[Solved] Cannot save to external drive

[Rebecca_D]

I have just installed OpenOffice 3.4 in Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS as I don't like LibreOffice (purged LibreOffice before installation).

The problem I now have is that although I have 2 external drives mounted which were seen by LibreOffice and are seen by every other application, for some reason OpenOffice does not see them. It only sees the local drive. This is frustrating as all my documents are stored on my external drives.

I am relatively new to Ubuntu, terminals etc and am still learning, so go easy with me please

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[RoryOF]

You may need to restart OpenOffice after the drives have been mounted before it will see the drives.

[Rebecca_D]

Thank you for this reply Rory but I am a bit confused. The drives are permanently mounted and even if I restart OO it still does not recognise the drives.

[RoryOF]

I think my results may differ from yours as I am using Xubuntu. I find that, to open a hot-plugged USB drive I have to navigate (using the navigation buttons on the OpenOffice file windows) to the main filesystem, /media/MyUserName/DriveName/directory, when you have to replace the path details with the values displayed in the OO file window.

A quicker method might be to open the drive in the file manager (usually nautilus on Ubuntu) and double click the desired file, relying on the file association to start OpenOffice.

My suggestion about restarting OpenOffice was because, in some circumstances (printers and fonts for certain), OpenOffice notes what printers and fonts are available at its startup time. It might have been so with hot-plugged drives.

[Rebecca_D]

Hi Rory. Thanks for the tip. Of course the drives are listed under /media. Silly me.