Open Office in Ubuntu had no spell checking.

Recently I was working on an article in Open Office 3 under Ubuntu 9.4. After I finished multiple pages, I realized that it thought my spelling was perfect. Those of you who know me, know my spelling is quite horrible.

My languages were all correct as was my spell check engine. But OO just kept saying that my spell check was perfect. After some Internet scouring I learned that the spell check dictionary is now an "extension". Here is what I did.

I started OO Writer and went into the Tools Menu to Package Manager. From there there was no spell checker installed. I just followed the "Get more extensions here" link and downloaded the Canadian English dictionary. I had to unpack the tarball file and then using the add button, locate the unpacked file.

Close up OO, remove the file (its not needed anymore) and the when I started OOWriter once again, I saw that ever familiar hodge podge of red ink on my document!

Ahh, Bliss again!

Cheers all!

Issues with ATI Linux Driver

Greetings all!

Its been far too long since I have written anything. I figured I would make a post here about 2 challenges I recently faced. Each being completely separate issues.

First, one that has caused me a great deal of stress, that is getting the ATI Catalyst driver to work on an ATI Card with Ubuntu Linux. Every time I installed the driver X would crash my computer. If you have worked a lot with Linux and ATI, you have likely experienced this at one time or another. The solution is really quite simple.

Install the ATI Catalyst from the AMD/ATI site, then boot to Runlevel 1, or recovery mode. All you have to do is issue one command.

aticonfig --acpi-services=off

Thats it!! Reboot and you should be off to the races. Feel free to activate Compiz after that. Should that command fail, Just add a sudo in front of it.


Cheers!