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WordPerfect Office 2000 For Linux Reviews
You may be wondering if you should purchase the WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, since there isn't a downloadable version. Here are some reviews, which could assist you in making a decision. This is Canux review, and here you can find a review done by the people at Linux Weekly News. Also, you might want to take a look here -- you'll find comments from people who tried it (thanks to Linux Today). I hope someone from Corel is reading those articles and comments ...
It's using Winelib to port it's application which is VERY different
The application is recompiled for Linux.
Here is an extract from WineHQ's web site:
Wine provides both a development toolkit (Winelib) for porting Windows sources to Unix and a program loader, allowing unmodified Windows 3.1/95/NT binaries to run under Intel Unixes.
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
First, becaus the thing is not native it is going to be a bit buggy and I think Corel will learn quick that it is best to go native. Also, somebody give me a reason to EVER go and buy a product the minute it comes out. Even Corel that typically makes a much better product than M$ still has kinks to work out of the first product. I will wait till the next version or at least till some reasonable patch releases come out.
What is funny is the reaction from the community. I hear people blinding touting the idea of bringing Linux to the desktop and to the common user. Yet, they fuss when a major software player like Corel wants to make a product for Linux and expects people to -gasp!- pay for it. WTF?
Catch a clue people. Most end lusers are not download slackware, configure Gnome without ever asking for help (go help the newbie that asks a Linux user for help), and then download a laundry list of GPL office programs and tries to compile each one themselves (only wimps use RPMs or deb packages after all). The laundry list of dependency errors alone would drive them insane. They would be old and gray before they downloaded the lib packages and kill themselves in the end before they realized it was not worth it.
Our community needs to stop waffling between the extremes and figure out once and for all do we want to be the geek man's favorite home system/server OS or do we want to be the everyman's productivity tool? If we want to be all things to all people we are going to have to make some concessions. People like buying pretty boxes with CDs that they can pay for, install and expect to get support for from a big name. The geek in us all may hate that but it is true.
ACK
Well, yeah, its all fun and games till someone gets hurt, right?
:)
Remember, this is a platform that has gone without a really good, polished commercial office suite for a long time.
WordPerfect 8 is nice, but hardly an office suite. StarOffice isn't bad if you don't mind the occasional X server crashes and poor compatibility with M$ Office documents (WP8 is worse on that count, though) and the massive BLOATWARE effect.
Then there's K-Office, which, my sources assure me, be available RSN. Even then, as a fairly immature suite of programs, I doubt KOffice will stack up to WordPerfect Office, at least initially, which has had years and years of polishing to make it what it is today. (Well, from the review, it looks like KOrganizer smokes WPO's PIM on network functionality, but there is more to an office suite than a PIM).
But hey, if you want to stick with open source and need true power, there's always vi and TeX!
My journal has hot
And I must say I'm quite impressed with what Corel's pumping out for Linux. I myself ordered WP 2000 Deluxe (including Paradox) and I anxiously await it. The apps are really seamless and integrated. The perfmance seems a bit off, tho, because of Winelib.
I'm currently beta-testing Corel DRAW and PhotoPAINT for Linux (photopaint being my favorite graphics proggie) and even in their Beta 1 state the apps are pretty and polished. Again, there is a performance issue using wine. I have an Athlon 610 MHz w/ 256 MB RAM, and just applying a basic pinch, perspective or other effect on a simple object can seem painful. I did submit this in to Corel, tho.
These professional apps, along with Corel's OS will finally make Linux on the desktop a much easier reality. With Office and PhotoPAINT, my boots to Win98 will be almost nil.
BTW, did you know COREL stands for COwpland REsearch Labs? I got that at the roadshow also.
What do you mean there isn't a downloadable version?!?! golly, who needs to make money any more, how dare they try to make money of us! I'll show them, I'll use pico!
Now here's the tough part ... trying to rank WordPerfect2000 over staroffice. I've used both of them ... and I've used them both for windows and linux. The winner is ... you choose :-).
Corel for the last couple of years has started to see linux as the other market that they should endorse. Not to mention the neo3 ads are kind of interesting to look at. But Corel does lack a web browser and it doesn't really do that perfect of a job to take care of Word files. I do like the great printer support inside wordperfect and all the fonts that have been with WP since the old groupwise days.
Though staroffice is free unless you might still want to look at wordperfect because it's more of an application than an actual suite. It looks as if staroffice was meant to be loaded onto a computer and that's all the computer would need to run. Wordperfect on the other hand does not. I really like the slideshows that Corel uses through presentations alot more than powerpoint also.
