Ubuntu 12.04 First Impressions
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, 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 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 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 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 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 Read more…
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