Long term followers of this blog will know that I use multiple computers and multiple operating systems when I work. Of late, I have mostly been using my new MacBook Air, singularly the most lovely piece of hardware I have ever owned, and Scrivener 2 which remains the most polished iteration of that great piece of novel writing software. Over the past few months, I've mostly used my Windows PCs for gaming and I have been neglecting my Linux installations completely. All of this changed this week when I finally got round to installing the latest release of Ubuntu, 12.04 Precise Pangolin, on my trusty Acer Travelmate where it shares a hard drive with the much maligned (but actually rather excellent for my purposes) Windows Vista Business. … [Read more...]
Writing on an Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook
I often carry my eeePC 1001P around with me when I am travelling or going out to cafes to write (Yes, I really do this! I know it's not cool but I stopped worrying about looking cool a very long time ago.) Worried about Windows security, I replaced the XP installation with Ubuntu Linux 10.10. This has been something of a revelation. Ubuntu is a very light operating system and it boots and runs very quickly indeed even on older Intel Atom processors. It's free and it comes with pretty much all the software you could possibly need to get some work done, including its own capable office suite (OpenOffice in the case of Ubuntu 10.10) and hey, you can even install Scrivener on it. (The Scrivener forum has links to downloads for Linux.) There … [Read more...]
The Tech Roundup
It’s a big week in tech for me. Asus and Acer have just announced their new ultrabooks, Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) is due any day now and, perhaps, most importantly Literature & Latte have (sort of) announced a release date for Scrivener for Windows. First up, the ultrabooks. I have long lusted after some version of the MacBook Air. It seems to be just about the perfect size for a travelling laptop to me. Somehow I can never quite make myself pull the trigger though. £1000 is a lot of money and to tell the truth I have been less than impressed with what I have seen of Lion. Heretical as it sounds to many people I actually prefer both Windows 7 and Ubuntu. I have been living in hope that Intel’s Ultrabook initiative would … [Read more...]
Well Done Amazon, Kindle on Linux Finally
A lot of people have been praising Amazon's new Cloud Reader, an extension for Chrome and Safari which allows you to do pretty much everything you do on a Kindle or Amazon's iPad app but using only your browser. They have (quite correctly IMHO) assumed that this was an attempt to evade paying the 30% fee Apple demands for in-App purchases on the iPad and iPhone by letting users read their Kindle books in their browsers and make purchases from there too. I don't own an iPad so I can't personally attest to how well it works on Apple's magical device. What I can say is that this has one very useful side effect for those of us who use Linux. The Cloud Reader extension works just as well on Chromium as it does on Chrome or so my brief tests this … [Read more...]
WINE
For those of you not familiar with it, WINE is a compatibility layer that sits between the software and the operating system and lets you run Windows programs in Linux without actually having a copy of Windows. The results have been very impressive. So far I have the Windows versions of Evernote 4.4 and Microsoft Word 2007 running. I used the Playonlinux front-end for WINE to instal Word without a hitch. (There is no option for Evernote on this software so I did a manual install.) There have been one or two graphical blemishes occasionally but both programs run well enough to work with. Even more impressively they integrate with Gnome Do so I can launch Word by calling up Gnome Do and typing in the first couple of letters of the name. I … [Read more...]
Scrivener on Linux
I just downloaded the .deb package from the Scrivener forums and installed them on a Linux virtual machine running Ubuntu 10.10. It worked flawlessly. I am looking forward to testing this next week. Below is a screenshot of The Angel of Fire imported from OpenOffice Writer. In case you are wondering why the word Scene appears so often in those Binder headings it's because I put it there to mark scenes in my OpenOffice file before I imported it into Scrivener for Linux. I then performed a search for the word and used the Shift+Control+K hotkey combination to split the file into individual scenes in Scrivener. Yes, I spend my time doing this stuff and it really amuses me. I am a sad, sad man. … [Read more...]
A Week On OpenOffice
So here it is, Friday. I have been working away for a week in OpenOffice Writer and I have had some time to assess the impact. I have written and revised my work quite happily and so far I am not missing Scrivener too much. This surprises me. It really does. I have written my last 5 books in Scrivener and have really enjoyed doing so. My only real conclusion is that modern word-processors are catching up with the Scrivener features I like in exactly the same was other operating systems are catching up with and even surpassing OSX. Yeah-- I know that's a huge claim to make in a throwaway line-- I'll get back to it at a future date. There are some things I miss, the Target word count and the Session word count features but that is about … [Read more...]
Working in Ubuntu
I went out to the cafe today carrying my Acer TravelMate 8371 running Ubuntu 10.10. I opened my present manuscript from Dropbox and I began work immediately and I did not stop writing until I had done 1500 words. I was very pleased with myself and very happy with the Ubuntu writing environment. Of course, when I came home, I had a setback. I opened up Dropbox in Windows 7 on my desktop replacement and looked at what I had written. I decided that I did not like the way Open Office Writer handled chapters and scenes. It does not allow you to fold the lower headings into the higher headings in Navigator. Libre Office does so I decided to uninstall OpenOffice and installed Libre Office. Unfortunately, uninstalling OpenOffice also corrupted my … [Read more...]
