StarOffice 3.1 Mini-HOWTO

5. StarOffice Tips

Contributed by Patrick D'Cruze ( pdcruze at netpal.com.au)

1. Instead of sourcing the .sd.sh (or .sd.csh) file in my .bash_profile script, I instead copied the .sd.sh script, renamed it to swriter and copied it to /usr/local/bin. I then modified it by adding a:

#! /bin/bash

at the start of the script and a:

exec swriter3 $*

at the end of the script. Now all I have to do is run swriter and it automatically sets up the appropriate environment variables and then runs StarWriter. Saves having those environment variables pollute other applications/environments.

2. I noticed that for a lot of people, StarOffice takes quite a while to load (upwards of 60 seconds). The consensus on usenet was that a large chunk of this time was due to the symbol relocations that the dynamic linker has to do. ie, for each new symbol the dynamic linker has to locate the appropriate library. StarOffice dynamically links against quite a few libraries so the dynamic linker spends quite a bit of time searching through lots of libraries.

There is a solution to this. I run StarOffice in a chroot'd jail. In the jail, I just put the binaries and libraries that StarOffice uses (all the libs out of /usr/X11R6/lib, libc/libm and libg++/libstdc++). StarWriter takes approximately 15 seconds to come up on my P133/32MB. This is due to the fact that the only libraries present are the ones needed by StarOffice and hence the dynamic linker spends proportionately less time searching through all the libraries on the system (ie, it doesn't search through all the useless libs in /usr/lib etc looking to resolve symbols).