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Some Multi-Boot Ideas — Day 53© Copyright Darrell Anderson. I’ve had some success getting Word to function under WINE. I have several problems to resolve, the biggest of which is getting VBA to work. Without VBA Word is little more than a glorified text editor to me and close to 90% of my Word envrionment depends upon a half dozen templates and associated built-in VBA macros I’ve fine-tuned through the years. Nonetheless, running Word in Slackware is eery! One trick I am using to adapt more easily to both environments is to share common command line syntax. In NT I added the doskey commands of cp, ls, alias, and cat. In my Slackware /etc/profile script I added aliases of cls (clear screen), copy (cp), dir (ls), md (mkdir). I also have long used a doskey alias of x as a shortcut for exit. I added that same alias to my Slackware profile script. Now, regardless of where my brain my be, I likely will type the correct command. Another trick I added to Word a long time ago was to map the keyboard shortcuts of Ctrl-Q for exiting the program and Ctrl-W for closing files. Because Firefox uses the same keyboard shortcuts in Windows, I seldom now have to remember which environment I am in. By the way, I am typing this journal entry in Word inside Slackware, and the file is saved to my newly converted FAT32 data partition. To help my migration I finally converted several NT4 partitions to FAT32. Although this might seem routine and a no-brainer to many people, I was uncomfortable doing this because the NT file system is more stable, reliable, and robust than FAT32. FAT32 also provides no journaling. Nonetheless, I made the move. Although for a while I will remain apprehensive about using FAT32, converting helped me synchronize my dual-boot installation of Firefox. Although sharing profiles is not possible for several reasons, I nonetheless am sharing several files. I share the same bookmarks file. From the early days of using Firefox, a.k.a. Phoenix 0.5, Firefox was prone to corrupting bookmark files during a crash. An easy solution was to store bookmarks outside the profile directory. I have been doing this for about two years. All I need do to share the bookmarks file is enter the correct path location in each user.js file. I maintain some simple HTML pages that I like to inspect from my Personal Toolbar. However, the two environments use different file path syntax, so I resolved the hurdle by entering two bookmark entries, one for each system. I also share the same cache. This is scary but cool! I was unsure if I would be able to do this. The trick is to also share the same history.dat file. Because my Windows profile is now located on a FAT32 partition, I created several sym links to share critical storage files. One of those files is history.dat. To prove to myself that the two separate Firefoxes were sharing the same cache, I opened Firefox and went to offline mode. Then I opened my history file (sym linked to Windows) and opened a file from the list. The page opened immediately! Other files I have sym linked are cookies.txt and hostperm1.dat. I also use the bookmarks backups extension and in each operating system I instruct the extension to store the backups in the same directory. I also have both profiles pointing to the same directory I use for downloads. Careful coordination makes all of this work, such as typing correct file paths, ensuring the defined cache size is the same in both user.js files, etc. That all of this works, however, surely brings a smile to my face and makes me shake my head in wonder. Yet, all is not well in Firefox land. The GTK version is noticeably sluggish compared to my Windows version. I haven’t determined why, but within a half hour of a surfing session I have to close and restart Firefox. Context menus open dramatically slow, pages open slower, and occasionally the mouse cursor changes into something weird that I haven’t been able to describe. The oddities are so frustrating that I am considering abandoning Firefox after two years of dedicated use. That Thunderbird is also a GTK app leaves me cold to the idea of using that program is a transitional migration tool. Finis. |
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