Help Needed with Open Office 2.0 Beta and corrupted Files

[Barronmore]

Hello all..

I'm having problems with my odt files becomming corrupted in OO2.0 beta after I save them to my USB drive.

Here's the deal. I'm an adjuct faculty member at Dixie State College and I'm testing out Linux/Open Office to see if it's somthing the school would be intrested in offering a course in. I don't want to install Linux onto a hard drive (as I dont' have admin privilages and it's a hassle to get such things done) so I'm using Knoppix 3.9 Live CD to preform all the work. The disk works great and I've been very happy with the whole experiance until I go to open my saved files.

I'm following the Word book so I have an outline of what I want Open Office to do, so all the files I'm opening are the .doc files that come with the workbook. I open the flies, make my changes I need, then save to .odt format on my USB Flash disk. But when I go to reopen the odt files they are corrupted and freeze up open office. This does not happen with every file, but it does seem to be the majority of them.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what could be causing this? I'm using a P4 1.7 GHZ machine with 256 Meg of Ram. The Flash Drive is a Memorex 256 meg drive and the only things on it are a Knoppix config file, the school work files I"m using, a "findings" write up I'm keeping for each tutorial I work through (those have also become corrupted), and a few issues of Tux Magazine in PDF format.

Any help and ideas would be appricited.

Thanks

barronmore

[UnderScore]

I can't say I have or not had corruption as I do not use OO 2.0. OO.o 2.0 on Knoppix 3.9 is beta & furthermore the OO.o 2.0 beta bundled with Knoppix 3.9 is not an official package Debian package meaning that it is probably not quality tested. It was compiled & bundled in by Klaus Knopper himself & not the Debian package maintainter for OO.o 2.0.
sorry.

[angor]

The problem may also be related to the use of the new usb-module "ub" (AFAIK since knoppix-3.7). This module
breaks the usb-storage facility of the kernel, and without installing the system to the hard disc there is nothing
you can do about it. If you don't want to go back to knoppix-3.6 (which doesn't have OpenOffice-2 IIRC) you could
try kanotix (a variation of knoppix), which still uses the scsi emulation to handle usb devices.

(Donning my asbestos suit for mentioning a competing product in this forum ))

[|enouf|]

couple of quick thoughts from a *nix newb who's also booting from LiveCD (knoppix3.6 using 2.6.7 kernel)

Perhaps try to burn your data using the burning app "k3b"...
you can right click any blank area in a folder (KDE) and point to "Actions" -> Create Data Cd with K3b
hopefully this will tell you if it's a usb device problem or not atleast

I also save the config (Configs.tbz and knoppix.sh) - but I save to my HDD, on a dedicated partition - also contained there is a small knoppix.swp (60MB - which should also be deleted from time to time, I would think). It seems i personally have not even needed the swap file, but can't say yet for sure.

I've noticed these can become corrupt in and of themselves, for whatever reason - perhaps from having open apps at the time of saving config settings.

Realize that when burning to CD, it'll create READ only files on the CD-R media (suggest CD-R over -RW), but I would think they can be copied back to the HDD and have their attributes changed so you can edit/update/alter the files - then reBurn the newer versions to CD again. Perhaps when using CD-R look into using Multi-session, instead of packet-writing as CDRWs use. This way you can utilize all the available storage of a CD-R, but not use it all at one time (you can add to it, using multi-session, so keep your file DATES in order,so you know which ver. is which).

Other than that - a would think a Beta version to be buggy anyway

[Barronmore]

Thanks for the advice.

I can't burn the files to CD because i"m using the liveCD at work and there is no CD Burning Drive.

How about using a Zip disk. Every machine at the college has a zip250, but the reason I went to USB Pen Drive was because I heard that it would automaticly find it and that getting it to find the Zip Drive from the LiveCD was quite an event.

I'll check out that other distro, but to tell the truth, Knoppix is the ONLY linux distro that has done everything I have wanted it to do without me having a headache of a time finding where the particular command is.

[|enouf|]

can you atleast try an older version of knoppix ? (3.6 perhaps) - again, just to see if the usb device implementation is causing the issue or not.

perhaps your usb device needs to be wiped...and started fresh...Copy the files over onto HDD and run fsck or chkdsk or scandisk depending

I can't personaly tell you the exact commands to run fsck or e2fsck

Boot knoppix without loading your preferences (saved config)

author said;
"But when I go to reopen the odt files they are corrupted and freeze up open office"

so - "where" are you re-opening them. I mean, you're taking the flash drive back and forth between a p4 1.7GHz at school running Knoppix liveCD and "where" (and on what file system/s).

Does that p4 at school use RDRAM ?? (I have no idea if this can be an issue, but RDRAM is diff than the usual DDR-RAM in the way it operates).

Have a different usb flash stick you could try?

Another option is to get a USB HDD (standard HDD, mounted in a USB enclosure) - and use that for transportability -- again - process of elimination at first, to narrow in on the issue.

[UnderScore]

Does that p4 at school use RDRAM ?? (I have no idea if this can be an issue, but RDRAM is diff than the usual DDR-RAM in the way it operates).

I am genuinely interested in the possibility that different RAM might change how it operates and how it might cause corruption. To my knowledge, different types of system RAM are just the same to Linux. It only cares if the RAM itself is working & is not suffering from a bad RAM module.