Daily Use Linux

[gbergeson]

I'm here for a pep talk. Lately I've been fighting the urge to give in to the "Man" and return to WinDoze. I seem to be fighting a losing battle to get all of my stuff to work and to interact with the rest of the world.

I running an Asus M6000N based laptop with a Mobility Radeon 9600 graphics card, an IPW2200 wireless radio set, and a Pentium M (1700MHz) with 1 Gb of RAM and a 60 Gb hard drive.

First issue: wireless networking. Running Fedora 5. Network manager is a joke. I'd like it to work but it doesn't log into my WPA network. So I do it manually. However, even with WPA up and connected to my AP prior to networking starting, it fails to connect. So I have to connect manually. A pain in the a$$. It works but not smoothly. If someone knows how to contact the developers of NetworkManger I'd like to work with them to fix my system and to help test things as they come out...

Second issue: interacting with the rest of the world. Open Office 2.0 doesn't write files that my coworkers and costudents can open. The translation to, gasp, WORD fails. The unfortunate facts are that Word owns word processing in the corporate world, in the scholastic world, and the United States Govenment. Seeing as these are the people I need to interact with I need a better solution to move files around.

Interacting with rest of the world continued... I would like to play video from CNN. I have downloaded and installed plugins that claim to resolve this with no luck.

Enough rant for now. I really, really, don't like WinDoze. Perhaps I don't like the fact that their programmers try to think for me rather than just provide tools for my use. I am enjoying open source for games and programming tools, etc. I really want to make Linux work for me as my daily use system. I've been at this for about a year now but I seem to be reaching an edge and am fighting to say true to the Penguin.

Does anybody have any ideas how to reduce my stress about Fedora so it just works....?

[Craig Pemberton]

OpenOffice Writer saves in .doc format.
File -> Save As -> File Type -> Select one of the three versions of Microsoft Word .doc formats
I have heard that an .odt extension to Word is in the works, and it may very well be out by now. I have also heard that Microsoft may support .odt in the future. If you need to ensure that the document will display exactly the same way, export to .pdf or do your final edit in Word (this is the only solution that works for me, due to the lack of a grammar check. Abiword has a grammar check but it is not yet at the level of Word's).

Some good news though (http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2...ndocument.html):

The OpenDocument Format is our best chance at implementing a successful open standard file format for documents in the office suite context. It is an ISO standard and is already the target of IT policy or legislation in Massachusetts, Minnesota, the Bristol City Council (England), and at the national and municipal government levels in Belgium, Denmark, France, Australia, South Korea, and Malaysia, among others. Furthermore, there are unannounced publicly and privately traded companies that are pursuing vendor neutrality and modularity in their IT systems and expressing interest in ODF for their computer systems as the first step to an ideal end-state based on open standards.

Websites that stream video are another issue, it's true. The firefox mplayer plugin is slow and stubborn and I do not care for it, but it does seem to work more often now. Sometimes I can resolve the issue by getting the url of the media file from the html source. This isn't always possible and certainly isn't graceful but it does work.

[container]

Hey, don't give up just yet.

Second issue first: Hm, Open Office really does produce Office-compatible files that work perfectly well in almost any case, except that power point isn't always too good with OO ... although I last tried that with an ancient version.

Third issue second: The videos at CNN.com play perfectly well right away, and I have never done anything really special. It uses the mplayer-plugin in Firefox, and when it's equipped with a few plugins (all available in one package), it plays all the videos I've ever come across. Look at this page, http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_cor...s.html#MPlayer - especially under "Multimedia codecs". That's the key method for video codecs! Then, look through the mplayer section carefully, and that's it.

First issue last: You get networking to run manually but not automatically? That's really a bummer, I agree that if it's possible to get it working, it should work automatically just as well. I'm sorry I can't help you with that - never used anything wireless - but that's often the case with laptops: they tend to be, as the stickers on them say: designed for use with Windows. Perhaps someone with experience might tell you how to make it automatic, and I can ask a friend with a similar laptop in a while.

Please let me know if this helps at all,
and do get back to fedora forums

[Iron_Mike]

On the wireless issue, I don't recall seeing any msgs posted by you asking for help/assistance but if you use the "Search" function and type in wpa/wpa2 you see some results. One is written by me for using wpa/wpa2 and NetworkManager and it works fine there are also several others.

[gbergeson]

Originally Posted by Iron_Mike

On the wireless issue, I don't recall seeing any msgs posted by you asking for help/assistance but if you use the "Search" function and type in wpa/wpa2 you see some results. One is written by me for using wpa/wpa2 and NetworkManager and it works fine there are also several others.

I hadn't posted a question before because I searched the forum and got everything to work. Then I did a YUM update about 60 days ago and things got broken. This is very frustrating to have a software update break working items. Especially since I don't know how to roll back a YUM update.

I have followed your help procedure with no luck before. Tonight I went through it again and again it failed. Then I noticed a comment at the end of your procedure about the wpa service. When I unchecked this service and rebooted everything worked.

I have all of the codecs for FireFox installed and CNN video fails to run. What a pain! The movie trailer test files work just fine. Oh well.

[paolosca]

To improve the quality of documents you have to share with windows users you can install the True Type fonts which are on default on windows (Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, etc). You will be able to see the files the way they see it and vice versa.

While this doesn't solve all the compatibility issues it sure improves the layout of documents.

I personally use PDF files as much as possible for the text documents, if the recipient needs to edit the text then HTML and RTF formats are also alternatives to DOC files.

Regards,

Paolo.