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 Microsoft Office installation. I did not know that you were supposed to use the uninstall that comes with the program so I uninstalled it from the control panel. If you ever need to uninstall OpenOffice do yourself a favour and don’t do this if you also have Microsoft Office installed. I wasted half an hour repairing my Microsoft Office installation.

Once this was done, I got back to work and happily finished my daily ration.  I am starting to like this setup.