I may not be blogging as much as usual for the next few days… I’m working on an upgrade of Ubuntu on my computer, and I hadn’t planned for it, or set aside time for it.
See, I was trying to install the Linux version of HWP (the Korean wordprocessor that gets the widest use in Korea, and which everyone else hates because that program’s proprietary format, .hwp, is the standard here, but other wordprocesses don’t handle it very well). I’m trying to install this because I’m suddenly in a position where I can’t just advise people to re-send the file in .doc or .rtf. These days, I need to be able to open, work on, and save files in .hwp format.
So I found a few (slightly different) tutorials, and just what do you think happened?
Oh yes, somehow it absolutely destroyed my installation of Ubuntu. I’m not even sure what got broken, but suddenly Synaptic, Firefox, and even the terminal interface wouldn’t load at all! It was like all I had left working was GUI, and that was, well… not enough.
Yes, yes, my installation was long ion the tooth anyway, version 6.06 and probably screwed up in several different ways by my having run Automatix — external devices were always mounting funny, for example — so I should have upgraded long ago, and while installing Ubuntu is far from a headache, I didn’t need even a few small extra tasks right now. Even better, the reams of data I backed up on one of my external drives mostly looks invisible to my new install of Ubuntu — or, rather, looked invisible to the new installation after I ruined it by trying again to install the HWP app.
At least the files on that external hard drive are visible from the installation of Linux Mint I’m running on my smaller, throw-it-around laptop that I bring on trips and so on, though. Nothing was lost, indeed, not very much data at all: I’m a great data packrat, and I back up the most important files in ways that would seem paranoid to anyone who’s never lost the archive of all his writing or photos over the last N years.
So now, it’s just a case of getting an install of Ubuntu 8.04 running and back up to normal. You know, so I can input Korean text, view Youtube videos, play DVDs, process RAW images, and so on. The lovely thing about installing Ubuntu is that it takes only a few minutes. The unlovely thing is the work it takes to get back to normal is somewhat more argh, you haven’t gotten around to setting up a separate partition for the /home directory.
(Even though I have to say, it’s getting better… a few versions ago, I had a hell of a struggle just to get the monitor to display anything other than horrific jagged lines and guck! These days, it’s the luxury stuff one has to work to get… and not all that hard, I’ll admit, except, of course, for the blasted HWP app!)
But all in all, I’m feeling relatively unscathed… it’s just my time that I’m feeling short on at the moment, what with all kinds of school stuff to do or get done or start, and some writing stuff I was just getting into, and so on.
Ah well, it’s for the best… otherwise I might never have gotten around to upgrading!
UPDATE: Aha! And it was all so easy… once I found the right instructions.
I’m not sure if the crazy symbolic links I set up before reinstalling it helped, but there’s a repo you can add that’s listed on the page linked just above. It’s a Gutsy repo, but it works for Hardy Heron too. Now I can open HWP files in Linux…
That’s enough for today. Tomorrow, I’ll install Abiword, Nabi (or some other input device software to allow Korean input), some Roman and Korean fonts, get the multimedia working, set up few other necessary applications, and… well, and then we’ll see. I still want to migrate my /home directory to a separate partition, and it seems like now is a good time to do it. Or, maybe not now, but sometime on the weekend, perhaps.