Re: can't get LibreOffice to run on XP Pro SP3

James Wobanwu wrote:
> I have an old Toshiba Pentium II with XP Pro SP3 and I am trying to get 
> LibreOffice to run on it.  I have downloaded the last versions of LO, 
> which appears to be 5.4, that will run on XP.  I have tried both 
> portable and non-portable versions.  No error messages, just when I 
> click on LO, the hard drive starts to churn and then stops after a while 
> and the program doesn't open.  I even tried a 5.3.X version but same 
> behavior.   Any help here would be welcome and thanks.

IDK.

Dial the knob back to 3.6.7.2 ?

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/System_Requirements#Windows.2C_Mac.2C_Linux.2C_and_Android

   "Windows 2000   2010-07-13   3.6.7.2   x86
    Windows XP     2014-04-08   5.4.7.2   32-bit, 64-bit
    ...
   "

Worth a try, if it's an SSE2 problem.

If you want to determine your hardware support, then the
Intel PIU is one tool (Processor Identification Utility?).
But CoreInfo is another way. It's less work to get this going.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/coreinfo

    SSE             *       Supports Streaming SIMD Extensions
    SSE2            *       Supports Streaming SIMD Extensions 2
    SSE3            *       Supports Streaming SIMD Extensions 3
    SSSE3           *       Supports Supplemental SIMD Extensions 3
    SSE4.1          *       Supports Streaming SIMD Extensions 4.1
    SSE4.2          *       Supports Streaming SIMD Extensions 4.2

One of the reasons SSE was used years ago, is the Intel processor
was missing a good block move instruction, while the 68K had
"MOVEM" or Move Multiple. In retaliation, first the programmers
abused FP (Floating Point) registers as garbage bins. Then they
started attacking SSE (which I think has its own wide registers).
Then there was some stink about "having to support a sea of macros
to do conversions", to stuff things in various size holes. Well,
that's bread and butter stuff, and only lazy individuals start
moaning like that. I had guys at work that made a bunch of those,
and once one genius does the work, the rest of the team swims
in the glory. But eventually (without me understanding all
the details), SSE2 began to become "essential", which resulted
in some older processors getting kicked in the nuts, when
lots of stuff would no longer run.

I think LO also uses OpenGL. The first times I tried LO,
I was getting crashes due to OpenGL... on a "modern" machine too.
And it's because the call that returns available remaining
OpenGL memory, was missing in action. The video card companies
had complained Microsoft kept changing stuff and they
couldn't keep up. That is fixed today, in some version
of WDDM x.y , which is not something WinXP uses. It was fixed
around the time Windows 10 got a GPU tab in Task Manager, and in
Linux, NVidia got an NVidia SMI ncurses thing, to show Linux
users how their GPU was being used.

There are other things LO can use, but they're optional. LO
can use Java... but I'm not interested in the hair loss
to install/add something like that to LO. LO has enough
problems without going overboard. Java would be like putting
lipstick on a pig.

Good software uses Dyn DLL loaders, the main program loads
first, and then it tries to load DLLs one at a time. If a
DLL is missing, it prints an error message on the screen

    ABC.DLL is missing

And if you toss an ABC.DLL file into the program folder...

    DEF.DLL is missing

it tells you what the next one that is missing happens to be.

Now, I really like that concept, but not many developers do that
for you. I mean, users can Google "ABC.DLL is missing" and then
find hints about what to do. That's preferable to turning over
rocks hoping to find hints.

    Paul