Finally. The templates in wordperfect are what keep me coming back. If you're a student and you've had to follow MLA documentation before and hate to keep going back to reformat the page the MLA wizzard/template(Whatever you call it) will make the job the easiest.
Also the MakeItFit manager has saved me quite a few times. This feature alone is worth it to me ... it manages to take the document you have and change around font size and margins in order to make the document however many pages you speficy without making it look too obvious. This is also good when you've typed too much and want to shrink the document down.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
I just sent the review to the CorelLinux users list. Might as well post it here.
/etc to save settings and then did a fresh install of Corel 1.0 and then upgraded to 1.1 without installing the new kernel.
/mnt/cdrom/ ,run /mnt/cdrom/setup and follow the instructions. I run setup this way because even though the install program is graphical it writes information to the console that you launched it from. So you can see what files are being installed, problems that might occur, and you can make sure that the true type font server (fontastic) is run at the end of the install. Only problem: I had to run the setup twice on my laptop (first time segfaulted), but the other machines took it just fine the first time out.
.wpo2000 directory (which by the way is a WINE system directory). If you don't it pops up a "read this and then click yes" prompt and installs a default .wpo2000. So you have to be patient. Actually you need to be patient when loading any of the applications.
s ocket' exists,but I cannot connect to it; maybe the server has crashed? If this is the case, you should remove the socket file and try again.
/home/arrasmith/.wpo2000/wineserver-mand/socket
/, /mnt/floppy, and /mnt/cdrom to "virtual drives". Which is actually really nice for normal users. No equation editor of the WP 8-9 type, just the one from WP 5.1 - 7. Also pick a good default font because some video cards have problems with displaying "_" or "." (I've only seen this problem on one computer).
I just bought 2 copies WP Office 2000 deluxe for work (and home) along with Office standard (no paradox). Just some notes:
First warning . . . It looks like this is a "stop gap" measure to give Corel some time to get a true Linux native application. Why do I say this? These are modified Windows binaries that are being run on Corel's version of WINE. So not only do you get WP Office you get a rather nice version of WINE. (look at the script wordperfect and you should see how it can be made to run other windows binaries) Now WINE does give longer startup times, but once the applications are running they are rather quick. I've run this an a Cyrix 166MHz, K6 333MHz, K6 266MHz, and Celeron 400MHz and I am happy with the performance.
Installation.
WP Office Deluxe comes with Corel Linux 1.1 and I installed this fresh on a Cyrix 166 and upgraded from Corel Linux 1.0 on a K6 266MHz and a K6 333MHz (this is a laptop). I didn't have any problems with the fresh install and it was the easiest. To upgrade just boot from the Corel Linux cdrom and choose the upgrade option. The upgrade actually fixed my network problems on the K6 266 and but is also killed my laptop. I was able to fix the laptop because the boot cd comes with a rather complete running version of Linux (vi,etc) so that I could mount my hard drive and get my system running again. The main problem seems to be with not having interactive control of dpkg during the upgrade to handle conflicts. In the end I just tar > gzip'ed my home directory and
Also they fixed the 98% bug. And the partition program is Much Much better. You can now use your entire disk, keep existing partitions, choose to format an existing partition or not, and the overall interface in nicer.
Actually you don't need Corel Linux 1.1 to install WP Office. I've heard of success stories with RedHat 6.1 and Mandrake. To install Office all you need to do is mount -o exec
Running.
The first time you run an Office application it checks to see if you have a
After install the average start time was 20 secs to splash screen and another 20 secs to a running application on a Cyrix 166. All of the applications look like their Windows counterparts (probably because they ARE the Windows version). Again I recommend starting the programs the first time from a console by typing wordperfect, quattropro, or presentations (or paradox). After the first run you can just use the links in the start menu.
Problems.
If you run into a error box that says something like "The application has encountered a fatal error. If the problem persists, contact Corel Technical Support." Just try and run the application via a console and get better information like:
mand:~$ wordperfect
wine:'/home/arrasmith/.wpo2000/wineserver-mand/
And so all you have to do is
rm
and have everything working again. Which makes the graphical error box REALLY REALLY STUPID! Couldn't they add the message explaining the real problem to the box? Of course I could just see if the wine error message can be dumped to the kmessage box by looking at the wordperfect launch script (anyone what to give this a try? my bash programming isn't that good).
WordPerfect.
Nice. If you have used any word processor you should feel right at home. Weird things: File Open(Save) maps ~/,
I've been able to import several large Word 9 (MS Office 2000) and the formating is mainly intact. Equations are really screwed up though. It looks like the solution to the equation problem is to get the true type font that MS uses for their equations onto the Linux box (anybody know what font that is?). Word 8 and Word 7 conversions retain the formatting more closely to the original.
