BW and Linux

[united_by_truth]

As usual Wezlo has given an excellent response. For me the switch to Linux started as a money issue. Could I go to Linux and keep my older hardware (Dell PIII 600 384MB RAM) and not have all the upgrade costs in hardware and licenses from Win98 to XP or Longhorn on two machines (home and church)? Then when I realized that Adobe was abandoning PageMaker 7.0 and it probably would not run under the next Windows version (PM 6.5 won't run under XP), it became a compatibility issue. Finally when Dell, after 15 hours of phone calls, told me that the reason my computer wouldn't run was the Windows operating system, I decided to take the plunge. BTW, it ran fine on Linux.

It was a bit bumpy at first, but now with Mepis, Win4Lin ($68), and an old Win 98 license I can run BibleWorks, PageMaker, Theological Journal Library (Logos Libronix Library system) better than they ever ran under native Windows. If one does crash (very rarely) it does not take down my OS and other stuff like a word processor or mail or browser.

No Win upgrade fees, no problem with PageMaker or forced upgrade to InDesign, no more software fees (I just feel better about donating), better operability, friendly support, more security, and it is just plain fun... GOOD QUESTION, why would anybody want to go through hoops to achieve this?

Now I can save for a BW upgrade.

[wezlo]

Thank you for the compliment!
I used to run BW via win4lin; but with cxoffice I don't feel like I'm switching OS's to run one program and the fonts look SOOOO much better...
Have you tried Scribus out lately? Great community, and a pretty nice DTP app...

[united_by_truth]

Wezlo, you are one of the main reasons I am using Linux. You gave me hope.

Crossover Office worked fine for BW, but I could not get PageMaker to run effectively under it. I don't remember if I even got to the point of trying Libronix or not. It is closely tied to IE Browser, so it might work under CO fine. (Just an aside, the license for CO bothered me a bit. If I read it correctly no one but me could use it even on my computer--not my wife or kids or youth pastor... Maybe I read it wrong.) I guess I don't have the feel of switching OS. It is just another window on the desktop and it works like it has for years, so I don't notice a significant difference.

As for Scribus, I want to learn it and will probably switch to it in the future for current documents. However, I have many, many documents and Greek diagrams dating from BW 2.0 and PM 4.0 days. Scribus (and nothing else I can find) will open or convert them. Hence the preoccupation with PM and a major reason I am now in Linux. I can retain access to my PM diagrams.

BTW, I also use OnlineBible and e-Sword for the reference works (I know they are old and unscholarly). How about BibleTime for Linux? Have you had any experience with it?

[wezlo]

Wezlo, you are one of the main reasons I am using Linux. You gave me hope.

Awww, warm-fuzzies...
I know your problem with the diagrams and nothing being able to open them. of course, you could export to pdf...or just print to a post-script file.
I actually use Scribus for my Hebrew syntax work, it's pretty nice. Just today I was thinking however, "Gee, Bibletime is unicode, and they've got the Lenningrad Codex in there.....and OOo supports unicode....hmmm..." I think I've done my last Hebrew work in Scribus, I'll let you know how it works out. I did a partial syntax outline of Psalm 42 in about 5 minutes, that's a ton of copy/paste/move in Scribus. We'll see... Now, Scribus for anything else DTP, however, is a no-brainer....
CXoffice can be installed entirely as a user app; which is how they prefer that it be set up. For a local machine, however, you can install as root adn allow access to to other users, as long as only one user is working with an app at a time. I don't have a problem with this, but then again I'm the only person using BW on this laptop...

[ericding]

hey all,

just another (revised) data point: after having to do a clean install of Gentoo Linux on my system last week, complete with latest 2.6 kernel and so forth, I found to my delight that BibleWorks 6.0 runs without hiccup under Crossover Office now! No "hoops" to jump through -- just installed BW under Crossover Office as normal, and it worked. I've no idea why I was seeing crashes before, and as a developer I'm still a little curious, but as a user i'm content not knowing as long as it "just works."

i've also installed the BW fonts under OpenOffice.org and copy/paste works just fine as well. Hoorah!

eric

[wezlo]

weird. Glad it works now though.... I saw you updated your medal at codeweavers too, sweet!

