Just changed to Etch AMD64, and OO behaves oddly, I suspect connected to Java in some way.

The approved way of putting buttons and controls into your documents is VIEW>TOOLBARS>FORMCONTROLS. This brings up the little click and paste widget, and it does allow you to paste buttons in.

Having done this, the next step would be right click on the button. You are now supposed to be able to choose CONTROL. However, nothing happens. The cross hairs stay in place, and all I can do is create a new button.

In Writer, drag and drop doesn't work at all. Select some text and try to drag it, and nothing happens.

Base seems to be so unstable as to be unusable. Almost anything you do crashes it.

Suspecting this might be something to do with Java, I tried to install both the Sun JRE 64bit and 32 bit versions in addition to the FSF one. They appeared to go in fine, but the only one OO is aware of in the OPTONS>Java menu is the FSF one. How does OO become aware of a JRE? You're invited to supply classes and so on, but I can't figure out how to do that because of not being able to find anything it will agree is a Jre. Where would I look for such a thing?

One thing that suggests it may not be Java, its very odd that if it is Java, my Mandriva installation shows no Jre at all, but all this stuff works fine. On the other hand, turning off the FSF Jre in Etch leads to a lot of stuff going missing.

Its true that Mandriva 2006 being stuck in a timewarp with OO, I downloaded and installed it direct from OO. The Mandriva is 2.03 and the Debian is 2.04. But its hardly credible that going from 03 to 04 screwed up something as basic as this.

Anyone have any ideas? Should I just apt-get uninstall and then download and install directly from OO? Or does anyone know some way of testing that the Sun Javas are installed and working and telling OO they are there?

Cheers

Peter