Chroot - ooh now I can run OpenOffice

I've been struggling with OpenOffice crashes since I've been running Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid). I've tried everything. I've added horrible red-herrings to one of the many seemingly relevant bug reports on Launchpad. And in the process, I've tried debugging (debug symbols seem to be inadequate) and then I saw a discussion about recreating a bug from a previous Ubuntu version in a chroot based basic installation. So I followed the instructions for creating a chroot with a basic Ubuntu installation, installed a few basic packages (nano for example), set up the en_US UTF-8 locale, following Andrew Beacock's blog (necessary to install Java). I also had to add some archives for apt to pick up OpenOffice. Now I have Lucid running chroot'd inside Lucid.

I don't know chroot well and heard some issues around mounting disks, and I'm using ext4 with ecryptfs encryption for my home which kinda gets in the way, so I went the roundabout route and mounted ssh using sshfs (yes I had to install both of these first).

Finally I installed openoffice.org-ubuntu and openoffice.org-human-style. And I finally ran ooffice and edited a document all day long with no crashes. I don't know if that's it, allowing me to avoid some strange library conflict, or whether tomorrow is another day and another crash. But currently I like the chroot method for testing a clean install without making a whole clean install, or making it difficult to get at my documents, which I find a VM image tends to. And it took me about half an hour total time to get it to work, without chewing up half my disk or half my memory. I like chroot for this. Hopefully it will keep me productive for a while.