[gdrew]

I'm not sure if I am doing this right. this is a bit hard to follow.
Anyway I would like to get BW6 up and running on Linux Mandrake 10.
I am new to Linux. So far I have Wine on Mandrake 10, but I am not sure of the way forward re loading BW6 onto the system and using it. Can you give me some simple instructions to getting started?
ugbc@hotkey.net.au

Well, I've been a Mandrake user since 7.0 and I've had my ups and downs with them. I'm running 10.0 Community right now and I really like it. If I hadn't liked it, I would have switched to Knoppix or Fedora by now. You CAN install Knoppix on to the HD, there is an ever evolving script that helps you through the process. I've got a friend who's been using Knoppix for about 2 years now, he's in love with the thing. Knoppix also has a lot of community surrounding it (www.knoppix.new) which is a real plus. It's also "free as in speach and free as in beer" which is also good (but there are places to donate money to continue development, which is a good thing to do).

I wouldn't use knoppix right off the bat though. You're better off with Xandros or Mandrake. You can still download Mandrake for free, and their package manager (urpmi) is right up there with "apt" (which is a thing of beauty). If you want to get a boxed set, I'd purchase Xandros though; it's utilities are highly rated AND last time I checked their boxed set comes with crossOver Office, which can run BW! (at least 3.0 can, which is what I'm going to purchase this week).

On the other hand, Mandrake is pretty dang good, has a better community then Xandros, and mandrakeclub is actually a pretty valuable thing (I pay $120 a year for a silver membership, I've been happy). Mandrake also runs cxoffice 3.0 just fine, which is how I'm currently running BW (flawlessly, I might add; EVERYTHING works).

[wezlo]

I'm not sure if I am doing this right. this is a bit hard to follow.
Anyway I would like to get BW6 up and running on Linux Mandrake 10.
I am new to Linux. So far I have Wine on Mandrake 10, but I am not sure of the way forward re loading BW6 onto the system and using it. Can you give me some simple instructions to getting started?
ugbc@hotkey.net.au

Well, the easiest way to install BW in linux is to go to www.codeweavers.com and purchase cross-over office. It's worth it, trust me.

When you install CrossOver office there will be a control panel that gets installed along with it. You need to go to "install new programs" and install the following from the list....

1. Dcom95
2. Internet Explorer (though it grieves me to install this on an innocent linux partition, you'll need it for the install to work, delete the icon after it's installed).

Then, click "installed unsupported application" and select the BW installer, it should work fine, and even put an icon on the desktop.

[united_by_truth]

When BW goes unicode in BW 7.0 how will that affect us? I also use e-sword and had trouble with the most recent update properly displaying Greek and Hebrew. E-sword support said the problem was that Win 98 (which I run under win4lin) didn't support unicode. They sent me a fix, but what does our future hold? For those who run BW under CrossOver Office will it be a problem? I wonder if the next version of BW will run on Win 98.

[wezlo]

When BW goes unicode in BW 7.0 how will that affect us? I also use e-sword and had trouble with the most recent update properly displaying Greek and Hebrew. E-sword support said the problem was that Win 98 (which I run under win4lin) didn't support unicode. They sent me a fix, but what does our future hold? For those who run BW under CrossOver Office will it be a problem? I wonder if the next version of BW will run on Win 98.

It won't be a problem, both kde and gnome are fully unicode compliant. Actually, I'm rather looking forward to it because it'll make doing hebrew discourse analysis a lot easier.

If you want to see how unicode hebrew/windows works right now, go to www.crosswire.org and check out the sword project (depending on what version of linux you use you can get it through rpm or apt, "apt-get install bibletime" is a fun command).

What BW needs to do when it goes unicode is finally drop the hacked rtf format for the editor. I'd suggested in the past that they adopt OOo's file format, now that OOo 2.0 is coming out, the openDoc format is looking like a pretty good candidate for BW 7.0 (and they may submit it as an iso standard to boot.... let's ride this one...).