[SWLUG] Open Office problems & recovering files?

[Stuart Herbert]

Hi Marcus,

> 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. 

Which version of OO are you running?  The current "stable" version is 1.0.2.
There are also development snapshots available, giving early access to
features that should be in OpenOffice 1.1 beta when it comes out.

I run OO under Windows XP, and have had no stability problems with 1.0.2.
Plenty of other problems - but it's only crashed on me once.  That's better
stability than Word XP.

> 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.

Many professional writers won't trust a large document to MS Word.  Word v6
and 95 in particular earned a reputation for corrupting documents.

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

Probably not.  The one time OO crashed on me, it attempted to auto-recover
the file I was editing at the time.  If this didn't happen to you, my guess
is that OO completely lost your work :(

> 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 there to prevent very long boot-up time after the machine
crashes or shuts down abnormally.  It can take far too long to fsck a ext2
filesystem.

> 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

Aren't there generic mini-DV drivers available?

> 3. Applications frequently crash (see above), losing 
> data (although the OS is stable) 

It's getting better all the time ;-)  If you think about the (unnecessary
;-) complexity of these applications, and that many of these developers
aren't working to enforced engineering standards, what they're achieving is
remarkable.

OpenSource doesn't mean better quality.  But it does mean that, from time to
time, you get the chance to use code by better quality programmers - the
sort of engineers who normally don't get to write that much code of their
own in traditional software sweat shops.

Best regards,
Stu
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