Problems and solutions in Linux
The move to Linux continues.
I have reached the stage now where Linux is my main operating system. I now only log into Window for a couple of minutes a day, and the rest of the time I am in Mint.
To my disappointment, there are still a couple of applications that still have no real equivalent in Mint. One is Windows Live Writer, which is unrivaled when it comes to writing posts on blogs. I am currently using ScribeFire, which does the job, but lacks some basic essentials, such as the ability to save a draft post locally. The other package I tried (and will probably return to) is Blogilo. This has a lot more features but is not quite as convenient as ScribeFire. I suppose you can’t win ’em all?
The other application I have been having problems with is Open Office. I have a couple of spreadsheets created in Excel. These spreadsheets contain a few complex graphs. Open Office opens the files perfectly and displays the full content, but is apparently incapable of saving the spreadsheets without losing the graphs. I could recreate the graphs in Open Office, but they are complex, and frankly, it’s simpler just to boot into Windows.
Apart from all that, I have expanded my setup to include my master PC which sits in my office. It now has Mint running happily in a dedicated partition, and I use KRDC to control it. The latter is a lot less problematic than UltraVNC which I had been using in Windows.
One aspect of mounting a Linux system within a virtual file is the ability to backup that file. I haven’t tried this out yet, but technically, if I have to wipe my hard disk, it should just be a matter of reinstalling Mint in a virtual file (to set up the boot loader), and then just overwriting that file with the backup. In theory, that should restore the entire Linux setup, including all documents, settings, software and preferences.
Needless to say, I haven’t tested the theory out in anger yet.
It should be interesting, should the day come?
On the OO.org problem, if you still have your Office installation discs, you could try installing through Wine. Office is one of the programs that the Wine development group put most effort into.
I don’t blog as much as you, so couldn’t comment on that – when I do write, I write directly into WordPress.
Thanks for the tip, Kae. Indeed I have the disk (somewhere) so I’ll give it a try.
(grr your blog ate my post… Retypes.)
I used Ubuntu non stop for about a year, although I loved the operating system, the one thing that constantly made me wish I was on windows (shudder) was Open Office. 1/3 of the time it would crash, 1/3 of the time it would crash my laptop last 1/3 it was clunky and laggy as hell. It’s free and great open source software don’t get me wrong, just still very very buddy..
Have you considered using google docs? It’s spreed-sheets aren’t bad at all.
Welcome, Kat. Please don’t accuse my site of eating your words. It is a well fed site, having eaten a full Spaghetti Bolognaise earlier today.
I followed Kae’s advice earlier today and installed Office through Wine. It worked a treat and I now have full access to Excel (which is the application I needed). It works perfectly with one small glitch – all the titles and legends have disappeared! This is purely down to confusion with available fonts, so it is a trivial issue.
Never used Google Docs. I doubt they would be fully compatible, but I might have a look as a standby. Thanks for the suggestion.
haha <3 Bolognaise.
Yea google docs may not be the way to go for very complicated things, but handy for quick mockups.
Gluck in anyway 😀
To solve your problem with titles and legends disappearing, bring up your Home directory in the file manager (Dolphin) and under the View Menu, select “Show hidden files”. Then scroll scroll down and look for a folder called “.fonts”. If it doesn’t exist then create one and open it (there will be nothing in it of course).
Open up another file manager window and click on your Windows partition in the left hand sidebar (this will mount the partition). Once your Windows partition is mounted and the folders and files are shown in the file manager, navigate to the Windows/Fonts folder and open it. You should see all your installed Windows fonts.
Now you should have two file manager Windows open. One showing your open “.font” folder with nothing in it and one showing the contents of your Windows/Fonts folder on your Windows partition. I’m sure you can see where I’m leading here but just to say I gave complete instructions…
In your Windows/Fonts folder, select all the fonts (ctrl+a) then deselect all the non true types if you wish (this is what I do). This should leave you with all the MS True Type fonts selected including all the ones installed by MS Office in Windows. Now simply drag all the selected fonts from your “Windows/Fonts” folder over to your “.fonts” folder in your Home directory and tell it to copy when the dialog box pops up and you’re done.
Log out and log back in and all you should have all your Windows fonts available for Mint KDE and, I believe, for the Wine installed MS Office.
Please excuse the long winded instructions but I used to write tech manuals for the common man and I can’t get rid of the habit.