Warning re: openoffice

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

Anyone got any tips for recovering unsaved OO docs?

I just lost 3 day’s work thanks to a combination of linux’s desire to crash itself randomly and OO’s lack of an autosave feature. I strongly recommend that anyone using OO be wiser than I and hit ctrl-s every 5 minutes or so :(. (thankfully we’ve got a backup of all data here every week so I didn’t lose everything).

This could turn out to be very ironic - I’d just finished downloading version 1.1.2, which could possibly have a working autosave, in which case I missed salvation by a matter of about ten minutes :frowning: (OO’s autosave hasn’t worked since 1.0 - unlike everyone else’s definition of “autosave” it overwrites the current file AND it requires human intervention on every save! Not so much “autosave” as “annoying popup window every few minutes”).

#2

You can remove the dialog, under general in the load/save settings. It works just fine for me in OO 1.1.1, running on both windows and linux. It’s pretty crappy that they don’t keep a work copy though.

edit: I just discovered that there is an option in the menu that is named “Always create backup copy”, don’t know what i doed but it sure sounds like what you’re requesting :slight_smile:

#3

Thanks. I’ve tried the backup thing before but it didn’t seem to do any good. 1.1.1 won’t run on my computer, so the latest I’ve used is 1.1.0 so far.

This is not my day - Mozilla now has decided that it hates OO and won’t allow me to download the latest version (the one that was almost ready to install when linux crashed). I say “allow” because when you go to save the download, clicking the “save” button has no effect! Mozilla just plain ignores it. Arggh! Why me? Sob.

#4

I have insufficient vocabulary to describe my feelings about the genius behind linux (and mozilla). The problem was that linux at some point previously had had a kernel panic and decided to silently suspend all attempts to write to the drive. In the infinite wisdom of linux developers, it didn’t remount the drive read-only - oh no, it still CLAIMS you can write to it, but it just disallows any actual attempts.

Mozilla doesn’t bother to say something like “cannot save because FS failure”, oh no - “that’s what they EXPECT us to do; do not help the user! the user is our enemy!”. It just doesn’t do anything :(.

#5

I’m afraid you just don’t meet the geek quotient, you should be enjoying this! I mean, don’t you find it fun?

Kev

#6

Blah, if you have a Mac lying around, I highly recommend using it for writing. Specifically, NeoOfficeJ is what I use. It fits into the Mac programs pretty well, does anti-aliased fonts, Print to PDF, spellchecking, and it NEVER, EVER, EVER looses a document.

I’ve actually had NeoOfficeJ crash on me several times. The first time it happened, the crash was immediately followed by lots of swearing and cursing. That is, until I reloaded the program. The first thing I saw was a popup asking me if I would like to recover my lost document. I clicked on “Yes” and was able to keep chugging along.

I don’t know what the NeoOfficeJ guys did to OpenOffice, but it’s probably the best word processor currently available for the Mac, and it most certainly beats out the Linux version.

#7

I always find it amusing that blah continually has serious problems with computers - problems that no other user in the history of computing has ever seen or will ever see.

Blah, are you sure the problem isn’t you? ;D

But back on the subject - do you have a core dump? As the OOo file formats are XML it may be possible to recover your document direct from the application’s memory image. Make sure you get all the fragments of XML you need - trying to put a document back together with one part missing might take some shoehorning.

#8

[quote]Blah, if you have a Mac lying around, I highly recommend using it for writing.
[/quote]
Thanks for the suggestion - although I don’t have a Mac, I’m another of those who’ve already decided that their next PC purchase will be tastefully aqua-blue-and-white ;).

Sounds beautiful; sounds like word processors should have worked for the last 10 years.

Although, intriguingly, now you described it, I’m 85% sure than openoffice 1.0 (note: the really old version) used to do this for me too (linux crashes a lot :(). It’s just that 1.1.0 doesn’t seem to…Hmm. Perhaps it’s a 1.1.0 bug?

re: dumpfiles, I don’t seem to have any (although, being linux, it’s kind of hard to know if you’re looking in the right places…). Often when linux crashes it thrashes the hard drive as though writing a dump file BUT I once left it like that for half an hour to check if that was what was happening, and … it was still thrashing the hard disk. So these days I just cut the power when linux bails :(.

PS Yes, I do have a magnet in my stomach.

PPS I hate computers more than all the luddites in the world put together.

#9

Go for a PowerBook or (if you don’t want to spend the money) iBook. My writing projects would all be long overdue if I wasn’t able to get some writing in while taking my four year old to gym class or while riding the bus. There’s just too little time at home to actually write something on my PC.

