Installing yWriter5 In Ubuntu Karmic Koala

I happened upon the yWriter5 program and wanted to give it a try. But the Spacejock's instructions didn't work for me. I do admit to not following them completely as I'll explain. I followed the instructions given to unzip the files. Then I checked to see what version of Mono I had installed. Since I already had Mono 2.4, I skipped the step for installing Mono from source. This setup produced an error upon trying to launch the yWriter5. I used Google to find an answer and sure enough someone had solved this issue in the forums. The steps given in the forum were to uninstall and re-install Mono and add an install of the Visual Basic 2005 Runtime libraries. Once again I didn't quite follow the instructions given and went ahead and installed the Visual Basic 2005 Runtime libraries using Synaptic. I could now open and use yWriter5. This most likely worked because I already had the latest version of Mono installed. Evidently the Visual Basic 2005 Runtime library is not a dependency for all Mono related applications otherwise it would already have been installed. I hope this will help others to install and run yWriter5 easily.

For those interested in books that help you to write, on page 28 of this book the author plugs yWriter.

Installing Packages In Debian With Synaptic

I have gotten very comfortable installing packages from the command line using apt-get, aptitude and dpkg. In fact I installed Synaptic using aptitude on the command line. So if I can do this why use Synaptic? The problem I have is what to install. Aptitude will install packages with ease this is true. Synaptic will also install packages with ease and I can find the packages I want by either searching or browsing the categories. This is extremely helpful since I really have no idea what packages are available or what they are named. And I also get the benefit of a brief description.

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If you know what you are installing and are comfortable on the command line then by all means use it. It is very simple and you will see what is going on. But if you are like me and just don't know what is available, then Synaptic is definitely the way to go. Either way installing any of the available packages in Debian is a breeze. And for Debian that means lots of choices.