[Techtalk] X trouble and OpenOffice.org crashing in Gnome on RH7.2

[Conor Daly]

Hey all...

I've installed RH7.2 on a blank disc in a P166, 140Mb RAM, 2.5Gb HD, 
S3 1Mb SVGA running GNOME.  I installed the latest Openoffice.org suite
(build 641D) using the "/net" option to /usr/local/bin/Openoffice.org .
Under KDE, $HOME/Openoffice.org/soffice works just fine but under GNOME,
it gets to the word processor with a new blank document and then exits.
The one time that I (inadvertently) typed a few chars into the doc, I got
asked if I wanted to save changes and on pressing "cancel" was left with a
working word processor.  In all other cases, it simply exits immediately.
If I do $HOME/Openoffice.org/soffice private:factory/swriter I get the
same result.  top shows plenty of spare resources (about 5Mb of physical
memory free and about 120Mb of swap free) so I don't think the system is
killing the process.  Has anyone seen this sort of behaviour?

In a slightly different vein, I'm having a little trouble with XFree86 on
the same box (I've to build and ship 30 of these boxes so I'd like to have
the best possible configuration working on them).  On board S3 graphics
S3 Trio 64V (86C765) uses XF86_S3 server in X 3.3.6 .  Using X 3.3.6 it will
run at 800x600 8bpp happily but at 800x600 16bpp, I get momentary screen
artifacts when a window refreshes or scrolls or anything.  Using X 4.1.0 , I
get a messed up mouse cursor leaving artifacts around the screen with a
2cm border at the top od the screen where the mouse just won't go.  This
is the case at either 8 or 16 bpp colour depth.

None of the options under X 4.1.0 made any difference while the "nolinear"
option under X 3.3.6 hung the machine hard.  

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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