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WINE and CrossOver Office—Day 56© Copyright Darrell Anderson. I tried the Crossover Office (CxO) 4.1 demo. I was able to run VBA, but that is the only difference from my previous efforts. Most of the other problems that haunt me continue. I am unable to update Word to SR-2, tool tip text is so small as to be almost unusable, help files don’t open, and general screen layout and fonts need a lot of fiddling to provide a comparable look-and-feel from Windows. CxO is miserably slow on my system. I don’t know why. I also thought the dialog boxes and widget tools looked amateurish. Clunky. Although CxO automatically created a sym link for the “a:” floppy drive, the link was to /dev/fd0 and not /media/floppy. For some reason, sym linking to /dev/fd0 does not work on my box whereas the latter always works. This is important to me because I have an “upgrade” CD for Office 97 and I need to insert the old Office 6 floppy disk to install Office 97. Yes, I still have the original floppies from Office 6! I am now torn with some tough decisions. I do not want to abandon my migration. I’d rather run Word from within WINE rather than stopping to focus on converting to OpenOffice. This frustrates me. Almost everywhere I go on the web I read about people successfully running Word under WINE. I cannot find anything of people being unable to run Word just as they do exactly in Windows. Something is not right, either with WINE or with my interpretation of how this environment works. I am aware that WINE is a moving target. Perhaps the December 2004 version I am using is hosed. Although painful on dial-up, I will download a newer version and try again. I also hope to merge my two attempts from both WINE and CxO to see if I can produce a working environment. I am exhausted. I have devoted all of my spare time the past week trying to solve this mystery. I am not new to computers and I have tried many avenues to get this to work. A huge problem is that WINE being a moving target the documentation is so out of date to be pathetic. Thus, everything I have learned is by trial and error. Discovery by trial and error is time consuming. I am seriously considering abandoning my journey. I will not apologize for my dependency on Word 97. Word meets my needs for a structured writing environment. If I was Granny who did not need such an environment, I would have moved to OpenOffice a long time ago. I am not, so I haven’t. Recall my words from my early journal entries. My NT4 system works, is functional, and is rock stable. Internet Explorer and Outlook have been missing on my system for years. I never worry about viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, or hijacking. I don’t need to migrate for technological reasons. I want to migrate only because of philosophical reasons. I easily could close the door to this journey and never miss a productive beat. My heart, however, would be torn because I want to embrace and be a member of the free/libre and open source community. Finis. |
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