The Copywriter Underground

I’m on a two-week fly fishing trip in Montana, and in the Interest of seeing Ubuntu Linux perform on the road, I brought my work laptop with me.

Not many posts? I’ve been spending my time here.

The results have been instructive, if not always thrilling.

First, let’s talk wi-fi access.

While Ubuntu glommed onto my home wi-fi network without a hitch, it didn’t want to connect to my friend’s wi-fi, even after entering the correct WEP key.

Making it all the more galling was Vista’s facility; I re-booted in Vista, entered the exact same WEP key – and basked in the glow of an instant connection.

This wasn’t looking good.

After 30 minutes of mucking around, I discovered the solution. Well, “a” solution.

Entering the WEP key into an alternative pop-up choice in the Ubuntu wireless menu solved the problem (I used the “WEP Passkey Hexadecimal” choice).

But why?

Ubuntu was no help. But OK, lesson learned. Try stuff until it works.

It’s not a ringing endorsement of the OS, but it is one strategy for success.

Now That We’re Connected, Let’s Work.

My non-blog writing projects have gone swimmingly. Ubuntu’s fast boot times have made road use a joy.

In addition, my blogging workflow has been excellent. I wrote my longer Trout Underground posts in OpenOffice (excellent).

Pasted the text into the Scribefire Firefox-based blog editor (easy).

Downloaded the photos from my digital card reader (easier than Windows), and edited them with Gimp image editing software (again, a winner - fast and powerful).

Then I added the photographs to the article (annoying; Scribefire would only add the image code half the time), and fired the article.

Which is when things got weird again.

Only one of the images (of eight) appeared on my article. And even weirder, replacing the first image in the Wordpress editor solved the problem for all the photos.

While Scribefire is a nice product, it’s really strongest when doing quick cut & paste jobs from online sources. And it seems to suffer from odd bugs.

And while the photo failure shouldn’t be laid at the feet of Ubuntu, it’s clear the lack of a killer Linux blog editor still hampers my Ubuntu test – enough that I may look at running a Windows blog editor under Ubuntu’s Windows emulator (Wine).

But not until I’m back from my vacation.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.