Though everything else seems fine, LibreOffice flatpak launch fails after upgrading Kinoite to version 44. From the command line rather than Plasma launcher, this error is thrown:
Failed to open display
/app/libreoffice/program/soffice.bin X11 error: Can’t open display:
Set DISPLAY environment variable, use -display option
or check permissions of your X-Server
(See “man X” resp. “man xhost” for details)
The fix seems to be adjustment of the launch command. Failed, original command was:
Removing the @@ %U @@ resolved that, and function is now restored.
This research and manual intervention should not be required, of course. One can blame flathub/flatpak, I suppose, but as this occurred with a mainstream application after a Fedora upgrade, I felt it made sense to post about it here.
By the way, my declaration of success was premature. The revised command line is unreliable and may only work after a fresh reboot.
At times since my “fix”, launching produces only the LibreOffice splash screen, and the Plasma taskbar shows an unexpected X11 icon. I wonder if further messing with the command line with --socket=wayland or --nosocket=x11 would be relevant. Most likely, there’s some other problem that, if resolved, would eliminate the need to mess with the command line produced by flatpak installation.
I can run LibreOffice as a snap until this gets figured out.
Here on my Kinoite 44 and also on Kinoite 45 it just works OotB when I start it using the item in the KDE Plasma launcher. No changes needed in the startup line, which is: /usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=libreoffice --file-forwarding org.libreoffice.LibreOffice --calc @@u %U @@
Using your way of starting it from a terminal however does not start and I get this error:
Failed to open display
/var/home/jan/%U does not exist
But why do you want to start a GUI program from a terminal when it comes with entries in the Plasma launcher, which you can also pin to your panel?
Okay, it should work, I agree to that, but it seems so useless to first open a terminal, write or copy/paste the line and press enter to make the program start.
The only reason I ever launch GUI apps from a terminal is debugging: to try to find out why I could not launch from the Plasma Application Launcher. There may be something quirky about my Kinoite setup that causes this problem. Or maybe the upgrade process has a glitch?
I started with Kinoite 43, and all was fine. The problem occurred when I upgraded to 44. Launching from the command line revealed error messages that helped guide me to the workaround of adding --display :0.
I wonder if your Kinoite 44 was an upgrade from 43, or was a fresh install. The problem does not occur in a fresh VM install.
The part about the %U in the tail end of the command line was a distraction caused by testing from the command line – it works fine from the Launcher. But for unknown reasons, I still need --display :0.
I did not think about that: starting a program in terminal for debugging. That is the way to get info about what is happening.
I never do upgrades, I like to install the new version to get a working distro. I have had bad experiences with upgrades, not with Fedora but with another distro, so I avoid them.
But I have a different way of doing things than most people (I guess)
I use manual partitioning with an EFI, a BOOT, a ROOT and a HOME partition. The first three are formatted in the installer to create new empty ones without leftovers from the previous distro, the HOME partition is kept alive. This means I still have all my data, including the flatpaks data, plus I install the flatpaks with the option --user which lets me keep all the programs as well since they are installed in my HOME partition. All KDE settings are there as well.
I install the base, I connect my Nas, I create a container and in there I install programs like htop and inxi, plus I found a nice script to install mscorefonts. That’s it.
I have a new distro without the problems you might get when doing an upgrade. I deliberately waited a while to do this after I saw the problems others had with doing the upgrade here in the forum.
This all means I am ready way within an hour and it just works.
I do wonder, since Kinoite is an atomic distro, if there is a better way of doing this by using the rebase command, or that it makes no difference with a clean install.
For what it’s worth: my workaround (adding --display :0 to the Plasma launcher command line) is durable. I tried to launch without it after a Kinoite update, but it still failed. After a failed launch, I must reboot to regain the ability to launch with the workaround.
Unless I can find and fix the problem, it seems I’ll be stuck with my workaround until a completely fresh Kinoite install, which would be a substantial task . So far, no one here or at flathub has offered any hints or suggestions.
. So far, no one here or at flathub has offered any hints or suggestions.