For some reason the Eee PC ships with OpenOffice 2.3 preloaded instead of the more current OpenOffice.org 2.3. Since I don’t really need to do much more than basic word processing, that doesn’t concern me much. But I have noticed that there’s no in-line spell checking. You know, the thing that underlines spelling errors in red as you make them?
I figured there was just a package missing, so I went and installed AbiWord, one of my favorite open source word processors. It turns out there was no in-line spellchecking on AbiWord at first either. But then I installed the “aspell” package and it worked like magic.
But no luck with OpenOffice.org.
So I did a little more digging and discovered that OpenOffice.org uses “myspell” instead of aspell. Since the OpenOffice.org build for the Eee has smaller toolbars and fonts, I uninstalled AbiWord and installed myspell and all is right with the world.
So to make a long story short, here’s how to enable in-line spellchecking:
- Add “http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main” to your repository list.
- Open up a console window.
- Type “sudo apt-get install myspell-en-us”
- Enter “y” when asked
- Open up OpenOffice.org Writer and mispell a word.
adryry says
Good finding… but don’t know why it doesn’t work for me (I’m absolutely a Linux idiot). When doing the installing, it gives me this message:
You might want to run `apt-get -f install’ to correct these:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
openoffice.org-onlineupdate: Depends: openoffice.org-core01 but it is not installable
E: Unmet dependencies. Try ‘apt-get -f install’ with no packages (or specify a solution).
Do you know how to soft this? (or better yet, do you know how to install Ooo 2.3 on Eee PC?)
Thanks!
Dan Martin says
Great, this was perfect. To the previous comment, I had to add one step after adding the repository to avoid the error he sees:
sudo apt-get update
Dan Martin says
Great, this was perfect. To the previous comment, I had to add one step after adding the repository to avoid the error he sees:
sudo apt-get update