QuattroPro
The number one reason to get this package. A REAL spreadsheet. I haven't found any major show stoppers so far. By the way I have tried StarOffice, Applix, SIAG, Gnumeric, KSpread, and several other spreadsheets for Linux. None of them comes even close to QuattroPro.
Problems: you have to drag to resize and not use the maximize button. Also it seems to have problems with some very large spreadsheets. The windows version does 1,000+ by 1,000+ cell documents (where each cell is the average of the surrounding cells) and the Linux version just sits there. Updating of cells is also much slower than the windows version.
Presentations
Just plain cool. The Show on the Go feature can export your presentation as an executable. Your options are to make one that runs on Linux (2.2.x kernel), Windows 9.x, or Windows 9x/NT/Win3.11. The drawing side is really intuitive and suitable for minor graphics work. You can make an excellent presentation in very little time that is as interactive or automated as you like. Just plain cool.
Paradox, Corel Central
I haven't worked with these other than to see if they run, which they do. Corel Central doesn't interface to any email program which is really poor in my book. We need better graphical email applications than kmail or Netscape. Corel, can you bring back the one from Corel Central 8 (or was it 7)? If Corel Central just added a nice email/news reader it would be a killer application.
Bean filled penguin
My daughter (2.5 years old) loves him.
Personal Opinion.
If you want a working Office suite and have a Pentium 166MHz+ look into Corel. I am very happy with it so far, and I've been able to get several other windows applications to run with the included version of WINE. I just hope the upgraded versions will be native because nearly 40 seconds to load (on slow machines) is a very long time.
- mark arrasmith
Corel had to move much faster then the wine development team, so they made a private tree which they developed wine further..
Take a look at the wine mailing lists - you should see that Corel offered back the changes...
Hetz (Heunique)
When techies get excited about a Word processor. Why, when I was a young programmer, we did all our documents in Pong.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Corel, if you are reading this: Spend the time to make your apps portable, use GTK, and make true native Linux versions. Yes, it will be several man-years of effort, but in the long run it will pay off.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I really like it - I use Debian, XFree86 4, and a couple of font servers.
.1 - .25 seconds delay.
Adding the Fonttastic font server didn't hurt at all - everything still works, the fonts are beautiful and there are no conflicts.
The suite is very functional, and while having a few bugs, it is definately still acceptable to work with - moreso than Staroffice or Abiword to say the least.
And, YES, the suite is very KDE-Centric; but what do you expect? Corel is one of the large developers/contributors to KDE. As for the whole KDE-GNOME thing - just grow up. The source is free for both, QT is free source and FSF-certified as 'open source.' The crying about KDE being closed or somehow evil, bad, etc is getting very old and most uninteresting, espescially since the arguments simply aren't true. Of course, there are those who hate C++, but that's their deal.
I find it interesting that people have no problem with Closed-Source QuakeIII, CivIII, Whatever than Mech-type game is, RR Tycoon... man! Sure are a lot of closed-source programs there that are approved of! So what's wrong with having a commercial Office Suite? It's FAR more functional than the open-source counterparts at this time, and well worth the $ paid for it. (Although with Free software, you don't always get what you pay for... you often get a LOT more).
I had problems with the install of WPO2k - it was looking for some files that should have been in my path for root. That was my bad, not theirs. But, it has instructions for a manual-install via dpkg, apt, or RPM, so it's nothing I'm unaccustomed to.
The suite takes FOREVER to load the *first* time - it's building font-metrics for WINE. After that task is done, ALL the office programs load as quickly as their Windoze counterparts on my PII/450. The performance isn't 'snappy' - it's more like using a word-processor 5 years ago using a 486/66. Not bad, just having
Honestly, I am quite satisfied with WordPerfect 2000/Linux. I am still looking foreward to the first service pak for some minor bug-fixes; but there are fewer than I've seen for other office suites.
Being an open-source purist is a luxury that I and millions of other cannot afford. There is nothing 'wrong' with having proprietary software for Linux. Just because it's not GPL'd doesn't mean it's bad. Corel has created a product that is very functional and attractive to use, and - MOST IMPORTANTLY - it will give the press, buisinesses, etc. a good look at where Linux is going- that it is NOT some fringe OS, but is here to stay. The fact that WPO2k is brand-name, commercial software for Linux is going to turn some heads towards Linux. It will win converts to the OS. It will provide a 'gate' through which people will start using Free Software, and see the advantages to it. The release of WPO2k is one of the best things that has happened to Linux in quite a while. It will turn more heads to Linux and provide incentive to move to Linux. And that's what is most important.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.