Light Weight Word Processor

With a 'footnotes' feature. Rcommendations?

[Nick_W]

Hi all,

Well, I finally got Debian installed on this 32MB machine at home and now need a Word Processor.

The only real requirement is that it has a 'footnotes' feature. So that rules Abiword out :(

Anyone recommend something very, very light?

Nick

[digitalghost]

Ted? [nllgg.nl]

[Nick_W]

Looks great, why do they make these things so damn difficult to install though?

Sheesh! - It'll take me a week to install the thing. Anyone know which files I need to install from src?

Thanks!

Nick

[Nick_W]

I take it back, I got it!

Cheers

Nick

[Duckula]

For the random user who came here probably from a search engine, what Nick did was

apt-get install ted

:)

[Nick_W]

hehe, thanks Dukula!

Actually what I did was try the installer first (some script that comes withthe src) and when that failed I manually put the directories in /usr/local and /usr/local/bin

It's a great little editor btw ;-)

Nick

[dingman]

After all our Debian evangelism about how great apt-get is, you didn't even take advantage of it? Shame on you ;) Whether you're running stable, testing, or unstable, Ted is packaged and in the main Debian archive. Always look for a package [debian.org] unless you need different options than the maintaner compiled in. Even then, there's always 'apt-get source foo' to get the sources for foo, all set up to be modified and then built into a package.

[Nick_W]

>>main Debian archive

Yes, I didn't even think ;(

Thanks for the pointer, Debian has worked out really well for this old machine, I'm very pleased with it, and more importantly,. so is my wife ;)

Thanks all.

Nick

[dingman]

more importantly,. so is my wife

Mine is convinced that Linux on the desktop is evil. How did you do it?

[Ivana]

Hi, I'm the wife...

Has your wife ever tried Linux? For me it's pretty simple: Linux is stable and you will never see The Windows Blue Screen of Death.

I am really enjoying Ted, by the way. It's so simple that I don't have spend time customizing it and I can focus on the important thing: Finishing my thesis the decade!

Ivana

[jatar_k]

Hi, I'm the wife...
I am really enjoying Ted

rofl, thx Ivana, brightened up my day ;)

[dingman]

Has your wife ever tried Linux? For me it's pretty simple: Linux is stable and you will never see The Windows Blue Screen of Death.

Yup. She used my computer from time to time in college, as well as making aborive attempts at installing FreeBSD (no driver for her network card) and Red Hat $current_in_early_2000. (I don't remember what was wrong with it.) When I graduated (2001) I left my computer at her appartment for her to use while I spent a month in Haiti, because she wanted to try out Linux. Then I went home for another couple months, leaving my computer with her again. (To get Linux at home, I had to install in on an old 486.) When I got back, we went on a week long road trip and came back to find her hard drive fried, so she was stuck using my Linux machine exclusively for several months because we couldn't afford a new hard drive. (I was substitute teaching, she was waiting tables. Neither is even vaguely lucrative.) She hasn't used it much in the last year, but really I don't think that the changes I've seen in the last year are huge in terms of usability.

She's also the only person I know who can get months of uptime out of Windows 98. I was actually suprised when her computer crashed yesterday.

[Nick_W]

>Ted

*sigh* ;)

Er.... we have a problem. My DIY isnstall crashed a couple of times :(

I need to get the apt-get install from the CD. If i just type it I get 'package not found' (or similar) so, how do I make it get it from the CD?

THanks, again!

Nick

[dingman]

'apt-cdrom add' will add the CD in your cdrom drive to your /etc/apt/sources.list, after which you will be able to get packages off the CD with "apt-get install $package-name".

Alternatively, if you just need one package it might be easier to mount the disk it is on and use "dpkg -i /path/to/package.deb". (dpkg is roughly equivalent to the 'rpm' command. It's not nearly as cool as apt-get, but sometimes it's the right thing, such as when you're intalling a .deb like Opera that isn't in a propper apt repository.)

[Nick_W]

Hey thanks!

Well, a step in the right direction definately but I still get 'can't find package ted'. So, is it not on the cdrom and how to tell?

If it's not, the machine is not wred for the net so what should I do? Sorry to be a dumbarse ;)

Nick

[littleman]

Nick, I am not sure if it is coming across, but you can always auto install via the web. If you want something that isn't on the CD all you have to do is point to a apt-get repository.

Unless you do not have net access for that box?

[Nick_W]

Thats right, no access. I'm trying to find a way to work out which of the cd's it's on. I only downloaded and burned the first one.

I've found the page that gives the .deb src for the package but unless I can get it onto a floppy I have no way to transfer it to the older mahine. What a pain! ;)

Nick

[Nick_W]

Well, I have the .deb on floppy and have copied it to a dir on the older machine. Now how the <Eeek!> do I install it?

I see it has a few dependencies too?

did I mention I was grateful for the help, well, I am! ;-)

Nick

[Duckula]

Fine, I'll say it only once and if anybody else asks the same thing I'll just point to here.

Get the following addresses:

[packages.debian.org...] (443k)

[packages.debian.org...] (1347k)

Let's assume you have lesstif, jpeg, etc. on the system or the CD, and you're running woody.

Download each .deb to a floppy and copy them to a directory on the target machine, then do

dpkg --install ted_2.11-1_i386.deb ted-common_2.11-1_all.deb

That's what I had to do sometimes if a machine needed etherconf.

<edit: forgot the extension>

[dingman]

If you've got no network access on the machine, it probably makes sense to burn all the CDs, and add all of them to sources.list. It'll take time the first time you do it, but after a few package installations you'll break even.

Ted was on disk 3 in the official Debian 3.0r0 disk set. 3.0r1 is current, but they're *probably* on the same disk in the new set. I just don't have a stack of 3.0r1 disks next to me, becaue with DSL there was no point in burning them rather than using the mirrors.

[Nick_W]

Oh boy, tough!

ted depends on ted-common

Even though I did as you said.... any way to tell what's up?

Nick

[dingman]

Did you use dpkg or apt-get? If you used dpkg, you have to specify both packages on teh command line. If you added the CD with apt-cdrom and then used 'apt-get install ted' then it should have installed both packages. If not, then ted-common is probably on a disk you haven't added yet, and apt therefore doesn't know where to get it.

[Nick_W]

I was using dpkg but I think I didn't remove all the original files. So, I did apt-get remove ted, then burnt cd2,3 and apt-get install ted and all is GOOD! ;)

Now to see if it still crashes like my DIY install. It shouldn't I gues as I installed stable on this old relic, we'll see...

Thanks very much everyone!

Nick