Greywind is Dead. Long Live Talon!

[pinheadh78]

For backing up files I long ago gave up on dedicated backup-products. Each product has its own proprietary format that can render data irrecoverable or in your case fails to restore properly.

I've gone back to old-school Robocopy for my own backups for my 100GB of photos, 80 GB movies, and 40 GB other files.

I use an old BATCH file with a robo-copy string that when executed will pull data from the target-path and push it to the destination path. With the right flags you can make it update only "new" files thus speeding it up as it wont re-copy data that hasn't changed. The best part is that because its standard windows file-system and your current file-structure you never have to worry about your backup software becoming obsolete or having problems restoring data.

Robocopy command instructions can be found here... http://ss64.com/nt/robocopy.html

For each directory tree just make a new-line in the batch file then run the whole thing as a scheduled task.

If your interested I can go dig-up one of the strings and post it here.

As for an MS Office alternative I would have to put my vote towards Open-Office as its the most mature and feature rich of the free solutions.

Peace out

[Solemn]

I have used both OpenOffice and LibreOffice on my OpenSUSE desktop.

I switched to LibreOffice some time ago and never looked back.

I cannot in good conscience recommend OpenOffice to anyone. Without using certain patches it was like playing Russian Roulette with five bullets in the revolver. It would take upwards of ten minutes for the program to even start, at which point every other time it started it would corrupt my files, crash the entire system, or turn the screen into a Hall Of Mirrors until I could kill the program through a terminal command. It was excruciating. I had heard that there were external patches produced by the OO user community which could be applied to make OO a usable product, but I found that in practice those patches fell far short of such promises; it became more like playing Russian Roulette with three bullets in the gun rather than five, but was still far from the panacea I had been told about. I took to using gedit for almost all of my text editing and taking the risk of starting OpenOffice only when the finished work needed some special feature or needed to be exported to some format OO supported and my other text editors did not. Spreadsheets were basically untouchable for me on my SUSE box; fortunately I also had a Windows operating system with Office installed on a laptop, where I wouldn't run those sorts of risks. Importing documents was always hazardous and I always made multiple copies beforehand due to OO's tendency to corrupt whatever it touched. It was, by far, the single worst piece of software I had ever used.

With LibreOffice, I have a few complaints, but they are comparative nitpicks. For instance, I don't think LibreOffice Impress is a finished product yet. I say that because embedding and triggering video files in a slide is not handled particularly well, and transferring presentations from a Linux install to a Windows version or vice versa will usually not work; only a small number of video codecs will be runnable, many fewer than the program will claim to support on either system, and attempting to go across operating systems like that even with video codecs each system is supposed to support has caused LibreOffice to terminate when I attempted it. But those terminations have been comparatively polite; LibreOffice closes without saving, rather than forcing you to perform a hard reboot of the entire machine the way OpenOffice did.

I suppose there's a chance that OpenOffice improved dramatically in the time since I left it. There might also be a chance OpenOffice works better on Windows or on other Linux distros than it did for me on OpenSUSE 11.2, though it's hard to imagine that being the case since I assume Linux users are the primary target of things like open source office suites.

But I don't think it's a chance worth taking.

[fredgiblet]

I suppose there's a chance that OpenOffice improved dramatically in the time since I left it. There might also be a chance OpenOffice works better on Windows or on other Linux distros than it did for me on OpenSUSE 11.2, though it's hard to imagine that being the case since I assume Linux users are the primary target of things like open source office suites.

I wouldn't be so sure. If you're looking to make yourself a big dog you don't target Linux. I think both OO and LO think of themselves as competition for Office, not just the Office alternatives for Linux, and that means targeting Windows first and foremost. If your product is remotely decent the Linux community will do the work of fixing it themselves, whereas Windows users will simply go back to Office.

I never had any of the issues you cite with OpenOffice, though admittedly I am a VERY light user of office apps. That being said if I didn't get a free (legit) copy of Office 2010 recently then I'd be running LO.

[Arioch]

I downloaded LibreOffice, and it's functional, if uninspiring. It looks in layout and functionality very similar to Word & Excel 2003, which I believe I still have (though I'll have to go dive for the disks in storage... I passed over them as it didn't occur to me I'd have any use for Greywind's install disks). I find the way LO Writer renders fonts to be a bit shabby.

To be honest, except for the crazy subscription pricing model, the only thing that really bothers me about Office 2013 is how it looks. I really like the Windows 7 Aero interface, and Office 2013 discards it in favor of the Windows 8 Metro blocky opaque crap. I realize that Amazon and others still sell Office 2010, but I'm not sanguine about dropping $140 on discontinued software just because I don't like how the title bar of new version looks.

Oh well, it's not something that I have to worry about right now. Photoshop and Lightwave (which are not the newest versions) appear to work fine. Though if I ever want to upgrade Photoshop, I'm going to run into similar problems... as Adobe is trying the same shit Microsoft is with subscription-only pricing models.

[Hālian]

Upgrade to a non-CC version like, say, CS6???

[Arioch]

Sure, that's always an option, though I get a bit nervous plunking down money for discontinued software. But that's tomorrow's problem... I'm not lacking any Photoshop features that I urgently need. The Warp tool is the only feature I know of that I don't have but would like to have.

As for today's problem, I was able to find a trial version of Office 2010 deep within the bowels of Microsoft's website, so I can check it out vs. Office 2012 and LibreOffice. Suprisingly, Word 2010 saves legacy .doc files much more compactly than Libre Office Writer: 267 KB vs. 413 KB for the same test document.

edit: I downloaded CS2 (which is available on the Adobe site) just for the heck of it.

[Karst45]

It was interesting to see how much data I have.

66 GB - My Art
11 GB - My Documents
12 GB - Website stuff
28 GB - Images
30 GB - Music
13 GB - Misc Downloads
02 GB - Code

what? no 69 GB of porn?


btw most compagny that use office have the "employe" fee with Microsoft to get the said "office" for about 10$ (well at least here in canada)

[Arioch]

Here are the belated photos of the new computer.





Greywind's dead hulk is, sadly, relegated to the role of computer stand.

[GeoModder]

Talon looks quite spiffy.

Is that Historian script on its side? Or a more rounded version of Loroi Trade script?

[Arioch]

Is that Historian script on its side? Or a more rounded version of Loroi Trade script?

That's something Alienware put on there. I presume from the repetition of characters that it says "ALIENWARE".

[Hālian]

Those Historians are crafty...

...OR ARE THEY?!

>_> <_<

[fredgiblet]

Greywind's dead hulk is, sadly, relegated to the role of computer stand.

I now want a picture of Talon riding on an annoyed Greywind's shoulders

[Hālian]

Greywind's dead hulk is, sadly, relegated to the role of computer stand.

I now want a picture of Talon riding on an annoyed Greywind's shoulders

Second

[Karst45]

I and chuck Norris approve of this!

[fredgiblet]

Bonus points if Talon is hard at work drawing on a tablet.

[saint of m]

Let us know when we can start quoting Frankenstine.

You know, the line: Its alive! It's Alive! Oh, so this is what it feels to be God!

[Arioch]

How about Talon sitting in Greywind's lap?

[CptWinters]

Second.

[fredgiblet]

How about Talon sitting in Greywind's lap?

That works too.

[Grayhome]

Please do not ask the glorious author to do anything that would detract from his production of his art.

... I thought we had all agreed on this.

I am also enjoying Sins of a Solar Empire atm, and imagining an Outsider mod for it. Good times.