Star Office windows woes

[Ralph GL]

I posted this a while ago, then I went away and tried a few things with no joy - your comments would be appreciated :)

I am running Star Office 5.2 with SuSE Linux 7.0. I have a hard drive with three windows partitions (c and d are FAT 32, e is FAT, I'll tell you why) and the Linux partitions at the end. Because it's above the cylinder limit I use Loadlin to boot into Linux (thanks to the NHF). No problem.

The problem comes when I try to access my documents on the windows partitions with Star Office (and yes, I did mount them to the tree first :) ). The response I get from within the Star Office desktop is "Error: Nonexistent Object: Nonexistent File". Every damn time.

A friend suggested that it might be a problem with FAT32, hence the use of a FAT partition. No joy. KFM (and for that matter, wterm) has no problem seeing the partitions. KFM even allows me to open the office docs using Star Office, but Star Office itself won't play ball. Nearly all are word 97 docs.

I don't expect miracles, but if someone could at least put me out of my misery than I'd be happier. It's a shame, I really like the feel of Linux, this is just the fly in the ointment.

Cheers
Ralph

[jaygee432]

Maybe not the handiest thing, but is there a reason you have to keep them word97 docs where they are? If not, you could copy or move them to your so work folder and convert them to .sdw docs to work with them. ;)

[Ralph GL]

Yes, there are a couple of good reasons. One is that my compo is networked to another Win 98 machine which my other half uses, so we share files etc - and I'd prefer to only have to back up from one location. Maybe I'll get her to use Linux eventually but she has a lot of time invested in Windows apps (HTML/DTP/gfx)... as do I...

Anyway, I scoured the SuSE site and apparently for the 2.4x kernal (SuSE 7.1 onwards) Star Office can't write to FAT or floppies. This is "a Star Office problem, not a SuSE problem". Doesn't explain my probs as I'm using 2.2.16 I think, but it is probably SO rather than general Linux.

Guess I'll give koffice a shot until I feel like spending some money on Applixware or something. If anyone has futher thoughts, tho...

Cheers
Ralph