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My days of trying and writing reviews for every Linux distribution have slowed. I'm currently using Ubuntu 5.10 and I'm fairly happy with it. Spending most of my days as editor-in-chief of a popular news site, writing a system administrative book under contract and keeping up with a free lance writing career doesn't give me much time to play these days.
I kept waiting for the upgrades to two packages I use the most as a writer and they haven't made it into the repositories. So, I went looking. I discovered that neither Ubuntu or Debian have what I needed. So, I did what Linux guys do, I found people who did it themselves.
On Digg.com
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I had already installed FireFox 1.5 but it wouldn't upgrade. We have several computers here and I noticed how quickly SUSE 10 got their upgrade out. So, I knew someone had to know something I didn't.
I went to the Ubuntu Wiki and found an article by Ben Scholl. Ben had updated it yesterday. So, I landed on the site at the best time. His howto called FirefoxNewVersion really helped. It entails downloading the FireFox tar.gz from Mozilla.
The main thing I got out of the article was how to enable FireFox's own updating to work. Ben wrote: "This is the only way to get update notification working, but doing this has security implications in a multi-user environment." I didn't have that concern and I wanted to get 1.501 which supposedly has the memory leak fixed. I wound up reinstalling the new Firefox from Mozilla and by just following Ben's instructions, got it working fine.
Next, OOo 2.
The Ubuntu folks say: "The latest versions of K/Ubuntu came with very, very late betas of OpenOffice.org 2, but since then OOo came out of beta, but K/Ubuntu hasn't been updated".
That's fine. Scott Granneman wrote a nice Howto in his blog. I want to thank him personally for doing that.
Scott wrote:
Fortunately, in open source fashion, one Ubuntu user has compiled OOo2 & made it available for users to download. I'm using it, & things work just fine.
Click the link above or following his simple instructions:
To upgrade your OOo2, you need to edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file, AKA your repository list if you use Synaptic. I use the command line, so I first ran this:
sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list
Then I added this line:
deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/OOo2 ./
I saved & closed the file, & then ran the following commands:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
APT wanted to update OOo2, so I told it to go ahead. A bit later, I had the latest & greatest OOo2 running on my Kubuntu machine. Beautiful.
There you have it. I've noticed a significant increase in performance with the browser. I'm glad I upgraded to the new version. Also, I can tell a difference in the performance of my word processor. I just seems to run smoother.
I generally say if it ain't broke don't fix it. But in this case, I'd prefer Ubuntu to put these two applications in their update manager and be done with it.
I really shouldn't complain. The price was right eh. |
