was little or no format conversion problems between my home Linux machine and the Windows Laptop. IMPRESS CRASHES UNDER LINUX on 2.5MB S3/VIRGE However, when I booted the machine into SuSE 7.3, it was a different story. Fonts did not display correctly when I opened the presentation. I copied TrueType fonts from the Windows partition, but kerning was radically different under SuSE 7.3 ... and than onder SuSE 7.3 on my home machine, which matched Windows. Every time I tried to correct the font spacing, or to make any graphics changes to the presentation at all, Impress crashed. Frequently taking X-windows with it, making me ctl-alt-backspace or even open another terminal and kill-9 openoffice. It seems likely that Impress has problems with machines with low video RAM under Linux, and maybe with the S3/Virge chip in particular. This memory problem does not seem to be specifically related to Draw, as 3-D objects performed better than expected on the 4mb video desktop machine. Oddly enough, it's fonts that seem to be the problem. Good luck, and keep up the hard work. -Josh Berkus Marketing Project
TM->BH: Please have a look at this one...
Hello Josh, are the fontproblems, you mentioned for Impress, also appearing in the Writer? Which changings on graphics are you doing? Is it possible to send a doc? Thank you for your help.
BH: There used to be a URL attached to this incident, and it disappeared. Yet Another IZ Problem, I guess. Anyway: http://whiteboard.openoffice.org/servlets/ProjectDocumentList And download the SDForum presentation. Steps to produce a crash: 1. Install OOo on a computer with < 4mb video memory (either test platform below), running SuSE Linux 7.3 with Xfree 4 and KDE 2.2 2. Install several dozen fonts on the same machine. 3. Open the presentation. The font kerning (spacing) may or may not display correctly. (platform 1: yes, platform 2: no) Regardless: 4. Either: a) Attempt to edit and change font size on a few captions; or b) Attempt to change the shading gradient on Slide 3. 5. OpenOffice.org will freeze. Sometimes, all of KDE will lock up. OOo can only be shut down with a Kill -9. What I find particularly interesting about this problem is: 1) It does not happen on Windows 98 on the same hardware; 2) It seems to be entirely dependant on raw video RAM. If you notice, my old laptop has twice as much regular RAM and a faster processor, yet crashed faster than the throwaway workstation. The main difference I can see is that the laptop has 2.5mb video RAM, and the workstation as 4mb. I need to do more testing on the font-related crash in Writer. This crash does not happen consistently, and I still need to determine what other circumstances cause it.
After further testing on multiple platforms, all of these problems seem to be related to the font support problems in KDE 2.2. Hopefully with KDE 3.0 they will be fixed. If not, we should be prepared for a slew of complaints that we can't do anything about. -Josh
close it