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[Debian] preloading openoffice to speed up starting

For those who happen to use openoffice.org on the NIT, there's a simple command to shorten its startup time.

The command

Code:

debbie ooffice -nologo -nodefault

preloads parts of openoffice - it will steal you one or two second for its execution and some 23 megs memory.

From my experiments on my freshly booted 810, starting "ooffice" without this preload needs about 30 seconds, which scale down to 15 seconds after the preload.

I still have to fiddle with the booting scripts to determine the best way of autostarting the thing.

Re: preloading openoffice to speed up starting

I think it would be nice to bundle some if not all of your speedup tips into a future version of the easy chroot; I've just bundled the /tmp resize trick and it has done wonders; suddenly I can open complex documents in OpenOffice (before, it would just silently drop pictures, etc), print to PDF, print via CUPS properly, etc, etc...

Could you re-post your other OpenOffice optimizations here?

Re: preloading openoffice to speed up starting

OK :-)

Here are some reposts - other goodies will be posted here when available. Though I don't think you will be able to default the chroot to these, unless you hardcode the openoffice preferences which go into the /home/user personal space.

Another trick to shorten openoffice.org startup. Fire up an openoffice instance (ex. writer), go to tools / options, then in the list look for openoffice.org and memory. Change "use for openoffice.org" to 30MB and "memory per object" to 2MB. Seems to work in my hands albeit I did no measures (placebo is enough for me :-).
Taken from http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/pdfs/do...feat_speed.pdf which is a very interesting source of speeding advices.

This is to be able to open openoffice documents from the file manager.
dbus-switchboard allowed me to associate .odt files with openoffice writer.
In defaults.list put "application/octet-stream=hildon-dbus-switchboard.desktop" as stated by pipeline for files unknown by hildon.
In .dbus-switch-apps.cfg add

Code:

Oowriter,cli,debbie oowriter "%params%"

(double quotes were needed in my hands to allow filenames containing spaces).
In .dbus-switch-xref.cfg add

Code:

.odt,Oowriter,

This was enough. Other ooo file types work similarly.

Managing the "restoring files" window in openoffice.org
This particular window, when shows, is too high for the 800x480 NIT screen and its buttons lay behind the visible area - plus, there's no way to move the damn'd modal window and to push the OK or CANCEL buttons, except that tabbing and hitting return in a blind way. Luckily, there is a cure.
In Openoffice tools/options menu, go find the "view" screen and on top you'll find a field which controls the scaling of the user interface widgets. Scale down it to 80% (or experiment with other values) and you'll see the restoring files window is going to enter comfortably into your screen - plus, all the toolbar icons will be visible.

Re: preloading openoffice to speed up starting

I stumbled across this in the /usr/bin/startlxde file. I ran OpenOffice under LXDE but couldn't see any difference, however. Any ideas?

Code:

# Enable GTK+2 integration for OpenOffice.org, if available.

export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk

EDIT: More info here. I wonder if we should go a step further and force desktop detection to "Gnome" by using OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP="gnome"

EDIT2: That page suggests a couple of variables that might speed things up a bit...

Quote:

SAL_DISABLE_SYNCHRONOUS_PRINTER_DETECTION
If set to nonempty value disables synchronous printer detection. This can help on startup e.g. if your CUPS server is very slow.

SAL_NOOPENGL
Disables usage of OpenGL if set to "true".

Re: preloading openoffice to speed up starting

I'm curious about this; I'd like to see some results.

If you're willing to (perhaps) drain your battery a bit more in order to get more performance out of OpenOffice, you might gain some speed by setting your processor to "performance" mode. lcuk does this with his liqbase, it might really help OpenOffice, too.

Make two little scripts, one called "cpu-perform" and one called "cpu-ondemand" (or whatever you want) and then run them as root (eg, sudo cpu-perform)

cpu-perform

Code:

echo performance >/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

cpu-ondemand

Code:

echo ondemand >/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

(don't forget to chmod +x cpu-perform)

Re: preloading openoffice to speed up starting

Wow! This seems to work, definitely, just at the first test! Makes OOO much more usable. Now I wonder how much battery-time I lose by having this on while I use my tablet (and off when it's in my pocket).

Re: preloading openoffice to speed up starting

Great, I'll add these scripts to Easy Debian.

Re: preloading openoffice to speed up starting

If I were able, I'd modify the slidelock package (which I always use on my n810 - and also on my n800 after pushing the secret button which makes its secret sliding keyboard slide out) :cool: to set performance when the slide is open, and ondemand when it's closed. I'm going to ask Jgallen23 (the developer) to include this in his next version.

EDIT: I was able indeed. It's just a minor modification in /usr/lib/SlideLock/SlideLock.py. The modified version is as follows:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import dbus,gobject,time,os

from dbus.mainloop.glib import DBusGMainLoop





def main():

        slidestatus = '/sys/devices/platform/gpio-switch/slide/state'



        DBusGMainLoop(set_as_default=True)



        bus = dbus.SystemBus()



        tklock = bus.get_object('com.nokia.mce','/com/nokia/mce/request')



        def msg(id,obj):

                f = open(slidestatus,'r')

                status = f.read()

                f.close()

                if status == "closed\n":

                        tklock.req_tklock_mode_change(dbus.String("locked"))

                        os.system("echo ondemand >/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor")



                if status == "open\n":

                        os.system("echo performance >/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor")



        bus.add_signal_receiver(msg,dbus_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device",signal_name="PropertyModified",path='/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/platform_slide')

        loop = gobject.MainLoop()

        loop.run()



if __name__ == "__main__":

        main()

Now let's see how many Coulombs does it burn :p

Re: preloading openoffice to speed up starting

(qole looks all over his N800 for anything that could be called a "slide", doesn't find anything, shrugs, and goes back to his virtual keyboard)

Re: preloading openoffice to speed up starting

The external memory card slides out :P