Abiword 2.9.4 included in Slacko 5.6 is unstable

Word processors, spreadsheets, presentations, translation, etc.
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Wilhelm
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Location: Costa Rica

Abiword 2.9.4 included in Slacko 5.6 is unstable

#1 Post by Wilhelm »

Please do not include unstable software in Puppies people will use to do actual work!

I just lost my work because of an Abiword 2.9.4 failure using the new Slacko 5.6 (the non PAE version). :x

After this highly annoying experience, I checked http://www.abisource.com/
As per this website, on February 4th 2014:

"Our latest development release is version 2.9.4. Development releases are aimed at developers, or people willing to test unstable software. They should not be used in a production environment."

My experience with Slacko Puppy has taught me that it is has always been one of the most reliable OS for doing my work, without having to worry about failures or unstable things :) ... Until now. :cry:

I am going to use 5.5, which has proven to work perfectly, just to make sure I do not discover that other programs are also unstable versions, when it is already too late.

Please consider including unstable software only in Quirky Puppies, or clearly indicate that the version is not intended to be used to do any real work.
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sav_err.png
It was also impossible to "save as" or "save as copy". And there weren't "too many open files" (there was only one).
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w_err.png
Writing error when saving Abiword file.
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slavvo67
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#2 Post by slavvo67 »

While this is an older post, for the record.... ABI Word is not stable regardless of the version. 2.8.6 is said to be the stable version but many have had issues with that, as well. Please look in the forum for other word processors that might better suit your needs.

Most believe Libre Office is the way to go but it is large, so you have to way the advantages / disadvantages. Meanwhile, Gnumeric is a very nice spreadsheet program and I haven't seen any real issues with that one.

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Colonel Panic
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#3 Post by Colonel Panic »

I think Softmaker Office is a good way to go instead of Libre Office. A lot of people like the free version, which has nearly all of the features of the paid for one, but Office 2008 is still very useable as long as you don't want to edit or write Office 2010 files.

Even the full, paid for version is very affordable if you can pick it up at a discount (it's occasionally offered at a reduced price).

It's a real shame though that Abiword is still so buggy; I don't know what's gone wrong there.
Gigabyte M68MT-52P motherboard, AMD Athlon II X4 630, 5.8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250 GB Hitachi hard drive running Ubuntu 16.04.6, MX-19.2, Peppermint 10, PCLinuxOS 20.02, LXLE 18.04.3, Pardus 19.2, exGENT 200119, Bionic Pup 8.0 and Xenial CE 7.5 XL.

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rufwoof
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#4 Post by rufwoof »

slavvo67 wrote:While this is an older post, for the record.... ABI Word is not stable regardless of the version. 2.8.6 is said to be the stable version but many have had issues with that, as well. Please look in the forum for other word processors that might better suit your needs.

Most believe Libre Office is the way to go but it is large, so you have to way the advantages / disadvantages. Meanwhile, Gnumeric is a very nice spreadsheet program and I haven't seen any real issues with that one.
I tried abiword 2.9.x for a brief period and experienced a loss/crash like others. Switched to 2.8.6 and generally OK but again periodically trashed at the worst possible time.

I've since installed a portable Libre and whilst 380MB - that's outside of savefile space. I also use portable firefox. Combined with online email, my Puppy is lean (65MB puppy sfs size, 85MB with nvidia loaded).

i.e. boot using a very lean puppy (LiveCD, no savefile so all of ram/swap is in effect the 'savefile' space, but that isn't saved at shutdown). Data, browser, email, word processor (and spreadsheet) all outside of puppy savefile space. Load PET's/SFS's for the other things as and when needed (geany etc.).

For online banking, boot from read only CD, load a fresh copy of latest browser, loading into and running from clean RAM.

So far I'm impressed with Libre's vastly greater resilience/industrial strength compared to abiword.

Softmaker seemed ok'ish, but the menu/titles were a eye-strain. It also crashed after a brief stress test so I ditched it relatively quickly.

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MochiMoppel
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#5 Post by MochiMoppel »

rufwoof wrote:I've since installed a portable Libre
Where did you get this from?

