Open Office, Java, BlogBridge, Ubuntu Studio with Real-Time Kernel 
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On a new Ubuntu Studio 9.04 installation on a quad-core machine, I ran into problems where the system would hang. After doing some research and experimentation, I came to think the problems had something to do with interactions between the Ubuntu Studio 9.04 real time kernel, Open Office, and perhaps the OpenJDK 5 that I installed to get BlogBridge running.
Among the things that my research turned up was that other people have had problems running Open Office on Ubuntu Studio with the real-time kernel. People spoke of a problem in the low-level threading in the kernel that could cause the kernel to crash when Open Office was running. Sure enough, the problems occurred when I was running oowriter, a tool I use every day. In addition, I was seeing problems running BlogBridge, my favorite RSS aggregator tool.
Attempts to uninstall OpenOffice led to the system repeatedly locking up when it attempted to remove openoffice.org-emailmerge.
Further research indicated that the Ubuntu Studio 9.10 release has a much more stable real-time kernel. So, since I had already wiped away my very stable gentoo system, I decided to wipe away the non-functioning Ubuntu Studio 9.04 release and try out 9.10.
First, I installed Ubuntu Studio 9.10 and did not install OpenOffice or BlogBridge or any Java runtime. After a few days of working with the system, all seemed fine: no lock-ups, no crashes. I used gnumeric instead of oocalc.
The problem, though, was that AbiWord could not handle all the complexity of the documents I work with. So, I went back to a page I had found earlier:
[Tutorial] Installing OOo on Ubuntu, Debian and Co.
This tutorial includes the warning:
But Ubuntu releases of OOo are known to be rather bugged...
And it provides instructions on installing OpenOffice without using the Ubuntu Studio "Add/Remove Programs" feature -- which might be one of those buggy OO installations.
Basically, you download the OO debs and install them from the command line using dpkg.
I'm really hoping this works. If it does -- if my system remains stable after the OpenOffice install -- I'll return to the BlogBridge problem. Right now I'm using Thunderbird's RSS feed reader, but that is cumbersome, because you can't at a glance see which feeds have new content within the last few days (something I need for my work as java.net editor).
Anyway... OpenOffice is now in place on my Ubuntu Studio 9.10 real-time kernel quad-core machine. I am in the middle of writing a report, so I really hope the manual deb-based install works!
Update: OpenOffice JRE error
My first attempt to use my newly installed OpenOffice.org 3.2.0 required me to configure OO by entering my name and initials. Then, OOwriter displayed an error message:
OpenOffice.org requires a Java runtime environment...
and asked me to install a JRE. Having experienced first hand and read about problems with JREs on Debian/Ubuntu, I did not want to get into installing a JRE. I was pretty certain that my Ubuntu already had a JRE installed, but somehow OpenOffice wasn't finding it. A web search led me to this page:
[Solved] Some wizards receive defective JRE error
The advice that solved the person's problem was to delete the javasettings_Linux_x86.xml in the user's ~/.openoffice.org2/user/config directory. Since I have OpenOffice.org 3.2, I didn't have exactly that directory name; instead, I found that file in ~/.openoffice.org/3/user/config. So, I changed its name to javasettings_Linux_x86.xml_sav (I generally don't like deleting files whose purpose I don't understand). OOwriter popped up and let me open the report I've been working on. All seems fine!
So, what's in this javasettings_Linux_x86.xml that caused the error message?
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!--This is a generated file. Do not alter this file!-->
<java xmlns="http://openoffice.org/2004/java/framework/1.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<enabled xsi:nil="true"></enabled>
<userClassPath xsi:nil="true"></userClassPath>
<vmParameters xsi:nil="true"></vmParameters>
<jreLocations xsi:nil="true"></jreLocations>
<javaInfo xsi:nil="true"></javaInfo>
</java>
That <jreLocations xsi:nil="true"></jreLocations> looks rather suspicious, I'd say. Is it saying that no JRE location exists -- i.e., that no JRE is installed?
Anyway, OOwriter is running now. So, back to work on my report!
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