Having repeatedly received the error that OpenOffice.org is not running on the standard installation of KnowledgeTree 3.7.0.2 Commercial Edition (the same holds true for the Community Edition), further investigation was necessary. The key area of investigation must focus on the dmsctl.sh file, particularly from line 47 onwards, but more of that further down below. This is on Ubuntu (9.10 Server).

First, do a few quick checks:

1. Is the process running? Anywhere?
   Check whether OpenOffice.org is actually running, using a simple netstat -pant| grep 8100 — as the default installation is running with a headless OpenOffice.org on port 8100. You should see something like:
   
tcp  0 0 127.0.0.1:8100 0.0.0.0:*  LISTEN  9655/soffice.bin

   For the fix in question, it wasn’t giving any results on this check (sudo the commands where required, but you knew that already), which means that it’s not running properly. Also,

   ps -aux | grep soffice
   
   gave no results, indicating non-functioning backend software.
   

2. Is Java correctly installed for openoffice.org (soffice)?
   Having used the proper installer, Java should have been appropriately installed, so the Java calls OpenOffice.org makes should execute without an issue.
   I had to execute the below following a few re-installations:

   sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre libxext6 libsm6 openoffice.org

3. Run the call to openoffice.org in plaintext that is actually run in the system at startup.
   When you do a sudo ./dmsctl.sh restart or sudo ./dmsctl.sh restart openoffice, you may get the following:
   
./dmsctl.sh : openoffice not running
./dmsctl.sh : openoffice started at port 8100

   If point 1, above, give you no luck, then the startup of openoffice is clearly not happening. Modify dmsctls.sh to echo the full path around line 50:
   
SOFFICE_STATUS=""
echo $SOFFICE

   That will give you the call being passed – typically using an SOFFICEBIN path pointing to the custom installation (SOFFICEBIN=/usr/share/ktdms-office/ktdms-office/openoffice/program/soffice)

Solution turned out to be twofold:

1. Where is soffice? So then, whereis soffice? It should give you a path pointing to soffice(.bin) – if not, sudo apt-get install openoffice.org and use a current fresh install – clearly ktdms-office is not being seen.
2. Update the dmsctl.sh and point the SOFFICEBIN in a new direction: SOFFICEBIN=/usr/bin/soffice (or the output of your soffice, above)

I didn’t get much help from the recommened documents on troubleshooting OpenOffice on Knowledgetree, so I hope that you have more luck with the above should you encounter the same issue and are at the brink of a full re-installation of the machine as a full –purge didn’t clean out the issues… 🙂 (been there, done that)