Hi

Suddenly Abiword won't launch - I have uninstalled it all and reinstalled twice but no luck - If I cannot get it to work can some one offer an alternative simple word processor.

Thanks
Tirnanog

Did you have any error messages after it brake to launch? If you provide some more information maybe someone could help you to fix it. As for alternatives I can suggest OpenOffice, LibreOffice or Calligra Suite (but it has some dependencies on KDE Frameworks and Qt so it may be difficult to use it if you prefer other DE). I have very poor needs in any word processor applications but when I have to used LibreOffice some time before it was rather intuitive and powerful for ordinary desktop user in my opinion.

Try launching it from a terminal, not from an icon or menu. That way you will see whatever error messages the system provides.

Hello
Suddenly it stopped lunching but no there were no messages. I am assuming that this is an update issue and looking at the net it has happened before. I have an office suit but this was handy for small jobs though not as good as some windows alternatives
I am new to linux and I have tried to find the instruction to load via terminal but no luck so far - if you can post those here I will have a go

Thanks
Tirnanog

In Linux, commands are just the names of programs, so every program name is also a command for launching that program. Open a terminal (you'll find it on your desktop menu, probably under "Accessories") and type abiword.

I managed to install via terminal but it made no difference. Having done a search I installed wine which was my next step anyway and I got word-pad working and via wine tricks an older version of abiword is working fine - I do not need a text-editor but a simple rich text editor.
Not as convenient as abiword in my menu but will have to do for now. If anyone has any further suggestions I would be very grateful but this is a solution if anyone has the same issue as I had

I use LibreOffice in a corporate environment consisting of M$ Office 2010-2016 and everything remains completely compatible.

Libreoffice is arguably the #1 native office suite for linux imho.

Calc = Excel

Writer = Word

Draw = Visio

Base = Access, etc..

add Thunderbird to replace Outlook and there you have it!

... and then copy-paste everything it spits out (including the command you enetered) and post it here.

omg! this is just evil.

anyhow, i suspect a deeper reason for why abiword stopped working.
maybe you need to fix your system.

what sort of linux distribution are you running?
have you been keeping it updated?

I am running a new Install and updated version of linux Mint Rosa 17.3 and I just tried to install again but no go with the version in the repositories I suspect an earlier version would work

Tirnanog

had another go and installed via package manager. Abiword appears in the office menu but will not launch ot respond to double click using terminal I get

VPCEA3M1E ~ $ abiword
abiword: error while loading shared libraries: libwayland-egl.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
VPCEA3M1E ~ $

Good work! Now we know why it won't run. It's missing one of its libraries. I'm surprised that happened actually, because the apt system used by the Debian/Ubuntu/Mint family is usually flawless in tracking down and installing required dependencies. The most likely explanation therefore is that you had this file once but accidentally erased or corrupted it.

The next thing is to try and find out what package it belongs to. Open a terminal and type:
Once you have found out the name of the package, you can reinstall it.

did what you asked result was

VPCEA3M1E ~ $ dpkg -S libwayland-egl.so.1
dpkg-query: no path found matching pattern *libwayland-egl.so.1*
VPCEA3M1E ~ $

now that is gobbledygook over to you!

Ok, let's try to do it graphically. Open synaptic, click on Search and look for wayland. There's a package called wayland-egl1-mesa that looks interesting to me. Check if it is installed on your system; if it is, the properties button can show you a list of the files it installed, which hopefully will contain your lost library.

PS: I just checked on the Debian website. Here is a list of the files in this package:
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libwayland-egl.so.1
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libwayland-egl.so.1.0.0
/usr/share/bug/libwayland-egl1-mesa/control
/usr/share/bug/libwayland-egl1-mesa/script
/usr/share/doc/libwayland-egl1-mesa/changelog.Debian.gz
/usr/share/doc/libwayland-egl1-mesa/copyright
/usr/share/lintian/overrides/libwayland-egl1-mesa

So it does really look as if you need to install/reinstall this package.

maybe this can help:
https://everythingoyston.com/2016/04...fallback-mode/

Thanks all I went back to a basic image in the end and built up from there though I am very elderly a friend insisted I learned to use clonezilla it has saved my life over the years but thanks all for your help problem solved
Tirnanog