[Solved] Textmaker freezes when trying to save a document in Debian

[Colonel Panic]

Hi. I've recently installed Softmaker Office (version 972) in Debian Buster, and twice this weekend I've had the same problem; when I've tried to save a document I've been working on, the display has frozen, the mouse has failed to move and after a few seconds the display has disintegrated into a mass of horizontal lines and I have to reboot. It feels as though the cursor's suddenly gotten stuck in mud.

Could anyone please advise me on how I might be able to fix this?

Thanks in advance,

Colonel Panic .

P.S. I've also had the same problem in FreeOffice (version 973), although only once so far.

[miguel-c]

When TextMaker crashes, a crash report is offered to be sent on the next start. Did you get one?
If so, please post it here or send it to forum(at)softmaker.de

[Colonel Panic]

Thanks for replying Miguel. It didn't crash (and hasn't done in the past) so there was no crash report.

[miguel-c]

Passiert das immer mit dieser Datei oder nur ab und zu?

[Colonel Panic]

Das passiert normalerweise, wenn ich in Debian 10 bin und versuche, "Speichern unter" zu verwenden, aber nicht immer.

(Danke für Ihre Antwort, aber ich benutze ein Übersetzungsprogramm, weil mein Deutsch nicht sehr gut ist; ich hatte nur ein Jahr Deutschunterricht in der Schule. Ich würde Englisch vorziehen, wenn Sie es beherrschen).

It usually happens when I am in Debian 10 and try to use "Save As", but not always.

(Thank you for replying but I am using a translation program because my German isn't very good; I only had a year's study of German at school. I would prefer English if you can manage it).

[miguel-c]

Sorry for the message in German.
Could you please try the following?
1. Open a terminal and run "textmaker18 -debug"
2. When the issue occurs, everything until that moment will be recorded into /root/SoftMaker/Settings/tmlog.txt
3. Please send us that file
4. optional (more detailed): strace -f textmaker18 2>output.txt
5. also, please also send us the file: /etc/mtab (this shows the mounted volumes)

[Colonel Panic]

No problem Miguel. Thanks for the message; I'll follow your advice tomorrow if that's OK as it's getting late now and I'm a bit tired.

Best,

CP .

[Colonel Panic]

Hi again Miguel,

I ran "textmaker18 -debug" as you suggested and it seems to fix the problem. I've not yet had any problems saving files since I started doing that. (I've now tried it in Slackware as well as in Debian, with the same result).

Thanks again for your advice and I'll keep trying to replicate the fault, in Debian as well as Slack. If I can't, then you also deserve thanks for fixing the problem.

Best,

CP .

[Colonel Panic]

A further update; I ran Softmaker Freeoffice on Slackel Openbox (a distro based on Slackware and Salix) and had the same problem when I tried to save a file; the screen froze and I had to reboot. Again, running the program with the same switch (textmaker18free -debug) solved the problem, but there was no output file I could inspect to find out what had gone wrong in the first place.

Then I tried this;

4. optional (more detailed): strace -f textmaker18 2>output.txt

More detailed? You're not kidding - the output file size was over 10 MB! I decided not to post it to the forum for your and the forum's sakes.

I think the best thing to do is to run the program with the -debug switch in future and mark the thread "Solved". It's not ideal because I still don't know why the program freezes without the switch, but at least it works now which is the most important thing.

[miguel-c]

Instead of running in debug mode you could try do disable OpenGL, and, if needed, also XIM.
Both options are on File | Options |System.

[Colonel Panic]

Thanks for the advice, I'll try that if I have any further problems in this area.

[Colonel Panic]

I have had further problems in this area because the file I was working on in Textmaker froze when I tried to save it, but turning off both OpenGL and XIM allowed me to save it without any problems. Thanks for your advice.

Just one thing though; are there any downsides to turning off Open GL and XIM? I assume that they're in Office in case you want to work on a document in Textmaker that has embedded images in it that need scaling, but I can't recall the last time that I wanted / needed to do that.

[SuperTech]

Yes, you are right. For simple documents without complex graphics, OpenGL and XIM are not required.