Showing the Inspector fixed my cursor problems, even in full-screen mode. Hurrah! \o/
I’ve had some strange behavior with resizing, too. Hitting Alt+F7 to drag the window around a bit first usually lets me resize it how I like afterward.
Can I ask a really silly question, please? I’m sorry (in advance) if this is really obvious and I’m just being dim, but I don’t know anything about Linux or its commercial environment, and I’m genuinely interested. (In a previous existence, one of my accidental responsibilities was negotiating the transfer of intellectual property rights for software in a corporate-incubator start-up company, and after that baptism of fire I can’t help retaining a nerdy fascination for the legal/contractual details of new-to-me arrangements. Sad, I know, but we all bear the scars of earlier experience. 
)
How does licensing work with an arrangement like this (not necessarily specific to Scrivener)? Is it a special build of the Windows version that is being distributed, and therefore covered by its licensing and (eventual) purchase arrangements? Or will it have its own licensing and purchasing arrangements? Or has the source code been released to make a new version of the application, in which case is this different to open sourcing? I know that a lot of Linux stuff is open source, but what would be a typical commercial, non-open-source arrangement in this environment?
I keep thinking I ought to learn more about Linux, if only because I like the little penguin 
using @randywallace’s ubuntu .deb on LinuxMint Debian Sid. It allows me to be lazy and just works although it does not launch from the MintMenu, but will launch from the modified ubuntu menu, and main menu, and obviously cli.
I could not maximize the window until I had turned OFF the Inspector. With the Inspector on the window maximize fails, regardless of how wide I had manually dragged the window. And the bottom bar disappears with the Inspector open.
Opening a project that is not in the recent projects list just opens the .scriv file as a folder. If the project is in the recent projects list it opens fine.
Hrm, still no cursor for me. Eh, it’s work-aroundable, since I can just double click, highlight the word the cursor is near, and know where I am. I did change the default font…
Edit: switching back to default preferences gave me a cursor back. Wonder if that would help the windows folk?
Licensing: dunno. Don’t care. If it goes live and the linux version goes poof, I’d still buy the windows version, just because they went the extra mile for us. 
Hallo! Good to be here finally, even in an unsupported manner.
Alt+F7 didn’t helped. Somehow I can’t change the height, only the width. I tried different resolutions, but my monitor supports nothing more than 1280x800 px.
edit: after hiding the Inspector I could resize the window. thanks, djfrantz.
Wow, go away and deal with real life for a short time, come back–and the progress here is AMAZING. 
Yay, Linux people!
I can add that the .deb from randywallace installs and runs on Ubuntu 10.04.
As for licensing, there’s progress from Canonical on having paid (and possibly closed source) Linux programs available in the software center, so maybe Scrivener can show up there one day? I’ll be proud to pay for my Scrivener license whether it’s for Linux or for Windows (I run XP in VirtualBox), but I’d love to have a chance to actually pay for the Linux version because they certainly HAVE gone the extra mile for us. And yes, the native version is much nicer than running it under WINE.
Thanks to Lee, and everyone in the Linux community who is making this happen.
Scrivener is both closed-source and non-free. The Linux install comes with documented licensing information (if you’re interested, maybe someone can post it here?). Since it’s in beta, we’re all using a “trial” version which will expire, and we’ll have to purchase a license when the final version is available if we want to keep using it. (I don’t think there’s much of an “if” there! ) There are other closed-source and non-free programs for Linux, they’re just fairly rare. I think–if anyone knows otherwise, correct me–a good example here would be Bibble, the RAW photo editor. It’s available for Linux, it costs money, and I don’t believe the source code is available.
Canonical, the parent of Ubuntu-based Linux, has added an area to the Software Center for non-free applications. I don’t know where they stand on the closed-source issue–I believe they’re already offering a version of a commercial DVD player application.
While I am a supporter of free open source software, I also want to see the choices available to the Linux community grow. I wish it were possible for all programs to be free, but not every small developer has a big corporate sponsor or a day job, and they need to charge for their work in order to make a living. Writers can empathize with that! Anyway, I think Scrivener is well worth the asking price, and it’s simply not true that all Linux users will refuse to pay for any software. I’ve bought Linux-native games from independent developers. I’ll pay for Scrivener. It’s great to be offered the chance to work in my OS-of-choice (and it’s especially wonderful to be able to use software designed to write longer works–OpenOffice can be a real monster sometimes, as can MS Word).
Also–Lee, let me know if I’m incorrect–I believe this is a special build of the Windows version.
Hope somewhere in all that was an answer for some of your questions. 
Progress notes:
On Ubuntu 10.04 / Gnome:
Changes to the Preferences give me the disappearing cursor issue. Resetting to Default gives me back the cursor.
I get the window resize issue, too. Closing the Inspector does fix it. Simple enough to do.
File–>Import–>Web Page IS working for me. I’ve had a few images which didn’t import on the page (possibly java script issues?) but text and most images show up fine.
Drag and drop from Nautilus (file manager) into Scrivener works with RTF (with formatting, so far as I’ve seen) and TXT files. It also works with PNG files, but not with JPEGs.
MP3 files can be dropped or imported, and while they don’t play (I didn’t expect them to), Scrivener does seem to recognize them as media files. It opens the play and volume controls on the media file’s page in the Research folder. Clicking play doesn’t work, but maybe it’s helpful to know that Scrivener at least tries?
