I looked to see if this had been discussed, but I couldn’t find it. Apologies if it has.
I (FINALLY) managed to get Scrivener working in my Linux box, licensed approved, it launches, etc, a few months ago.
However, I’m terrified of trying to update Scrivener as bug fixes and stuff come out, but I am updating it on my other machines. Can I use the “Check for Updates” from the menu and run an update successfully from there just like on my Win machine, or do I need to do a fresh install any time Lit&Lat release an update? Or is it some weird mixture where I can update it, but have to somehow have to also update what file WINE is looking for after I run the GUI update?
Would really like to update, but terrified of not being able to get it going again (took me literal days to get it to get the license to go through and the program to open), but also concerned about going back and forth between older and newer versions on different machines. Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
Since all of what makes Wine tick is just files in a folder, a quick backup of the prefix folder so you can immediately roll back in case of trouble should be an easy and safe way of testing an upgrade. That’s one nice thing about Wine, since it isn’t an entire operating system it’s much easier to recover from a botched install, or even to test in a sandbox prefix by cloning the main one (this is very easy to do, just cp and then set the $WINEPREFIX env var on launch).
As to the main question: I have never had a problem running the in-software upgrade. I always check it every single time we upload an update, both in Wine and in a Win10 VM. The updater is essentially just the installer with some extra instructions for bringing any one particular build up to the current spec.
Expanding on Ioa’s comment re: licensing specifically, the same license will work for all versions of Win Scrivener 3, and Scrivener should “remember” its license key between Win Scrivener 3 versions. So you might have a new adventure when/if you upgrade to Scrivener 4, but that’s a while from now given that Scrivener 4 doesn’t exist yet.
Thank you, but it appears it’s not even an option.
Though I’m running Scriv 3.1.1.0 in my Linux machine, “Check for Updates” does causes it to just return with the “Scrivener is all up to date” pop up, even though I know that version is a few updates old, so apparently I can’t update it via the in-software updater.
Oh, if it is that old, yeah it might not see anything. We did discover an issue with the 3.1.4.1 update that came out recently, which would be the version currently listed as most up to date for you, in that older builds of Scrivener blanket assumed anything ending in .1 is a beta and ignores them. We’ve since made improvements to the upgrader system to allow for much better control over all of this (including providing selective updates based on system variables), but the old system was very basic: one update message for all, and if that doesn’t match the criteria, nothing updates.
So you would need to update manually to get around that. Is your prefix 32-bit or 64-bit?
Sigh, uninstalled, trying to reinstall. It installs, but won’t launch, which is what I was afraid of. Get through the install completely where you get to choose to install the shortcut icon or not, close everything out, but Scrivener won’t launch. always says it can’t find it. Looks like I’m back to days of trying to get this back on, but trying it since you said the in-software updater works now.
Did you have it create a new .desktop file and try launching from that? Also have you tried launching it straight from the command-line, with wine Scrivener.exe in the install folder? That should give you some logging output at any rate.
Also, while the latest installer should not have done so, make sure there is no file named ‘qtexttospeech_winrt.dll’ within the texttospeech folder, while you are there. That is known to cause a crash on launch without a full speech environment available.
I’ve always tried to launch it from the command line, as no other way ever appears, and the command line is what gives me the message it cannot be found. I’ve tried installing it where it defaults (program files) and directly onto the wine “C” drive and nothing.
Well, almost working. I managed to get it to open, and activate the license (YAY!)… BUT - I can’t hit “check for updates” without it crashing. If that’s a known issue and how to resolve it and someone can point me in the right direction, that would be super helpful.
You wouldn’t have ordinarily had to activate again (I have uninstalled, patch-installed, updated, and fresh installed so many hundreds of times and have no once had to mess with registration), so you must be doing some uncharted procedure I’m not familiar with.
Well, at least you’ve got the software running. Being able to run the updater is just a convenience. No it shouldn’t be crashing, but if it doesn’t work on your setup, you
can just get the latest build and run the installer over the current version in 99% of cases.
I always deactivate and fully uninstall when not updating an application from the built-in method.
One final update - it’s not just the Check For Updates that causes Scrivener to hang/crash, it’s anything that involves connecting to the internet (how it managed to activate the license is beyond me). All the “Help” menu items (Check for Updates, Keep Up to Date, Scrivener Home, Literature and Latte Home, etc) all cause it to freeze and crash. But anything local seems to be working perfectly.
Oh okay! Well just so you know it is not necessary to deactivate, but one is of course free to do so if they wish to. We designed the activation system very specifically to survive full removal of the software. It is stored at a level outside of the standard settings.
One final update - it’s not just the Check For Updates that causes Scrivener to hang/crash, it’s anything that involves connecting to the internet …
Your configuration might be different and causing them to seem related, but internally these are very different things (as evidenced by the activation working). An action much closer in terms of the tech being used would be to put a Bookmark to a web page into the inspector and then clicking the button to load it from the web, or even importing a web page into the binder (though that does have additional technology in the mix, to capture the input and convert it to MHT for archival). Those all work for me.
The other stuff in the Help menu, and this includes any URI triggering event, will hang Wine for reasons I do not know, but it is a global thing. Accessing a file:// link from your Bookmarks pane will hang. Clicking a hyperlink in a text file that points to a web page will hang. Using the Open in External Editor command will hang. My best guess is that there is some awkward corner between Wine and Qt-based software that struggles to map MIME types properly, or maybe even deeper in the networking stack. It isn’t a common Wine limitation, just something odd about how Windows Qt software works that perhaps isn’t anticipated for, since most of the time Qt software starts life on Linux, or at least has a build for it since most people use Qt to deploy on multiple platforms instead of just one. We’re a bit weird on that score.
Whatever the case, those kinds of menu commands and actions are things I’ve learned to avoid entirely and find other ways around (such as the “Copy URL” contextual command in the bookmarks list).
Oh okay! Well just so you know it is not necessary to deactivate, but one is of course free to do so if they wish to. We designed the activation system very specifically to survive full removal of the software.
That is very good to know! Thank you. From now on, I won’t be deactivating, and that actually takes away my biggest fear about updating manually. I was afraid if I DIDN’T deactivate, you all would think I was putting my single license on dozens of copies and would end my license for violating the terms, but I was always afraid every time I updated manually that I was risking not being able to reactivate my license (only in WINE, obviously not a problem in Win or Mac).