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Puppus Dogfellow
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#6 Post by Puppus Dogfellow »

MochiMoppel wrote:
rufwoof wrote:I've since installed a portable Libre
Where did you get this from?
there's this:

http://portableapps.com/apps/office/lib ... _portable/

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MochiMoppel
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#7 Post by MochiMoppel »

Maybe I should have added that I'm interested in a Linux version... :lol:

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rufwoof
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#8 Post by rufwoof »

Where did you get this from?
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 569#603569

Its a old 3.3 Beta version, but seems stable (and usable). French thread (of which I speak/know very little - but the link works :) )

I also downloaded a UK dictionary and opened that using the Libre Text Editor - which installed the dictionary.

Set the Libre options to uncheck Java and it doesn't complain at startup about Java being missing.

In my case I run using CD/ram boot Puppy (no savefile), so I installed to /mnt/sda4/libre_portable (hard disk) and copied the Libre config directory contents (under /root/.config) - after initially setting it up - to the hard disk directory. I also created a run libre script to start up libre and that deletes the /root/.config/libre directory and creates a symbolic link to the /mnt/sda4 based version of those config files (i.e. libre configuration persistence across reboots). I also changed the Libre Config PATHS choices to be more appropriate for my set up (directories on the HD rather than under /root (non persistence in my case as I don't save puppy sessions between reboots)).
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dt.png
TOOLS, OPTIONS, LIBREOFFICE, MEMORY, QuickStarter (so can open text editor and/or spreadsheet using the tray icon)
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Last edited by rufwoof on Mon 21 Apr 2014, 09:38, edited 4 times in total.

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Puppus Dogfellow
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#9 Post by Puppus Dogfellow »

MochiMoppel wrote:Maybe I should have added that I'm interested in a Linux version... :lol:
you'd have to install wine,
Download Details
SourceForge.net

Publisher: The Document Foundation & PortableApps.com (John T. Haller)
Date updated: 2014-04-17
System Requirements: Windows XP/Vista/7/8, Wine under Linux/UNIX/Mac
License: Free / Open Source (Launcher: GPL, LibreOffice LGPL)
Source Code: PortableApps.com Launcher, LibreOffice
MD5 Hash: 971ab7fe2612d4d3db59c4aae4794b65, All Languages: d6b5621dee9c3c60f4f0dd3bc9499195 (from http://portableapps.com/apps/office/lib ... _portable/)
which you can apparently do as a portable:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=91748

so, ...that's the portable linux version. it's portable, and it's Linux/"linux." :lol:

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mikeb
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#10 Post by mikeb »

Abiword.... yes a long term unstable application that been with puppy for years... never saw the point myself and always the first thing i remove. Its ok if you only want to handle documents of 1 to 2 pages.

Softmaker office... surprised to hear of instability... we use it pretty regularly now and never had a problem and even barry's weird gtkdialog approach to running it should not affect that. Shame as its size for the word processor only is about the same as abiword.
Mind you we use older linux so perhaps its one of those precise mysteries.

My libre office sfs 3.4.4 sfs is around 100MB ... but its just its clunkiness and slow launching that puts the family off compared to softmaker...I'm sure a quad core gives better performance. As for compatibility it and softmaker give similar results.

Mike

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rufwoof
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#11 Post by rufwoof »

My mistake. I scanned the directory size (right click, properties) and just noted the size, forgetting that I'd made a backup copy of the main compressed file and also 2 copies of the UK dictionary.

I'm finding that its pretty quick, especially if you leave the quicklaunch tray thing active (that does however disappear each time a jwm -restart occurs) i.e. start it with LibreOffice33portable -quickstart &

First time to load text editor 3 seconds, Subsequent loads near instant (single core PC).

Quicklaunch seems to use around 28MB of RAM

slavvo67
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#12 Post by slavvo67 »

My one argument in keeping ABI Word around it that it may actually handle some document conversion better than Libre. Meaning when converting from one file format to another, ABI seems to keep the original more true to its form (at least in some instances).

I'm still testing that theory....

