A Fedora/RPM LibreOffice repo exists!

My other tiny triumph of the day concerned LibreOffice.  Thanks to Fedora's insistence on excising a tool I rely on from their copy of OpenOffice I spent too many hours Saturday trying to install either LO 3.3.1 or an unmolested OO 3.3.  If I followed the instructions and installed the damn things from RPMs, the program segfaulted after the registration screen with the oh-so-useful error $sd_prog/$sd_binary. (I found jackall useful about that online...) Copying a chunk of files from the RPMs on top of an existing Fedora-mangled install basically got me nowhere aside from several yards closer to dumping Fedora.


Meanwhile, I intermittently searched the web (and various RPM/app sites) aggressively for a RPM repository, but all I found were repos for other distros, and the knowledge that LibreOffice will be available in Fedora 15 (which doesn't help me now).  Finally, Sunday night I discovered a Fedora-based repository with LibreOffice, courtesy of an intriguing distro I've never heard of before called Kororaa.

Their repo file didn't work right away (package managers kept telling me the repository was inaccessible), but a lucky guess let me figure out how to fix it.  Open a terminal/console and do "su" so you become root, then download their .repo file per their instructions:

wget http://kororaa.org/repos/kororaa.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/kororaa.repo

Once you've grabbed it, while still root, open the little bugger with your favorite text editor (I like nano):

nano /etc/yum.repos.d/kororaa.repo

On the "baseurl" line, change the part bolded here from the original:

http://kororaa.org/repos/kororaa/$releasever/$basearch

over to a more useful (as of right now; the number will change):

http://kororaa.org/repos/kororaa/14/$basearch/

(I'm not using Fedora 14 on this machine, but it doesn't seem to matter.)

All you should have to do from there is use your preferred package manager to remove any old copies of OpenOffice/LibreOffice and install the properly-functioning one from Kororaa.  I recommend also trying their distro out because it seems like a very good way to have your cake with Fedora and eat it too.

The Dreaded SuSE Connection Failure

I went down to my computer this evening to discover that clicking the mouse no longer did anything, rebooted...and found myself saddled with an infuriating bug a few SuSE (and possibly other distro) users have been encountering.  In it, the wireless adapter can see other routers, but attempting to actually connect to them basically stalls out and fails. Same happened no matter whether I told it to use Network Manager or the traditional ifup approach.

I remembered that much of the problem is that SuSE forgets that it's supposed to access the network through a router. I looked up the "route" commands in the must-own Linux Phrasebook, and managed to at least connect to the router this way:
ifdown eth1 && ifup eth1
route add -net default gw my-router's-IP-here dev eth1

That let me access things that use an IP, like most Internet radio stations, but it didn't let me access anything that required a site name.  Well, at least now I didn't have to drain the batteries on my iRiver H10 to have something to listen to...

I returned to the proverbial drawing board and opened the YaST Network Settings, which I experimented with for a painfully long time.  Arrgh. Eventually, I discovered that I could get online with these settings -- each boldfaced & underlined area is a tab in Network Settings, italics is the name of something to change:
Global Options: Network Setup Method is Traditional
Overview: click on Edit for your adapter, go to the Address tab:
Choose "Statically assigned IP Address"
IP Address: 192.168.1.9, Subnet Mask: /24, Hostname: your pick
Click Next to get to Wireless Device Settings, click "Expert". Set Access Point to your router's name, Power Management: off, AP ScanMode 2. Click "OK", then "Next".
Hostname/DNS: Hostname & Domain: your pick, Name Server 1: your router's IP**
Routing: Default IPv4 Gateway: your router's IP, Device: -, Enable IP Forwarding ON

**If you don't know your router's IP, it almost certainly begins with 192.168.1 and after another period, has either a 0 or a 1.  If one doesn't work, try the other!

I'm sure that some (possibly most) of the settings I've specified have nothing to do with fixing the problem, but those are the certainly-not-default ones I altered.  Hopefully this will help somebody else frantically searching the web for help through another computer/distro, since I didn't find a whole lot that was useful last I looked.

OpenSUSE, Nautilus' location bar fix

Well, after having a few too many problems with GNOME within the otherwise-awesome SimplyMEPIS, I ended up switching distros yet again... After a lot of research & trials, I ended up settling on OpenSUSE, which runs faster & cooler than any other distro has on this computer by a longshot. Its version of Nautilus also offers both tabs and an extra pane for working with files, which should come in really handy.

I heard earlier this year that the "new look" for Nautilus, mostly available through custom designs, was an overly-minimalistic (aka "let's blindly mimic OS X") approach that disables the text-based location bar without giving any visible way of turning it back on. OpenSUSE seems to come with the latest of everything, and sure enough, the change was there. BLEAH.

Thankfully, a quick web-search has shown me how to fix it... First, you can use control-L to switch quickly from text-based to buttons... If you want it to always start up with text, start the GNOME Configuration Editor, go into the /Apps/Nautilus/Preferences area, scroll down to Always Use Location Entry, then set it to true.

Voila, no more clicking to get everywhere, which is a huge improvement for those of us that can touch-type rapidly & have a variety of folders/drives active. If they're all within a home directory, clicking is easy -- but if you have a large organized folder hierarchy, it won't. (Do the people that prefer the buttons-only approach not know how to type, or just throw everything into a few directories? Enquiring minds want to know...)