Can't Do This on Windows!
My daughter came over to me and said she didn't save her Abiword document for her class, and it crashed. She thought she had lost everything. I asked if she saved it at least once because the program auto-saves every 5 mins. by default after that and she said she had not saved it at least once. She was in a panic. The first thing I did was tell her that in the future she's going to want to save her doc at least once. Second, I changed the auto-save to every 2 mins. in Abiword. Third, I did something *that you cannot do on Windows!* I went to her Ubuntu computer and did:
$ sudo strings /dev/mem | grep -i dinosaur > /home/family/docs/saved.memory1.txt
$ sudo strings /dev/mem | grep -i temperature > /home/family/docs/saved.memory2.txt
...because she was writing a paper on dinosaur eggs and had at least these two keywords in there. She then opened the text files, highlighted stuff she had previously typed, pasted it back into Abiword, and re-edited it. All was not completely lost.
Now if she had Windows Vista, she would be up the creek.
2 Comments:
At Tue Jan 23, 08:56:00 PM MST , Anonymous said...
Can't do it in windows?
Eh ... both Microsoft Office & Open Office have options for autosaving ... even before the document has been given a name.
If the word processor crashes, next time you open it up, it says something like "here's these crashed documents; care to restore?"
And so you know ... I use Linux and Windows (though more Linux now than Windows).
So, I do have an informed opinion.
But yeah, the grep tool is very cool and useful.
You ought to try open office.
Oh, and dino eggs? What could she possibly learn from that?
1. dinos weren't really real
2. even if they were, how could we know ANYTHING about their eggs?
yeah, that'll be all
-Ck
At Sun Jan 28, 06:52:00 PM MST , amanda bee said...
Right, and if you do something dumb like move a document while it is open in OpenOffice, OOo will crash next time it tries to autosave and then it will keep trying to recover the document until you figure out that you can just press "cancel."
Grep is the thing that you can't do in Windows, probably the tool I miss more than any other when I'm using Windows and I find myself stuck.
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