Frequent crashes of 4.1.8 on Linux, recovery non-functional

[hman2]

Hi,

I witness several hard crashes of 4.1.8 (on Linux Mint 18.3 64 bit), and in all instances, recovery did not work.

One of the crashes is reproducible. Its a Writer document with a small table (4 columns, 9 línes, and some harmless computation like adding VAT and calculating the sum). When I insert paragraphs of text before the table, Writer crashes immediately once a line of the table goes to the next page. Reproducibly. Actually, at the first occurence, the whole Base crashes, taking a spreadsheet with it.

Both could not be recovered.

OO restarted and showed the two documents (on the later reproduced crashes only the Writer document, because I did not open the spreadsheet again). When trying to recover, a message came that recovery failed. Despite this error message, the recover window's content changed and both documents were listed as "successful" ! When trying to open either, another error message came, that /tmp/sv1tsjfd.tmp/MYDOCNAME.odt_0.odt does not exist.

Actually, in /tmp, there IS (while OO is running) a directory RANDOMNAME (probably for security reasons) with files 0.odt, and sv1.swzk0.tmp, MYDOCNAME.odt_0.odt.

When OO crashes, there is only 0.odt and sv1tw2gs.tmp in there, and both are way to small to contain MYDOC's data...

Is there a bug in the recover routine, that it tries to recover files by the wrong file name? And why does it crash when a harmless table gets shoved to the next page?

Thanks
hman2

[Hagar Delest]

You should file a bug report if it is easily reproducible: [Tutorial] Reporting bugs or suggestions.

You may try LibreOffice.

[hman2]

I can't. I do not have a user account, and account creation is disabled. Looks like I have to apply for one by mail ?!

[Hagar Delest]

Indeed, for spam reason, you've to ask for an account on the dev mailing list IIRC.

[John_Ha]

Please upload the file showing the problem so that it can be analysed.

Press POSTREPLY and click the Upload attachment tab below where you type (128 kB max); or use a file share site, Dropbox or Google Drive for a larger file.

If the file has confidential material in it, you can obscure the contents without affecting the structure too much (lines will spill differently because different characters have different widths) by changing every lower case alphabetic character to an " x ". Select all the text (Ctrl+A) and:

Edit > Find and Replace
Find box [a-z]
Replace box x
Options: Match case: YES, Regular expressions: YES
click Replace all

Repeat the above using [A-Z] and X to scramble the upper case letters, and [0-9] and 0 to scramble numeric data.

[hman2]

I could create a dummy test file that provokes the crash. Possibly even simpler test files can do the trick. This just a blank document with a 4x9 table containing description, amount, value, and total incl. VAT (multiplication of 3 fields). I haven't even added building a sum.

Open this document and insert paragraphs above the table, until the table wraps around to the next page. This goes well until the very last (i.e. the first) line of the table has to wrap, AOO instantly crashes, and recovery fails.

[RoryOF]

Didn't crash for me, running on Xubuntu 20.04.1. Try, in place of inserting new lines (blank paragraphs), inserting a page break just before table.

[Villeroy]

LibreOffice is pre-installed on every Linux desktop. Use it. OpenOffice is dead.

[hman2]

After start AOO and loading crashtest.odt, in /tmp a directory sv2o1khp.tmp is created, containing two files, 0.odt and sv2o1sld.tmp".The latter is about 9 kBytes in size. When I try to look into sv201sld.tmp with cat, I get the error message that sv201sld.tmp would be a directory! But ls -al does NOT show a directory flag, so I would, without further analysis, think that the inode creation somehow went wrong.

After the crash both files still exist. A window pops up that AOO has crashed and crashtest.odt will be recovered. Clicking on Ok produces another window "OO document recovery", list crashtest.odt with status "not yet recovered". Clicking on "Start recovery" produces the error message /tmp/sv201khp.tmp/crashtest.odt_0.odt would not exist. This is true, because the entire directory in /tmp has a different name (sv2o9ee3.tmp) and that only contains one file named 0.odt...

Clicking on Ok produces another window that crashtest.odt is locked for editing by "unknown user" ?! The document could be opened write-protected or a "working copy" could be created. While this is displayed, the status of crashtest.odt in the recovery window changes to "recovery is performed".

