Since I upgraded my T60 from OpenSUSE 10.2 to 10.3, I have been unable to start OpenOffice. No matter what I did the OpenSUSE customized splash screen appeared, but the progress bar never moved. Starting OO as root, it actually managed to freeze X, requiring me to bail out of X with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.
To debug the problem I tried stracing oowriter without much luck. Around the net people reported various similar problems, but none of the suggested solutions worked. Eventually I found a bug report in Novell’s Bugzilla where Martin Tessun explained, that with the ATI Radeon fglrx driver, LD_LIBRARY_PATH must be set to point to /usr/X11R6/lib:/usr/X11R6/lib64. True enough, after exporting LD_LIBRARY_PATH with these paths, OO started without a hitch.
To make the change permanent, I added the export statement to /etc/profile.local.