Hmmm… well NeoOfficeJ is a fork of OpenOffice 1.0.3 (IIRC), so you may be right. All I know is that the damn thing is smart. On one crash, it actually stopped to automatically save the document before giving up the ghost.

Core files are usually somewhere in “/var”, but sometimes they can be in the root or “/boot” directories. You can always do a “find / | grep core” to find any core files hanging around.

Are you using ext2fs, ext3fs, JFS, XFS, or ReiserFS? My experience is that using ext2 and ext3 is a great way to watch your system go KABOOM. From my (admittedly limited) testing, ReiserFS seems to be the most stable and mature file system.

Of course, you could do like I do. Say “nuts to this Linux stuff!” and load up FreeBSD! :wink:

Interesting profession you’ve chosen…

#10

The plot thickens…

Thanks for the pointers. That’s quite a problem with linux these days - you either know your distro inside out or you end up having to grep for everything :(.

I only moved to ext3 once I’d seen lots of positive commentary on it. Apart from some screwed up UI stuff (like on boot where it pauses to ask if I want to rescue the partition - well, duh, what’s the point in having a jfs if it’s not going to do this automatically? It shouldn’t be possible to have any negative consequences, so the warning ought not to be there…) it seems to work fine, always recovering from crashes.

But if it turns out that it was the cause/catalyst of said crashes…oh what irony that would be!

It is the intimate familiarity granted me by my career that gives me so much cause for hatred.

Actually, to be honest, I don’t hate computers per se - I hate the lazy programmers and the moronic programmers (those ones that shouldn’t program BECAUSE THEY’RE TOO DAMN STUPID AND A DANGER TO ALL AROUND THEM - the ones who come up with acts of genius like windows’s programmatically-forced-reboot) who cause so much pain and suffering for the rest of mankind. Ahem.

I’m also not exactly impressed by some of the policy/decision makers either - the ones who decide that it’s OK to screw the customer because by the time the customer realises they’ll already have the cheque and it’s too much hassle / too late for the customer to get their money back. Even more frustrating are those purchasers who are even more selfish - c.f. the multi-million-dollar public contracts where the govt/tazpayer usually gets screwed: in the UK they get screwed by petty incompetent bungling empire-building civil-servants fighting for personal power, in the US they get screwed by legions of institutionally corrupt greedy equivalents who’d do anything if a rich man promises them membership of the local country-club.

#11

WOOOO HOOO, another freebsd fan. Isn’t great tho? Honestly? installing an app is as easy as clapping (can you clap? huh? huh? ). It does it all through ports ( only gentoo manages to come close ), downloads, compiles, installs, creates an entry to the packages list so that you can uninstall cleanly! What an OS!

DP

PS, anymore freebsd fans?

#12

If you do one day decide to get an apple laptop, you’ll need at least the 14" ibook or 15" powerbook - I opted for maximising the 17" and no longer find myself using my 22" flat CRT (which is kind of a shame, seeing as though I spent £800 on it when i bought it a few years back for my PC).

Last September, I bought a new revision maxed out 12" ibook - it was perfect, but I always felt like i needed some extra screen estate - I sold it on ebay earlier this year (for three quarters of it’s original value) and now take my powerbook around with me everywhere.

I don’t think i could go back to using anything else. :slight_smile:

#13

After reading you guys espouse the powerbook all these months I will most likly switch to Apple for my next comp as well. They’re just so damn expensive and I’m such a tight wad…

#14

[quote]After reading you guys espouse the powerbook all these months I will most likly switch to Apple for my next comp as well. They’re just so damn expensive and I’m such a tight wad…
[/quote]
Expensive?! Never! A 12" iBook starts at about $999. I upgraded to a full 640MB and 40Gig drive for a total cost of about $1400. While Ribot says that he prefers a larger laptop, I kind of like how small mine is. It makes it ultra-portable with a longer battery life. All a larger one does is make the screen slightly bigger at the expense of weight, size, and battery power. (Trust me, a 14" is much harder to squeeze on your lap on the bus ride home.)

#15

[quote]I always find it amusing that blah continually has serious problems with computers - problems that no other user in the history of computing has ever seen or will ever see.

Blah, are you sure the problem isn’t you? ;D
[/quote]
He’s not the only one :). And I find that his problems aren’t usually with “computers” but more often with Linux and the hodgepodge of half-done software it comes with… an endless source of frustration for people that expect stuff to “work”.