Clicking on "open write protected" yields the error message "No access to object. Due to insufficient rights the object cannot be accessed". If you click on Ok on the error message, the status of crashtest.odt in the recovery window changes again to "recovery successful". If you click on Continue, you get another window that states that the recovery process was aborted and by clicking on Save you could save the listed documents into the the folder given. This will produce NO file at all and open the unchanged document crashtest.odt (all edits are lost).

[hman2]

Hm, only three of the eight screenshots were added? Created a Zip file, which I had to split...

[hman2]

Second Zip

[RoryOF]

One is only permitted to add three files/screenshots to a single post.

[hman2]

LibreOffice is pre-installed on every Linux desktop. Use it. OpenOffice is dead.

I don't like LO's menu style, I find it illogical, and by default it comes with my #1 hate object of MS Office, ribbons. The worst productivity killer MS ever invented... And AO is part of LO, so bug that leads to crashes might be inside LO just as well.

[RoryOF]

AOO is separate, LO uses much of its code, but slowly rewriting it, under conditions that does not permit LO rewrite be used by AOO: the code movement is only one way.

[hman2]

One is only permitted to add three files/screenshots to a single post.

Understandable and okay, but forum should then issue a warning and not accept further file selection, but after uploading eight images I found only three in the posting, which I don't think to be user-friendly

[Villeroy]

LO does not come with ribbons unless you enable them explicitly. AOO will be burried any time sooner or later. It has become unstable. Do you really prefer an unstable product over the preinstalled one because of some trivia which are customizable anyway?

[John_Ha]

Boot in Safe Mode. Does it still crash?

[Villeroy]

No safe mode in Linux. You can turn off or shut down all kind of things but there is no safe mode. LibreOffice has ist own safe mode where it starts with a clean profile and no extensions.

[John_Ha]

And AO is part of LO, so bug that leads to crashes might be inside LO just as well.

LO is derived from the same OOo software that AOO is derived from.

LO is under active development and has fixed lots of bugs which AOO still has. AOO is "functionally stabilised" and effectively dead as there are only one or two developers working on it. LO has an army of developers.

That being said, fixing bugs in LO sometimes introduces new bugs ...

[hman2]

No safe mode in Linux. You can turn off or shut down all kind of things but there is no safe mode. LibreOffice has ist own safe mode where it starts with a clean profile and no extensions.

I don't have any extensions in my AOO, except for the Oracle Report Builder. Hyphenations and spelling dictonaries came built-in (German), I only added US and UK English.

[RoryOF]

As a diagnostic, start OpenOffice in a terminal (type openoffice4) and report the error messages there after your file has crashed.

[Villeroy]

Then disable the report builder for testing.

[hman2]

Hm, I did not have any databases or reports open. But I deactivated the Report Builder anyway. Still crashes with the above test procedure. To gain some additional information, I started Writer not by GUI, but from command line (/opt/openoffice4/program/soffice.bin -writer).

Immediately upon start a warning is issued:
** (soffice:13027): WARNING **: Unknown type: GailWindow

That is all. Writer starts and runs normally, until the crash test procedure is done. Nothing happens on stdout, until the crash. Then this warning is produced:

** (soffice:13027): WARNING **: Unknown event notification 36

But this is not consistent. At a second try, some other warnings were issued:

(soffice:13128): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_ref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

(soffice:13128): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_ref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

(soffice:13128): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_ref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

(soffice:13128): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_ref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

(soffice:13128): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_ref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

(soffice:13128): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_ref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

(soffice:13128): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_ref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

(soffice:13128): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_ref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

And no unknown event notification. No real errors, just these warnings. No segfault, No core dump.

[hman2]

As a diagnostic, start OpenOffice in a terminal (type openoffice4) and report the error messages there after your file has crashed.

openoffice4 (/usr/bin/openoffice4) is just a shell wrapper that performs an exec /opt/openoffice4/program/soffice "$@"

[hman2]

AOO is separate, LO uses much of its code, but slowly rewriting it, under conditions that does not permit LO rewrite be used by AOO: the code movement is only one way.

