[SWLUG] Open Office problems & recovering files?

[Dave Cridland [Home]]

On Wed, 2003-03-05 at 09:50, Davage, Marcus wrote:
> In my quest to get used to OpenOffice 1.0 on my Mandrake 9.0 partition
> rather than Office 2000 on my W2K partition, I was temporarily set
> back last night when, after typing in a whole page worth of document,
> OO just "vanished" when it tried to save my document. I clicked on
> "File/Save As" and put in the file name, and it vanished! All my
> typing had gone.  I solved the problem by rebooting W2K and typing it
> in all over again using Word. A rather unsatisfactory conclusion to
> the exercise, but 100% reliable. Unlike OO.

I'm not particularly keen on OO, either, for what it's worth. It
generally fails to start on my RH system at all. I have been known to
use AbiWord, but in general I write the few documents I write in HTML,
or, in one case, XML.

> There was, however, a .tmp file in the Dogfenni (documents) directory,
> but OO couldn't open it. Does this mean anything?

Possibly, or possibly not. Try "file" on it, and see what it says. If it
looks like it's text, try opening it in "less", and see if your text is
there.

> I am running an ext3 filesystem. This is allegedly journalled.
> Therefore, is there a way to recover a deleted file, or a temporary
> file? If not, what's the point of journalling?

Journalling is about filesystem consistency, not about file consistency
or file recovery.

In other words, if you delete a file, and the entire system crashes,
then it'll either be deleted, or it won't, without the in-between states
that a non-journalling filesystem might leave you with (e2fsck often
says things like "Deleted inode blah has no dtime". Of course, it'll fix
that rather easily, but that's somewhat besides the point.)

This extends to more than just deletion, but I think you probably get
the point.

If you really do want a versioning filesystem, that will allow recovery
of deleted or even overwritten files, then a combination of subversion's
auto-commit branch, and the DAV filesystem driver I've spotted on
Tigris, might get you there, but I've no idea how stable it is.

> I'm frustrated Linux user, who is using it less and less because
> 1. There are no drivers or applications for my Panasonic DV camera

Looked at the linux1394 (firewire) pages? They might help. Alternatively
they might not.

> 2. There are no drivers or applications for my CanoScan USB scanner
> 3. Applications frequently crash (see above), losing data (although
> the OS is stable)

There's only one application I use regaularly that crashes, and that's
Evolution. I don't care too much, since I keep my email on IMAP, so even
if Evolution dies completely, I've got plenty of alternatives.

But then, I probably use my computers for different things to you.

> 4. My copy of windows works fine thank you very much, even though I'd
> prefer to use Linux

Rather begs the question "Why?"... If Windows works well for you, and
handles all the tasks you want, then go ahead and use it.

It's the primary reason I use Linux, in fact - it does everything I want
to do. Of course, it also has the advantage that I can meddle with the
innards of the programs that don't work quite they way I want, but
that's somewhat of a minor point - there's very few programs I've
directly fiddled with, compared to how many I use on a day-to-day basis.

But it's all a matter of horses for courses - you can't ever state that
one OS is "best", without qualifying it with "for me".

> 5. I haven't found an alternative to Microsoft Publisher

Well, there's TeX of course, and based on that (via LaTeX, although I've
never cared enough to find out the difference) there's lyx, which may or
may not work for you.

It's doubtful, though - Publisher is designed for the likes of mere
mortals who want to knock out a newsletter or similar. TeX and LaTeX and
lyx are all really designed for people who want to do professional level
typesetting.

Dave.