Quick start without tray icon?

users
#1

Dear all:
When we checked the option "Enable systray Quickstarter", we preload
libreoffice and have a "Libreoffice logo" icon on system tray.
But there are too many icons on my tray, can I preload Libreoffce without
tray icon?
Thank you.

Regards,
Minhsien0330

#2

Probably - depending on your operating system.

In Windows, for example, right-click in the Taskbar and select Properties. On the Taskbar tab, under "Notification area", tick "Hide inactive icons" and click Customize... . Click the Quickstarter reference and select "Always hide" from the drop-down menu for Behavior. (But these directions do vary between Windows versions.)

Of course, having the icon there provides a quick means of opening new or existing documents through the context menu.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker

#3

Hi :slight_smile:
I think Brian is mainly talking about Xp there. Win8 doesn't seem to
have a system tray, but so far i've managed to mostly dodge Win8.
Win7 allows you to set parameters for each individual icon in the
system tray.

Why does it matter how much stuff is showing in the system tray? My
guess is that you have so much stuff starting up at start-up that
machine's performance is a LOT slower and some IT person has suggested
that reducing the amount of stuff in the system tray will improve
performance. However, just hiding the icons wont have any impact on
performance at all. If you want you could list all the icons that do
appear and we might be able to suggest ones that would be good to
completely get rid of.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#4

I am sorry that I did not tell you I am using Linux (Debian).
Thanks.

Regards,
Minhsien0330

#5

Hi :slight_smile:
On Gnu&Linux just switch the Quick Starter off. It doesn't do much in
Gnu&Linux apparently and might just make things awkward when you
upgrade or try to run multiple versions.

Gnu&Linux is completely different from Windows and designed to be much
more responsive and efficient with resources such as Ram, so you don't
really need to section off a protected space in Ram for LibreOffice or
anything and you don't need to have it quietly running in the
background to make it appear to start faster. So i don't think you
really get many benefit from having the Quickstarter enabled in
Gnu&Linux.

I take it you are using KDE rather than Gnome or Xfce or anything as
your Desktop Environment? I think Debian is one of those that gives a
lot of choices so it's not always clear what people have chosen. The
Debian machines i use have carefully avoided havign any DE at all so
it's all command-line based which is great for servers but not so good
for desktops. On desktops i'm more familiar with Unity (Ubuntu only)
or Gnome (runs on most different flavours of Gnu&Linux). I've not
really seen KDE in action. Gnome doesn't really seem to have a
system-tray as such.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#6

Since you have revealed in other message that you are using Linux:
grab script below, save it, add executable flag (chmod +x scrip.sh) and
make it run at start of your desktop environment of choice.

Script:
------START----------
#!/bin/bash

if ps -C soffice.bin >/dev/null 2>&1; then
        exit
fi

sleep 90
soffice --nodefault --nologo &
PID=$!
echo $PID > /tmp/lo-quickstarter
sleep 10
kill $PID
--------END----------

How it works:
It takes advantage of Linux smart memory management. When you run
application, Linux loads it into memory (RAM). It stays there then,
just in case you decide to run it later on. But it is marked as
"cache", so if you want to open another application, and running low on
memory, Linux will delete marked data from RAM to make up space for
this new application.
In high level steps: this script fires up LibreOffice in non-graphical
mode (so all libraries etc. are loaded into RAM), wait few seconds and
then kills process. LibreOffice will be in memory from now on. When you
start it again, you will perceive that process as much faster.

What it does, step by step:
1. Check whether libreoffice is running. If it is, just finish. We
don't want to break anything.
2. Wait 90 seconds. Starting graphical interface usually means starting
a bunch of services and many disk reads. Since LibreOffice is low
priority (we want our desktop responsive as fast as possible), we
somehow "queue" it on the end of boot process.
3. Run LibreOffice in "non-graphical mode" - hide splash screen and UI.
4. Save LibreOffice PID (Process ID - a number that uniquely identifies
each application running on system) for later use.
5. Wait 10 seconds for LibreOffice to finish starting. We don't want to
interrupt it on start, as something bad might happen (although
shouldn't).
6. Stop LibreOffice, identified by PID earlier. This way we make sure
that we don't stop another application by mistake.

One drawback that I have noticed - if you force stop LibreOffice with
documents opened, it will ask you what to do with these documents on
next start. And this "next start" sometimes happen to be that script
running. This might lead to unwanted windows popping up shortly after
machine boot.

I am using that script since some time and I am enjoying LibreOffice
perceived boot in 4-5 seconds on my dated machine.

#7

Hi :slight_smile:
I know probably everyone else knows this already but i just learned
that i can kill a process by using it's name without needing to find
it's PID! Since it's often Firefox that misbehaves after i push it
toooo far i find this useful

pkill firefox

Then when i click on Firefox icon to open it again it remembers most
of the tabs i had open and lets me untick a few if i want.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#8

Yeah, I know that.

But this is not an option here. pkill will, by default, search for
processes of every user. Imagine that there are two users on the
system, and one of them has LibreOffice already running. If you do
pkill soffice.bin, it might hit another user and interrupt his work
(unlikely, as you probably won't have sufficient permissions).

Or imagine that you have libreoffice running in background in headless
mode, used to convert documents in large batches. If you issue pkill,
you will interrupt it's work.

In both these cases you won't need quickstarter/preloader script, as LO
will already be in memory (so there is no benefit in preloading it).
But still, killing process by name is not an option here. We need to
stop one particular instance of LO that we have started only to put it
in memory.

#9

Dear Mirosław Zalewski:
Your solution is really a very good idea!!!
Thank you!!!

Best Regards,
Minhsien0330

#10

Dear Mirosław Zalewski:
I found an other convenient way to preload Libreoffice without tray icon,
just put the following command line in ~/.xinitrc:
soffice --nodefault --nologo &

Then, Libreoffice will be preloaded without tray icon in the background
after I get into X.

Thanks for your idea~

Best Regards,
Minhsien0330