[SWLUG] Open Office problems & recovering files?

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 09:50:02AM -0000 or thereabouts, Davage, Marcus wrote:
[OO.o ate document]
> There was, however, a .tmp file in the Dogfenni (documents) directory, but
> OO couldn't open it. Does this mean anything?

I'm not very handy with OO, but I would try a command like one of
these to find out. All at the terminal, because I'm not very handy
with Nautilus or Konqi either.

I would use "file" on it (file name-goes-here) to see what's in
it. If it looks ascii-like, then less or whatever. If it looks
messy, use "strings" on it (strings name-goes-here) to dump anything
printable to the screen. If it's the document, strings file > rescuefile
and edit the second one.

It might even just be an empty file. I think some apps create lockfiles
which are pretty much empty, but their existence signifies something.

> 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?

Oh. I fell for this a while ago. Journalling doesn't mean version
control. Much to my disgust. (I was in a similar situation.) 

It means that the filesystem remains intact. It used to be that if
I tripped the power and the machine went down immediately, when it
came up it would get in a mess. A journalling filesystem looks after
this more carefully. I remember Stephen Tweedie demo'ing ext3 by
wandering around with his laptop, getting people to move half the
files on the system or another long job, and then telling them to
reboot the laptop. It would know how far it had got and where all
of those files were when it returned.

If you want to "undelete" files, there are a few approaches.

You used to be able to build "mc" (not gmc, note) with an undelete
facility in it. Annoyingly, this was often often by default on
distro versions of it. (Which suggests to me that it wasn't always
reliable enough that they wanted to support it!) If you had 
already done that and suddenly wanted to retrive a file that
you had deleted, mc could do that. 

I don't know whether this works on journalling filesystems? 

Some people keep all their home directories and /etc in CVS!
This is a cumbersome solution: you need a lot of space for the
CVS history. But they swear by it. I don't know quite how you
do it: whether you have to remember to do "cvs commit" every
five minutes or what.

Erm... Actually, that's all I can think of. And I don't think
the second solution necessarily helps when it's a program that
nukes a hitherto-unsaved file. 

> 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
> 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)
> 4. My copy of windows works fine thank you very much, even though I'd prefer
> to use Linux
> 5. I haven't found an alternative to Microsoft Publisher

What does Publisher do?

Whilst there are now lots of big apps around which do everything
(Mozilla: mail/news/irc(!)/webpage writing ; Evolution: mail/calendar/
address book; OO.o: slides/documents/eating files; etc) it's
a relatively recent phenomenon.

It is possible that you can achieve the end results of Publisher
(whatever it does) with a series of littler apps on Linux.

> On a more positive note, I'd love to use Linux more (I loved Unix in
> college); I'm advocating it as much as I can; and I think this group 
> is an excellent resource. Thanks for all your input!

:) 

Telsa
>