If the “target word count” bar in the lower right corner is showing a moving bar and this annoys you, you can click on the target button in the bottom right corner and set the word count to something less than your current word count and the bar will show 100% (yes, movements on my interface distract me sometimes…) Setting it to 0 doesn’t work–at least not for me. With 0 I still get the moving bar. ETA: I see this bug also happens for Windows users, and they have the same workaround. Now that I’m running LinScriv I don’t check out the Windows threads as often as I should.
I couldn’t help but join up after seeing a full-blown Linux release 
The released beta and the library redirection mentioned earlier work just fine. I’m on Ubuntu 10.04 AMD64, and so far it’s going fine. Much better than the Wine situation, in any case. I’ll get to playing around with it and see if any bugs stick out.
Thanks for the release!
Hi, Demonax. Welcome to the LinScriv, TuxScriv, Not-Mac-nor-Win-Scriv community.
Cool to have an Ubuntu 10.04 AMD64 user here. I’m on 10.04, but i386. Let us know what you find.
catalinux, I noticed you put your distro in your signature. Very cool idea–I admit I do feel kinda “well, duh, why didn’t I think of that” 
Anyway, it’s really helpful and I hope other Linux users will follow suit.
If you have Inspector open, it seems likely you aren’t seeing the target word count button or bar. Closing Inspector and resizing the window will reveal they exist at the bottom right of the window. Re-opening Inspector causes the window to increase to full screen vertically though not horizontally if you’ve resized the width of the window, and this causes the word count button and bar to vanish. Useful to know if you want to write to a target word count–the feature is there, but for now you have to close Inspector to see it.
When you use File–>Open double click on the .scriv folder, then double click on the “project.scrivx” inside.
I’m glad everyone appreciates my package
Its rather trivial for me to update it for future changes. The licensing/copyright issue is more a concern of L&L than it is mine, I don’t care, as long as they come up with something final. As a ‘maintainer’ I am only concerned with making sure that new releases are packaged.
subsequently, once licensing is worked out, and a copyright finalized, there is no reason why scrivener couldn’t be packaged for the Multiverse component of the ubuntu repositories. Scrivener, at least according to the current license, would be classified as ‘non-free’.
There is only one major issue with the current binaries: as far as we know, it was indicated that the Qt libraries included are custom. This does not mean, though, that they are not subject to the license that Qt is under. This would have to be addressed if special binaries are going to be included.
Otherwise, the software portion which is solely copywritten to L&L may of course be put under any license that they wish, closed-source or whatnot.
As was indicated, there is no copyright violation present in the linux version concerning windows libraries; since most of the development was done with Qt, we get the benefit without the need for windows libraries. This is the only reason why they were able to provide a Linux version in the first place.
I am surprised to hear that there are issues with Scrivener showing up in the menu. The format I employed is the one supported by both Gnome and KDE under the freedesktop specification. Regardless, if someone wants to provide a fix, I can implement it in the package.
Furthermore, considering that the percompiled binaries were compiled for i386, i’m assuming that the Demonax is using the 32bit libraries for that?
Mostly, I would most like to know, from the developers, exactly what the dependencies are so I can incorporate them into the package.
And, of course, any fixes that are found which can be implemented, will be. I want to provide a solid package.
As far as the menu issue, I can only theorize that since the MintMenu that comes default on Linux Mint is a modified version of the gnome menu something may be changed. Why I can’t launch Scriv from there I have no idea. I’m not knowledgeable enough. I went as far as to change the command in the menu item and still nothing. But it does show up and launch fine from the default ubuntu menu (Applications Places System) and the default gnome menu. For me its a meh issue. I don’t really care for the mintmenu anyway. It could very well be me and my install, but hey, I can use Scriv on Linux. Thats all I really care about.
Found that after clicking around more.
Hi Randy,
Just to clarify, I didn’t use your .deb package. Sorry if I didn’t make that more clear; I just installed manually from the .zip archive that was provided, and had to direct Scrivener to use the included libraries with the commands provided earlier in the thread.
Based on past experience, it probably wouldn’t work with the 32bit libraries in the .deb package. Ubuntu has been very temperamental about that.
Thank you for packaging and maintaining the Debian version for us. That’s going to make it so much easier for users of any Debian variant to install it in the first place and to keep up with updates. Ease of install and upgrading are HUGE assets for many Linux users, especially the newer ones who aren’t fond of the CLI–like my 72 year old Mom, who runs Ubuntu.
Scrivener in Multiverse would rock!
ah, as far as the .deb packaging is concerned, its just a fancy way of re-arranging the .zip. For all intensive purposes, the .deb is exactly the same, which is why i asked. whatever libraries are in the .deb are identical to what is in the .zip. thus, if you didn’t do anything unique in amd64 to get it working, that wouldn’t have otherwise needed to be done in i386.
If you can, would you try this, anyway, on AMD64 to see if it works? we would be much abliged
Minor update to the package:
scrivener-beta (1.0beta-2)
* Changed arch to all.
* modified /usr/bin/scrivener-beta to use LD_LIBRARY_PATH instead of
/ld-linux.so.2
I’m on a Win partition at the moment, but I’ll give it a shot later when I’m back on Ubuntu. If it’s not any different than the .zip archive, then I doubt it’ll be any difference but it never hurts to test on Linux