I’m more or less back after needing to rebuild my machine. Being a certified (or certifiable) geek, this meant a clean install of Ubuntu using the latest release (eye candy pretty, but it’s going to take a LONG to get used to close buttons on the left. At least let us customize that guys!).
The reason for such drastic action is pretty simple: Scrivener for Linux beta. I’ve been looking for a better way to collate all my plot notes for longer works than a collection of obscurely named files of all flavors (including saved chat logs) so that I don’t lose track of things. At first blush it looks like Scrivener is all that and then some – I haven’t had a chance to play much, rebuilding a computer being rather time consuming, but it actually runs on my system now, which is a big improvement.
The day job has settled down from “insane” to merely “very busy”. I may actually recover something vaguely resembling sanity in time for NADWCon – although like any Discworld convention sanity is optional there.
In other news, I still need to book time off for Capclave and Philcon, but I’ve got all the travel, hotel and convention bookings sorted. Scheduling is still up in the air – I’m probably pure fangirl at the Discworld con, but negotiation over program for the other two.
Yanno if you use a different varient of Ubuntu (e.g. Xubuntu) you’ll have the menu buttons in the usual place etc. etc. Possibly less eyecandy but I find xubuntu to be highly productive as a base work environment.
I run the stuff that really needs windows in a Virtualbox VM. it works great!
But thanks for telling me about scrivener for linux, I guess I must have looked in early feb last – just before they produced the first beta
Hi, Francis,
I’ve worked with Ubuntu for… oh, 3, 4 years now. I don’t like changing my operating system that much (which is why I delayed this one and jumped from 9.04 to 11.04 – because 9.04 was too antique for Scrivener)
The scrivener beta looks sweet – they’re updating regularly, with the next one due to be available June 30th, and I’m getting used to the very mac-like interface that Ubuntu’s moved to. I believe they call it Unity – designed to be super-clean and uncluttered – which it is – but not so easy for someone who routinely has a whole bunch of windows open and uses workspaces for conceptual “spacing” of different types of running stuff (the work in process on one workspace along with all the notes and so forth, browser, email, newsgroups on a different workspace, tweetdeck on another one, and so forth. I may need to get more workspaces and go to a rotating scheme rather than the flat panel setup I’ve got at the moment. That or learn different switcheroo shortcuts to easily go from 1 to 4 without going through 2 and 3…)