Tech Chorus

I encountered this annoying issue today. OpenOffice.Org won't lunch at all. Clicking the OpenOffice.org icon from the GNOME panel application menu and clicking on a ODS file in nautilus had the same results. I could see the window information 'starting openoffice.org' on the bottom GNOME panel. It would soon disappear.

To troubleshoot the issue, I updated the system. There were new OpenOffice.org-* packages available. Updating the packages didn't fix the issue.

Next, I moved the ~./.openoffice.org directory to ~./.openoffice.org.bak thinking some file would have been broken in that directory. This also did not help.

To identify the root cause of this issue I tried to launch openoffice.org from the terminal.

[sudheer@localhost ~]$ openoffice.org
/usr/lib/openoffice.org3/program/soffice.bin: error while loading shared libraries: /usr/lib/libicudata.so.40: invalid ELF header

I suspected the file /usr/lib/libicudata.so.40 was broken. Either that or the package libicu-4.0-3.rpm was causing this issue.

I downloaded the exact same version of libcu from one of the http mirrors of Fedora. I the forced the rpm installation.

[root@localhost ~]# rpm -ivh libicu-4.0-3.fc10.i386.rpm --force
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
	package libicu-4.0-3.fc10.i386 is already installed
[root@localhost ~]# rpm -ivh libicu-4.0-3.fc10.i386.rpm --force
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:libicu                 ########################################### [100%]

I launched openoffice.org. Viola. I was all set.