OpenProj Locks up with Blank Grey Windows

2 min 206 words

Published on June 11, 2008 Peter Tillemans Profile picture

The symptom is that after starting sometimes there is some blurp dialog and afterwards the Tip of the Day dialog appears. This stays grey and the application accepts no more events. You need to kill it to get out of there.

This happens at the place which is protected by a firewall and has no transparent proxy. At home it worked fine albeit on my Macbook and not on my Ubuntu laptop.

The reason is that there is some phone home functionality built in and with wireshark I could see the application trying to connect to a webserver. Probably to get the tips of the day. Behind the firewall this did not work and the application is just hanging there.

I suspect that sooner or later it will time out, but I am not that patient. Since this is a regular occurence with java applications I also immediately knew that I had to tell it where the proxy can be found. In the file ~/.openproj/run.conf file replace the line :

JAVA\_OPTS="-Xms128m -Xmx768m"

with

JAVA\_OPTS="-Dhttp.proxyHost=proxy -Dhttp.proxyPort=3128 -Xms128m

-Xmx768m"

This directs the java runtime library to use the proxy http://proxy:3128/. And voila! ... Openproj starts immediately and in its full glory?