I decided, somewhat rashly, to give the 64 bit version of Ubuntu 13.04 a try. Mainly this was because I got a very good deal on ebay for a Samsung Q320 laptop (four years old, but with a 13.3″ screen with a better resolution than my netbook had).

Installing 64 bit Ubuntu

Installation was straightforward, I used the 64 bit ubuntu ISO file to create a bootable USB stick and then booted the machine from it. That took about five minutes to do its stuff, and left me with a dual boot with 32 bit Vista.

Scrivener for Linux

I did my usual and installed google chrome, calibre, filezilla and scrivener. The last one threw a bit of a wobbler, which I found strange as it runs fine on my netbook (32 bit Ubuntu 13.04). I hadn’t appreciated that there would be a difference because of the 64 bit version of software. A wee bit of googling though got me a post by Martin I Patrick about exactly this. So thanks to him I got a working version of Scrivener for linux on a 64 bit ubuntu machine.  (Hint: you need to install ia32-libs to run 32 bit software on the 64 bit OS).

Copying Files between machines

The next trick was to copy key files between my ubuntu machines. I hadn’t previously come across scp (copying across a SSH link between two machines). However it was a really easy way to copy files. Instructions on using scp came from the Ubuntu help pages.

 

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