[Solved] OOo crashes when navigating to home directory

[rond58]

Hello all,

Perhaps many readers will benefit from this discovery.

I am running Open Office 3.2 on Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS

I have just managed to diagnose the cause of a problem that has been with me for many months. The problem I was experiencing is that regardless of whether i was using write, calc or impress, when i clicked File Open, and then navigated to my home directory, Open Office closed. Clearing my user profile etc had no resulting remedy.

All permissions and filenames were as I would have expected them to be, belonging in my home directory. Me as the owner, my group, for all files in that directory, 755 permissions.

Via the process of elimination, I moved everything out of my home directory to a sub-directory, then gradually moved them all back in alphabetically, hoping to find perhaps a file or collection of files that might be causing the problem.

Lo and behold, I had some *.gif files that caused the problem. As soon as I moved them away, the problem disappeared.

Upon further investigation I found that only two files were causing the issue, both image files are small and have a height of less than 26 pixels. Others had heights of more than 34 pixels.

In my file open dialog box, there is a preview button which when clicked to off, prevents the problem from occurring. When it is clicked to the on position and the offending files are in the directory, the problem recurs. I have tested this about 5 times. Its a nice feeling when you click something and it behaves the way you expect it to, especially when finding a solution to a problem.

It is apparent, if not obvious to me that the code which renders images in the file open dialog box is unable deal with scaling very small images for the purpose of showing them in preview mode of the file open browser/dialog. I suspect the same is true when you want to save a file.

Comparatively, the Dolphin file manager in preview mode of the same directory shows icons for these two files as a generic image icon.

I trust this is not repetitive and helps others who have experienced similar symptoms.

RonD.

[kingfisher]

Well worth knowing. My file open dialogue does not contain any preview.

[Hagar Delest]

Can you reproduce that with the vanilla version? The Ubuntu version is sometimes less robust. Note that under Ubuntu, it's go-oo.org and not really OOo.
See [Ubuntu] Installing OOo on Debian and Co.

[acknak]

Nice work tracking that down, and thanks for pointing it out. I'm just not sure this is the right place to report it. We're only users, for one, so we can't do anything about the problem. And, two, I'm not sure this is an OOo problem. If the file open dialog is crashing on those image files, then it's a problem in the dialog code, which is not part of OOo.

My guess is that it should be reported to Ubuntu--assuming they haven't already fixed it (lots of things use file open dialogs, so problems tend to get noticed and fixed pretty fast).

If you want, you can attach one (or both) images here and we can give them a test--if it works for us then it's probably fixed and you just need the right update.

As far as OOo, you can switch to the built-in file dialogs: Tools > Options > OOo > General > Open/Save dialogs > Use OOo dialogs: YES

You won't get any previews, but they are stable.