OpenOffice 3 on Ubuntu eee edition

OpenOffice 3 is rumored to be officially released on Monday Oct. 13 (Today, technically). It was reported that the distribution was already being sent out to the mirror locations, though no official link to them was made readily available. But by simply copy-pasting-editing the link from openoffice.org I was able to download the .deb distribution to my Asus eee PC 900 running Ubuntu-eee 8.04.1:

http://openoffice.bouncer.osuosl.org/?product=OpenOffice.org&os=linuxinteldeb&lang=en-US&version=3.0.0

Once downloaded and unpacked, I ran the update script:

./update /usr/lib/openoffice/

This installed OpenOffice 3.0 to /opt/openoffice.org3/ . Now I needed to do some digging and figure out a nice way for the slick Netbook-Remix interface to launch OOO 3 instead of 2.4. So I edited /usr/bin/ooffice to look like this:

#!/bin/sh
# /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice "$@"
/opt/openoffice.org3/program/soffice "$@"

This may not be the best practices way of accomplishing this, but it worked for me! Enjoy!

Adventures in retail

Tonight after pulling the cracked radiator from my truck, I needed to run to Walmart and then to Domino's to pick up a quick dinner for the family (mine plus nephew and in-laws).

Walmart
At Walmart, I intended to pick up some magnetic spice racks for the side of the fridge, some Capri Suns for the kids, and an SD card for my eeePC. I struck out with the magnetic spice racks, but found a decent deal on a 2GB SD card in the photo department ($12). Sweet, I thought, and reached down to pull one off the rack. LOCKED! Rats. So, I tracked down La Photo Gal and asked for her to unlock the slider deal so I could take my $12 item and be on my way to track down the Capri Suns. Nope, she said, I have to pay for that item at the photo counter. I'm not allowed to walk through the store with this $12 item without paying for it. Seriously? She's just doing her job, I'm not going to argue with her, so I pay for it, get my little bag, and head to the juice aisle, shaking my head all the way there. Somewhere some brilliant manager made that rule, and probably received a bonus for loss prevention initiatives. Woot.

Domino's
After reaching my car in the Walmart parking lot, I rang Domino's to place our order for 3 medium pizzas ($5 per) and an order of garlic cheese bread. After ordering, I was informed that my total was $32 and some change. Huh?!?!?

"Do you not have the $5 pizza deal anymore?"
"Yes, we do, but it's the special and you have to ask for it."
"Really? That's odd."
"Not really, I mean it's the special, so you have to ask for the special. Make sense?"
"Nope. If something's on sale at Walmart, do I have to tell the cashier?"
"No. They have those barcode things."

I'm pretty sure she could hear me rolling my eyes.

"Ok. What's my new total? I'd like the special."
"$20.50."
"Thanks."

*click*
*sigh*
*weep for America*

eeePC and Ubuntu

Shortly after getting my eeePC 900 I decided to ditch the installed Xandros and installed Ubuntu 8.04 eee edition. It took some tweaking to get a few things working properly, but eventually made it's way to stable and fine.

Then the Ubuntu eee team (which I think is mostly one guy doing the work and thousands asking for it) released 8.04.1 which included a sweet "Netbook Remix" interface. I installed that on the 4GB SSD drive, and setup the 16GB SSD drive as the /home mount. Now, though, I was having speed issues. When running, everything seemed to be "delayed": typing, clicking, etc. After suffering through it for a bit, and doing some research, I decided to start over. I formatted both drives, this time formatting the 16GB /home drive as ext2 instead of the journaling ext3 filesystem. Then I reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04.1 with no problems. Other than the known "no audio after hibernate" bug, I now have zero issues with Ubuntu on this eeePC.

I wish I had a free XP license. I'd like to try installing XP on it and see how that runs.

I wish I could find a good, inexpensive car charger for it now...