My main laptop dual boots between Windows 7 and Kubuntu Oneiric (though I really only use W7 for games). I had problems running spellcheck on Scrivener on my 64-bit Kubuntu because aspell needed 32 bit libraries, and even after installing the 32 bit libraries spellchecker wouldn’t find any words. This has been an immensely frustrating situation where Scriviner and Linux is concerned, to the point where for a long time I just used the Windows version and ran it under Wine.
However, I got around this by installing a bare-bones 32-bit version of ubuntu using schroot and installed 32 bit Scrivener in that, and ran the schroot-installed Scrivener within my 64 bit session. That’s a lot more complicated than I want, but hey, it works.
I’m getting a second laptop (an ultrabook that I plan to use exclusively for writing) and want to put Scrivener on it. It’s a 64 bit machine and I’d like to put a 64 bit OS on it, and I’d like it to be Linux, but I don’t want to have to set up schroot and put in a barebones 32bit Linux install within my existing 64 bit Linux install just to run Scrivener. (No offense Scrivener, but I jumped through those hoops once for you, and once is all I’m willing to do.)
Fedora and Red Hat handle 32 bit apps in a 64 bit environment differently than Ubuntu does, and I wondered if may their implementation might be more Scrivener friendly. So with all that lead up out of the way, my question to any of you who might be using a 64 bit version of Fedora:
Can you install and run Scrivener successfully? If you can, does spellcheck work on it? If it does, was there anything extra you needed to do to make it work?
I have just gone through the process of reinstalling Fedora 17 32 bit on a laptop to play with Scriviener.
The only flaky part is getting the spell check to work. Out of the box and the development rpm for of aspell is not enough. An additional language as well as the one you require was installed on the machine and everything works fine.
Running on a 64bit OS has all sorts of grief and I gave up getting the spelling sorted.
If you are looking to transfer documents between windows and linux machines the fonts need to be sorted out. I find that corefonts.sourceforge.net/ does the job very well.
Actually I got the spellchecker to work under 64 bit. You need to have 32 bit apsell + dictionary installed. (I had aspell, but didn’t have a dictionary.) I’m not sure why, since Scrivener is packaged with its own version of aspell. (I suspect this is a bug…it shouldn’t be checking the system one, and ldd doesn’t show it, AFAIK.)
For me aspell was installed for fedora, but without any dictionaries. So when I installed aspell-en it worked out of the box. What fantastic software. Now I just need to figure out how to get my custom dictionary words from my Windows Scrivener version.