Today I was writing in Openoffice. I went away for awhile and came back. The computer was in sleep mode. When I woke it back up I found myself looking at the login screen. I logged in and . . . Openoffice and my opened document were nowhere in sight. So, I opened Openoffice back up and reloaded my document. All my changes since my last save were lost. This is one to two pages of creative work that I feel rather sick about losing.

Is there any possible way for me to retreive my vaporized document? I am left open mouthed that I can get up from my computer to go grab a bite to eat and come back to find that Linux has stored my writing away in some never-never world. I am hoping that it is stored away in some temp document, or in an alternerate desktop, or something. Some place, any place, where I can get it back!

I haven't rebooted just in case rebooting will wipe out my chances of saving my lost writing.

I am running Mandrake 9.1

Also, is there any way to turn of the sleep function/screen saver? I'd rather a little less security for the comfort of knowing that the screen saver isn't going to eat my document!

Not really a solution but a tip, always save your data before leaving your computer unattended, even if its a few minutes or days. Would you be saying the same thing if there was a short power outage?

You can also set the autosave interval to one of your own choosing, as I believe the default is one hour. But I'm afraid your original text is lost. -- J.W.

http://www.openoffice.org/about_us/c...ion_guide.html also
http://www.taming-openoffice-org.com/writer/wsetup.htm

Quite true . . . and as it happens I normally do save. Today was the first day I did my writing in Openoffice in Linux . . . previously I always booted to Windows and did my writing in Openoffice there. I had Openoffice on my Win boot was set up to autosave every fifteen minutes. Today being the first day where I switched to Linux I hadn't yet finished tweaking everything and, as it happened, auto-save wasn't turned on.

So Murphy's Law struck and I lost a lot more than fifteen minutes of writing. Yes, autosave is now turned on for Openoffice but it seems the Mandrake screen saver/screen locker does not work properly because sometimes it will properly bring back up the desktop as I had it and sometimes I will have to log completely back in from scratch with everything I had open gone.

I lost a page or so of writing maybe the best page in the next great American novel but I think I'll get over it. However, I would like to avoid a repeat. If there is no way of getting my lost work back is there any way I can at least set up the time required for the X screen server to come on, or maybe even turn it off completely. If I could at least make it come on after every two hours of inactivity instead of 10 min it would make my life easier.

Rundi - my sympathies over losing language you slaved over for hours, I think we probably all know what's that like. If your question is "Can I adjust the amount of time that must elapse before the screen saver is activated?" the answer is Yes, definitely. I don't know what window manager you might be running (such as KDE, Gnome, etc) but you generally it's a piece of cake. In KDE you can just right click on the desktop, then choose Configure Desktop, then choose Screensaver. In Gnome, just click Applications, then Control Panel, then Screensaver. Look around a little in your system and I'll be willing to bet you find it quickly. -- J.W.

Thank you. I will do that. I am using Gnome right now, so I should be able to find the setting.