FF 3.0b5 + OO 2.4 + Ubunty 8.04: OpenOffice hangs when using plugin

dmk

Hi,

I am starting a new discussion for this even though it seems related to 'OpenOffice.org hangs when clicking "Add Citation"' because I am almost certainly using a different version of zotero than the original poster. I am using 1.0.4 on a Ubuntu Hardy Heron machine with all the updates.

The Zotero plugin for OpenOffice was working fine, but at some point I closed firefox while openoffice was running and I think this caused the problem I am now seeing. Now, any time I try to use any of the Zotero plugin icons in OpenOffice, openoffice hangs for 5-10 minutes before saying "Error communicating with database" (or something like that). I have tried all sorts of things to try to convince the plugin to reinitialize the connection, including reinstalling the plugin, but nothing works (more specifically, reinstalling the plugin somehow worked for a short time once, but has not worked since then).

I have turned on debugging output for zotero in Firefox and have saved that output to a file. I can send that file if that would help. As far as I can tell, there are no indications of communication between firefox and openoffice. I also noticed one line that seem to relate to another post I saw:

zotero(3): Not initializing integration HTTP

Not sure what that means.

Any suggestions would be helpful. I was in the process of updating the AGU csl file, but I can't test citations without the plugin....

On a side note, it would be useful if there was a way to cite from firefox, similar to the "Create bibliography..." option, but in this case just do the citation part. This would allow one to check citation styles without having to mess with the plugin.

Thanks,
David

dmk

OK, logging out and logging back in appears to have fixed the problem. This suggests to me that there is some sort of lock file or registry that hangs around after closing openoffice telling it where to look for the firefox link that becomes stale when one logs out and therefore gets replaced. I have looked around to try to find such a file, but I haven't had any luck. Knowing how such things are mediated would be useful for both perhaps avoiding having to log out when there are problems and for debugging purposes.

adamsmith

don't know how much that has to do with your current problem, but Zotero explicitly warns against using 1.0.4. with 3.0b5
http://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-104-launches/
- since RLC1 version of FF is out (though maybe not in the ubuntu commons yet) might be worth installing it manually to avoid problems.

About testing citation styles - are you aware of the test pane?
chrome://zotero/content/tools/csledit.xul

dstillman

OK, logging out and logging back in appears to have fixed the problem. This suggests to me that there is some sort of lock file or registry that hangs around after closing openoffice telling it where to look for the firefox link that becomes stale when one logs out and therefore gets replaced

It's more likely that it was just a Firefox process hanging. If Firefox can't bind to the integration port (for example, if a process already has the port), it will display the "Not initializing integration HTTP" message.

If it happens again, check for Firefox in the process list.

dmk

I suspected that, so when it happened I checked for a lost firefox process and didn't find any. But I haven't been able to reproduce the error either. If it does happen again, I will check.

vroni

I' m one of those who had the problem previously (and am still experiencing it sometimes). Don't ask me why - but it works better when I'm online and firefox is open and than I start to insert citations in OO. No idea why.
This bug it certainly hinders one valuable feature of Zotero from working (online _and_ offline work possible...). Would be really great if that could be solved.