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rufwoof
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#13 Post by rufwoof »

mikeb wrote:Softmaker office... surprised to hear of instability... we use it pretty regularly now and never had a problem and even barry's weird gtkdialog approach to running it should not affect that. Shame as its size for the word processor only is about the same as abiword.
Looks like it might have been due to a circular reference somewhere within the 20+ worksheet heavy loaded spreadsheet I used for evaluation. I suspect that's crept in from being migrated between xls and ods and ... whatever several times now.

More generally, Softmaker's running well. The only annoyance is the menu text size. For some of it I have to squint closely at the screen - and I don't like having to lean forwards out of my comfortable laid back more usual posture :)

So you know if Barry's gtk fix (?) improved upon that?
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mikeb
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#14 Post by mikeb »

Barries 'fix' is just a complicated and dependency heavy (gtkdialog 4) way to take the user to sign up at the softmaker website...A little pointless really so nothing to do with the program itself as far as i can tell.

From google
If you choose "Linux (system)" in Tools/Options/Appearance, SoftMaker Office inherits the colors and menu fonts from KDE or Gnome.
Well had a play with this and not much success. Other options that come to mind would be the system dpi settings or font configs in /etc/fonts... they do look like a crappy small windows type or bitmap.

mike

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rufwoof
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#15 Post by rufwoof »

I've tried adjusting dpi and a load of other things. Even messed around with config (.ini) file values in /root/.softmaker but no luck.

I believe I saw in another thread that under openbox it did pick up the theme, so maybe its because jwm uses a 'non-conventional' approach.

Shame. Otherwise seems good. I do have a magnifier icon as the third icon in my tray by default, but I really don't want to be having to use that to see what the text editor options are.
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mikeb
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#16 Post by mikeb »

Hmm well i tried qtconfig for both 3 and 4 but perhaps its looking elsewhere since it mentions chrome.... I do remember kde had some mysterious setting that could pass over gui settings to gtk...possibly related to that magic....libreoffice also plays the 'use system theme settings game' too but like all things linux its a free for all and standards don't apply.

If someone was bored they could fire up a kde based distro...and play with settings and then try and find what file gets altered then use a copy of that... plan b...ask softmaker.

mike

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rufwoof
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#17 Post by rufwoof »

Tried mounting rather than union'ing the softmaker sfs

mkdir /mnt/softmaker
mount softmaker.sfs /mnt/softmaker -t squashfs -o loop


in

/mnt/softmaker/usr/share/freeoffice

ran

./textmaker

and it starts up the text editor ok, but throws out a

sh: getconf: command not found

error. Puppy doesn't have a getconf in bin nor busybox (that I know of), which could be the problem.

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mikeb
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#18 Post by mikeb »

Hmm don't have getconf on here either...so you thinking its running blind so won't pick up any desktop managers config? After all gnome and KDE are different beasties.

A sneaky way might be to find out which font it is using then alias a larger one....looks like its using a fallback X bitmap but thats just a guess.

mike

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rufwoof
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#19 Post by rufwoof »

No luck. I installed getconf and still the same.

There are loads of fonts already in their sfs. Which one's to swap !!! (I'm not going to spend any time trying to figure that one out).

I also tried a 2002 (Lucid) version - ran ok under slacko, but still the same again (spell check disabled in that version - I guess as encouragement to register. Did have an additional OS2 choice of theme, but that wasn't any better than any of the others).

For me, looks like using Softmakers spreadsheet and Libre Word processor are a nice combination. I find that Libre tends to stutter when arrowing around a spreadsheet whilst softmaker doesn't, but the small menu fonts make Softmaker less comfortable than Libre for word processing.

slavvo67
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#20 Post by slavvo67 »

I don't see a problem with Gnumeric. It seems very stable and converts the excel spreadsheets fine, I think. I've used pretty advanced Excel spreadsheets in Gnumeric without issue.

By the way, I'm running Libre Office 4.2 (there's a thread with different pets around here somewhere) on Fluxpup (PAE on one pc, non-PAE on the older) with old Dell hardware and I am experiencing little to no lag. Very, very happy with this combo. I kept ABI and Gnumeric on the same distro and 2 browsers (Opera and Seamonkey) with no issues. I also have Chromium (non-root) on the PAE version). I just can't decide on a browser... :roll:

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