[techtalk] StarOffice and Gnome installation issues

[Nils Philippsen]

On Fri, 12 Nov 1999, LeeAnn Bevell wrote:

> My problem is somewhat different from yours.  My installation
> apparently works, but when I run it, the windows update so
> slowly that it is unusable.  (The windows in the installation
> program also updated slowly - at one point I got a black screen
> also, but it eventually updated the window and continued.)
> I was wondering if StarOffice was having a problem communicating
> with X windows, but I don't really know enough to go about
> finding out.
> If you figure it out, please let me know.
> Any suggestions much appreciated.

How much memory do you have? StarOffice is a real memory hog (I call it
bloatware and you may quote me on that), a quick test gave this:

It eats additional 2MB in the X-Server and forks off 6 copies of itself,
giving 7 instances running. If Linux didn't do such a good job in memory
management (copy-on-write and stuff), it would consume between 100 and 120
MB of RAM (and that's with shared memory taken into account).

Background: I got my numbers from top(1). I opened one rather lightweight
spreadsheet in StarOffice besides the application itself.

So it's more than possible that it just consumes more RAM than you have
(if you have less than 128MB, I'm almost sure it does) and Linux is
steadily swapping pages out of memory on the disk and vice versa.

I wait for Miguel advancing with his bonobo stuff, so that I finally can
use gnumeric w/ diagrams *drool* :-)

Nils
-- 
Nils Philippsen / Vogelsangstrasse 115 / D-70197 Stuttgart / +49.711.6599405
nils at wombat.dialup.fht-esslingen.de / nils at fht-esslingen.de / nils at redhat.de
   The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be
   regarded as a criminal offence.                  -- Edsger W. Dijkstra


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