Jared's Web

Haven’t blogged for ages. I’ve just handed in my PhD thesis for examination, and now that I’m on holidays, I’ve decided to go Linux. Sorry ‘Bill’. I won’t be going back.

Partitioned my hard drive, and installed Ubuntu (dual booting with Vista), Open Office, Thunderbird (email) and Zotero (to replace Endnote). It’s a bit of a learning curve, and Linux still isn’t for the faint hearted, but with a little bit of computer knowledge, it’s brilliant. It’s free. There are free, good quality apps for everything (DTP, photo editing, etc). It’s quick. It isn’t as demanding on system resources (my 3 gig of ram that I needed for Vista eats up Ubuntu). It seems to be more stable than Windows, and when a program crashes (especially when trying to run Windows programs in Linux), it recovers really well. It reads my external hdd and usb key no probs. Getting my pocket pc syned is the only thing I haven’t managed to do yet.

With the ‘Wine’ program, I can still run MS Office 2007 (not that I want to, although I reckon that Open Office is about 5 years behind where MS Office is at). I can also run Acrobat standard and Endnote (but it doesn’t integrate with MS Office or Open Office).

I haven’t tried running Logos/Libronix yet, but I have got BibleWorks 8 up and running. With Wine, I installed Internet Explorer 7 (in a Win XP bottle), and put all dll settings as at http://www.wine-reviews.net/wine-reviews/applications/ie-7-on-linux-with-wine.html. Then I installed BibleWorks, and almost all of it works.

The toolbar didn’t work, but I changed “comctl32″=”builtin” to “comctl32″=”native”, and that fixed it. Without the above dll changes, not all resources/lexicons opened, but with the changes, they all opened and could be read. Some resources will not let me resize the window, and pressing the x button to close them causes the program to crash. The only workaround I have is to not resize the window and don’t close it (leave it open, and it will close when BibleWorks is closed). Hope this helps someone.