The other day (yesterday?) my installation of OpenOffice.org(ximian) started crashing every time I clicked the "Open" icon. Not a good thing, you might say. Another example of a Linux problem?
Not really. For starters, the problem was caused by an update of gtk (gtk is simply a library which handles a lot of the GUI widgets of the Gnome desktop), which is not something that a beginning Linux user would probably attempt (at least, I hope not). I expect that this issue was isolated to systems like Gentoo, and possibly Debian, which allow the user to quickly and easily (and at their own risk) update individual components of the system.
So at first, I was a bit distressed by this. I mean, a word processor that crashes when you try to open a document is not a very handy tool. So, I decided to see if our good friends, the Gentoo community, had seen this same problem and found a solution.
Sure enough they had.
All that was necessary was to open gconf-editor, and set the key /desktop/gnome/interface/file_chooser_backend to gtk+ instead of gnome-vfs. I believe this is just a workaround due to a possible bug in gnome-vfs, but sure enough, it worked like a charm and OpenOffice no longer crashes for no good reason.
The ever-helpful Linux community; yet another reason I love using Linux.
