Notes re Open office & Linux/Win data

[Vaughn Treude]

On Tue, 2006-03-07 at 13:11, Mark Jarvis wrote:
> 1) I switch between Linux and Windows (XP).
> 
> 2) I use Open Office in both.
> 
> 3) I need my data available to both.
> 
> 4) I use flash drives extensively.
> 
> I've found out (the hard way) that while OO-Win has access to any and 
> all fonts installed in Windows, OO-Linux has its own set of fonts with 
> many of the common and popular fonts simply not available. The default 
> substitutions for common Windows mono-spaced (Courier New) and serif 
> (Times New Roman) fonts aren't too bad. The default substitution for the 
> sans serif font I used to use heavily (Arial), however, stunk. It really 
> messed up page and slide layout when I created something in OO-Win, then 
> brought it up in OO-Linux. Two other fonts, Bitstream Vera Sans and 
> Tahoma, however, are available in both and work quite nicely.
> 

I switch back and forth a lot, too.  I do whatever I can on Linux, but
most clients want me to develop on the dark side.  I normally use Open
Office, written to MS Word format or exported to PDF.  But if they need
a Word document that's pretty, I copy it to my wife's XP machine and
check the document out in "real" Office.  The transition ALWAYS messes
up the formatting in one way or another.  If I'm lucky the cleanup
effort is minor.  If it's a complex document I'm better off starting
from scratch in MS Office.

> I keep my data in a fat32/vfat partition that is accessible to all OS 
> installations. I've found that adding ",umask=0,users" to the options in 
> the applicable line in /etc/fstab makes it writable by any user (not 
> just root) and any user can mount or unmount it. This also works for the 
> flash drives, since they also are formatted fat32/vfat. I don't know why 
> the "umask=0" option isn't default. BTW, some distros insist on 
> re-writing /etc/fstab on boot, dumping any special fixes you--the 
> owner--may have added. Usually giving it "400" permissions stops that, 
> but not always.
> 

There's another file that drives the recreation of fstab on some
distros.  Don't have time to look it up now, but I'm sure some of the
others will now.

VLT

> Just a couple of tips that might help someone.
> 
> -mj-
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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