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Screenshot below. This effectively means that I have the following setup for my writing: a Compaq Presario 2100 w/ a 1.6GHz processor running Ubuntu Linux 8.04 — OpenOffice 3; an Apple iBook 800[MHz] (dual usb) running Mac OS X 10.4.11 — NeoOffice 2.4 (3 will be released before long, it’s just OpenOffice for native PPC Macs…); and of course, the bitch of them all, a Dell Vostro 1000 w/1.9GHz processor running Windows Vista Home Edition — OpenOffice 3.
The point is that I have three different computers running a seamlessly integratable office suite unlike any before seen. It actually handles Microsoft .DOC documents better than Microsoft Office itself. And installing it on Ubuntu was not as hard as I remember it used to be on other systems.
The only thing it doesn’t explain, because probably it figures it should be obvious, is how you would make an icon on your desktop or in your menus or somewhere to automatically run this or any other software. It being the tutorial I used to install OpenOffice 3, which can be foun here. The reason this is a problem is that the Linux kernel doesn’t handle software installation the way Mac and Windows does, wherein the operating systems automatically add the software’s directory to a list of installed applications somewhere for the end user to easily find. This used to be a big problem for me, and was one of the main reasons I could never fully kick my Windows habit. At least nowadays most systems have package managers, Ubuntu’s being the superior one, but nonetheless all you have to do is make a link to the command /opt/openoffice.org3/program/soffice, something you can do anywhere, from the applications menu to the desktop itself. Very simple after you've spent some time on the system.
So there you have it, Open Source proves its superiority once again–and the fact that you’re probably using Firefox should have already brought you to this conclusion anyway!
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The other problem I’ve been trying to solve on Ubuntu for some time now is how to stream the music from my masive 1TB harddrive (more soon in the upcoming massive catalog of techie gear…), so I don’t have to disconnect the harddrive, which my Windows box relies on heavily for certain things. For some reason, the native install of Ubuntu doesn’t include VLC Player, though it is included in the Synaptic Package Manager defaults. For the longest time I’ve had a pretty nice program on Windows called Winamp Remote, which allows one to listen to his entire music collection from anywhere in the world with either a computer or otheriwse mobile communications device, such as a cellular telephone. I’ve been aching to get this working on Linux, but had no direction on how to do so. In Mac, it just plays in the browser. But with Linux, it wants a program. I’ve used VLC in Windows so long that I forgot it was actually originally a Linux media player, and so when I ran into this problem I didn’t think of that as a solution, but someone finally suggested it, and it finally worked, as seen below.
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In other news, Codeweavers made a deal with society, and society complied, and as a result I am going to get the program WINE for free, which will allow me to run certain Windows programs on Linux, and further, if they’ll let me, I’ll hopefully also get the Mac program, so that later, when I get an Intel Mac, I’ll be able to use Windows programs on it as well. The demand for their software in its new free versions (one day only) was so great that it crashed their servers, much like what happened to OpenOffice.org a couple weeks ago. And people say that Open Source is doomed as the economy shits itself–bullshit, I think we’re going to see a creative surge in this and other eras, and technology is going to answer the call to ease societal ills as much as possible. Just watch. And further, it seems I remember once upon a time WINE was a free program, so as with many of the lesser-used OSS, a company fucked shit up and started trying to sell it. Not that it’s not noble, it’s just that, if we wanted to pay for something like software, we’d use Windows, right…?
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Slashdot is awesome. I use this Linux machine largely to read the news there.