I took a look a LOs license, and I do not see why any fix applied to it would be under a different license than LGPLv3 or MPL 2.0 and I do not see anything in those that would prohibit applying said fixes to AOO code. Both would even allow the combination of code with proprietary, non FOSS code.

[Villeroy]

AOO is separate, LO uses much of its code, but slowly rewriting it, under conditions that does not permit LO rewrite be used by AOO: the code movement is only one way.

I took a look a LOs license, and I do not see why any fix applied to it would be under a different license than LGPLv3 or MPL 2.0 and I do not see anything in those that would prohibit applying said fixes to AOO code. Both would even allow the combination of code with proprietary, non FOSS code.

That's great news. You should explain this to the Apache foundation and to the one or two OpenOffice developers.

[hman2]

That's great news. You should explain this to the Apache foundation and to the one or two OpenOffice developers.

Well, IANAL. But maybe Apache Foundation should contact one.

[John_Ha]

I took a look a LOs license, and I do not see why any fix applied to it would be under a different license than LGPLv3 or MPL 2.0 and I do not see anything in those that would prohibit applying said fixes to AOO code.

I suggest you take a better look at the LO licence as it prevents any new LO code being used in AOO. Any AOO code can be used in LO.

AOO runs perfectly happily for tens or hundreds of thousands of Linux Mint users so do the maths. There is something different about your PC environment causing the problem.

You now have to decide whether you want to talk about it or you want to fix it.

If you just want to talk about it, carry on but it won't get fixed.

If you want to diagnose the problem then

1. Remove the calculation from your table. Does that fix it? If so it is the calculation causing the problem.

2. Whichever, do what I suggested, albeit based on assuming Linux has a Safe Mode. Stop all applications etc which are started when the PC boots, and boot; or boot from a clean OS. Test it. Repeat with all extensions and dictionaries disabled.

The above assumes you have already reset the profile.

If none works, then

1. uninstall AOO.
2. Delete every file in the AOO profile.
3. Download AOO from https://www.openoffice.org/download/ and install.
4. If you are not asked for your name you did not delete the profile so delete it now and restart AOO.

[hman2]

Didn't crash for me, running on Xubuntu 20.04.1. Try, in place of inserting new lines (blank paragraphs), inserting a page break just before table.

Yes, this works, but is merely a workaround, not a solution. My problem wasn't repositioning the table. My problem was that it crashes, which it must not under any circumstances...

[hman2]

I took a look a LOs license, and I do not see why any fix applied to it would be under a different license than LGPLv3 or MPL 2.0 and I do not see anything in those that would prohibit applying said fixes to AOO code.

I suggest you take a better look at the LO licence as it prevents any new LO code being used in AOO.

You can surely quote for me where exactly that can be found in LGPL3 or MPL 2.0?

AOO runs perfectly happily for tens or hundreds of thousands of Linux Mint users so do the maths. There is something different about your PC environment causing the problem.

I have been working as a professional software tester (ISTQB) for more than a decade now, and I am in the industry for three. So you can rest assured that I know what I am doing. There is nothing in my setup that is out of the ordinary.

You now have to decide whether you want to talk about it or you want to fix it.

If you just want to talk about it, carry on but it won't get fixed.

Do you believe this is the right tone of voice to talk to someone who made an effort to create a bug report that can be helpful to pinpoint the problem?

1. Remove the calculation from your table. Does that fix it? If so it is the calculation causing the problem.
2. Whichever, do what I suggested, albeit based on assuming Linux has a Safe Mode. Stop all applications etc which are started when the PC boots, and boot; or boot from a clean OS. Test it. Repeat with all extensions and dictionaries disabled.

I have already tried without the "calculation" (which anyway was just a multiplication). Still crashes. Linux has no safe mode. And does not need one. Linux has no registry that gets clogged up over the years and there are no thousands of helper applications like Windows users tend to stuff their machines with. There are NO other applications running, and my system is clean. My AOO installation is just some weeks old and was installed from scratch from a direct download from the open office download site (Apache_OpenOffice_4.1.8_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_de).