[ILUG] when OOo dies in a stranger-than-usual way ...

[Brian Foster]

 here's a hint for an odd situation I just found myself in:

   due to a messed up umask(2), attempts to start OOo-1.1
   the 2nd and later times consistently failed with a very

   earlier today, several attempts to start OOo-1.1 failed
   with a very obscure error window, with a complaint along
   the lines that a GetName didn't have an Object (or maybe
   it was the other way around; in any case, it clear came
   from deep inside OOo-1.1 and is presumably aimed at the
   developers, not the casual user).  furthermore, a deep
   stack dump was printed, apparently due to a segfault.

   _fortunately_, what I had just been messing with was
   umask(2), so I had a good idea what the problem was;
   and the fact OOo-1.1 worked once (with the new umask),
   and only then started failing (all the time), mostly
   confirmed the obvious guess.

   I had intended to set a umask of 077, but accidently
   set it to 0600 (which is not as strange a mistake as
   it looks like _if_ you happen to be thinking "these are
   the permissions I want set" and not "... want clear").

   a quick scan of `find ~/OpenOffice.org1.1 -ls' found
   the culprit, some XML gibberish in the file:

     .../user/registry/data/org/openoffice/Office/Common.xcu

   which had the very very strange permissions 077.
   guessing that it used to be 644 (like the other files
   in that directory), fixed the problem.   (actually,
   having since looked inside the file, it seems to contain
   data which I would call private to the user, and so it
   perhaps ought to be 600.  but since this is a single-user
   home machine, I'm not too fussed about it.)

 of course, I'd really prefer to be using LaTex ...  ;-\  
 ( I can't for the document in question, which is for work,
  where there is an insane M$-Worthless-_only_ policy that
  it has been made clear will not be reviewed or changed. )

cheers!
	-blf-
-- 
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