Problems with LO and mandatory profiles

[SeaWolf]

Used LibreOffice 3.4 last year in a high school setting without any problems. Looking at upgrading to 3.6 for new school year, but there is a major problem with 3.6 in the environment. The issue is with the synchronizing and enabling the first time LO is started. This is a 3.5 minute process on the laptops. After that, LO starts up in under 10 seconds, which is fantastic.

Here’s the problem: The sync and enable data is written into the user profile, not the computer profile. This isn’t normally an issue, except that student profiles are mandatory. For security reasons, changes to the profile are not saved when the student logs out. This means that as soon as the student logs out and back in again, it’s a 3.5 minute process to re-sync and enable LO again. Obviously, loosing 5 minutes of class time, every class, every day, is unacceptable.

Can anyone tell me what settings are being changed/created when LO syncs and enables so I can write these into the student profiles?

Thanks in Advance-
Dave

[vsfoote]

Dave,

There is about ~7.5 MB of material in the %APPDATA%\LibreOffice\3\user\extensions directory (bundled, shared, tmp), including ~6.3 MB of built-in multi-language Help data.

Also, by default the extensions directory gets rebuilt (mostly) on the initial LO launch per-user. So 40 seconds to parse it seems about right.

Believe you could modify the MSI installer with Orca to be able to suppress installation of the alternate language help data.

For roving profiles that are read only, every time a student logs in with their roving profile, effectively it would be their initial login and the extensions directory would have to be rebuilt. Can you adjust your Domain so the profiles can be validated and saved with changes coming back from the session in a logoff script?

If not, perhaps you could force a read only copy of the LO extensions directory into each users profile–and position a template pre-cached at the workstation. The template could be parsed with a logon/startup script and appended to each users profile, thereby not having to drag it across the network. Would not need to be too fancy, simple Windows Scripting host, Powershell, or Python actions to copy/change/replace into a placeholder in the profile.

Another possibility might be if you don’t install ALL the bundled extensions:

Dictionaries
PDF Import
Presentation Minimizer
Presenter Console
Report Builder
Script provider for Python
Solver for Nonlinear Programming
Wiki Publisher

–disabled in the installer performing a custom installation, or during an administrative install to a network share–result in a smaller “bundled” directory.

With extensions disabled, and fewer help files bundled, as the per-user profile builds it should be smaller, e.g. faster. You would simply allow that to happen each login-session – expensive but reliable.

Stuart

[cloph]

to move the user-profile data to another location edit the bootstrap.ini file or start LO with a corresponding commanline option. see
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/UserProfile#Changing_the_location_of_the_user_profile for details.

It is OK to reset it everytime the machine is rebooted/the user logs in (although you obviously loose all changes made to the options, and you should reset it to a version where LO was already started once)

But as suggested earlier: have LO update the userprofile once and then use that updated copy as the template for the students of course would also be an option.

[SeaWolf]

Stuart-

With your directions, I was able to figure out how to reduce the extensions directory from 6.3M to about 1.6M by eliminating all non-english languages. No guarantees that I did it right, but the program doesn’t seem to complain. Log in time is an acceptable 18 seconds. I’ll be looking into cloph’s answer as well. Reducing the size of the profile and storing it locally in a read-only directory may be the best way to go.

One final question, the first time I start LO 3.6 after every re-boot (or logout/login) the start up time is in the 15-20 second range. After that, start up is under five. This occurs on the local admin account as well, and I know that one is stored locally. Any ideas?

Thanks again for all of your help-
Dave

[vsfoote]

Dave,

We’ll assume you are working in a Windows environment. Per-user profiles will be built in C:\Users<username>\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice\3\user

Believe slow time to launch is building the extensions\bundled and extensions\shared folders–Devs are reworking portions of that for the 3.6.1 build.

But, you should be able to roll up a reference copy of the user configuration, and script the path changes to accommodate a build for each student user, and drop it into their respective roaming profiles.

Pay attention to the registrymodifications.xcu and the config\javasettings_Windows_x86.xml as those both for sure will change as you tweek your deployments.

As additional extensions are added, or basic framework like Java JRE are changed, you will probably need to rebuild profiles–i.e. don’t make them too static.

Good luck.

Stuart

[SeaWolf]

Thanks for the reply Stuart. It hit me on the way home from a frustrating day to update the profiles manually.

Here’s another issue. When I add the “…\Application Data\LibreOffice” folder to profile, the profile size changes from 4Mb, 151 files, and 100 folders, to 12.2Mb, 4359 files, and 1545 folders. Login time changes from 10 seconds to 40ish. Better than yesterday, but still not great.

Is there a registry setting I can use to make LibreOffice look for application data on the local hard drive instead of the user profile? I can setup a local profile on each computer that is mostly read-only or I can reset the local profile with startup/shutdown scripts.

Once again, thanks for your help so far.
Dave