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Review of Hancom Linux 2.01 Standard
ELQ writes: "The Korean-based Hancom Linux announced that the professional version of Hancom Office Suite 2.0 is canned, but the standard version has just been released, four days ago. It seems to be a capable alternative to Star Office, for a very reasonable price. It includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation app and a rasterized painting app. OSNews has the review."
oh and Gimp... I almost forgot!
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
Hancom Office when I tried it 6 months ago.. sucked royally. They could have spent the time making a product that people would have bought up readily and fast...
Import filters for Open Office that correctly import/export Microsoft file formats.
I know I would pay $79.95 for such a beast.
Open office feels and works well.. the only place it's lacking is the import/export... and Hancom could have made a TON of money making those tools.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Scaled down versions of the Hancom apps are on the new Sharp Zaurus. Played with on the other day and they seemed to work as well as the MS apps on Compaq etc.
Listen, I prefer to send my docs out as pdf files or rtf if I can get away with it.
.doc format. I rely on OpenOffice at this point to do that job for me on documents without a great deal .doc style voodo and formatting going on inside. (I have only had one doc that refused to convert correctly with some very nasty embedded graphics by the way.)
_ __
However, I have been asked more than once to send a document in the dreaded
Unless a word processor can save in the dreaded doc format I am not about to chunk OpenOffice for all its speed issues anytime soon. It is a sad thing that corporate america has hinged most of its documentation onto this standard but they have.
I don't mean this as a troll because anytime a commercial software company releases software for linux its nice in terms of having options. I just hope they get their filters straight for the next release.
_______________________________________________
ACK
An UPDATE was just released.. 2.0.1
Pro is still planned *someday* according
to their last user emailing.. not 'canned' (yet)
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Actually, Sun isn't releasing StarOffice v6.0 for free to the Linux or Windows crowds anymore. And my own experience with StarOffice was that it was rather slow, and left behind a lot of zombie processes that defied even the almighty "kill -9".
What I'd like to see is Hancom Word compared against KOffice and AbiWord, which are still very free and fairly high-quality products. Of course, I'm still waiting for someone to port Bank Street Writer over to Linux. There have got to be a few loose cannons out there who are willing to give that a shot...
/* Steve */
"Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of"-TMBG
Applelinks had a preview a few months ago, and it's worth noting the differences between that review's projected features and the ones revealed in today's review.
But even more important than that is to remember that this Office suite isn't only aimed at Linux. It's also aimed squarely at the MacOSX crowd, which could help expand its market penetration. (Businesses that are slow to adopt Linux on the desktop are often less tentative about permitting MacOSX installations.)
Just for future reference, you can't kill a zombie process, no matter what application creates it. A zombie isn't actually running, or consuming any resource beyond the process table entry - its executable has been unmapped, its file descriptors closed, and its memory returned to the system. It's only purpose at that point is hold the exit status until its parent process examines it. And, a zombie will never be left behind when the parent process exits, as they will be inherited by init, which will reap them immediately.
A programing keeping many zombies around is bad ettiquite for sure, but not really a problem.
Perhaps he meant OpenOffice which is still Free in both senses of the word. StarOffice has extra bells and whistles but at core they're the same. For features OpenOffice blows away KWord and Abiword. For stability and speed, well, I'm told OO is much better nowadays.
Anyway, LyX beats them all hands down. If only it didn't depend on XForms.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
I went out and bouth Hancom Office when I read that the Visio clone had scripting. But it's just like KOffice -- some APIs exposed to Python, and undocumented APIs at that. I gather you can at least figure out the KOffice API if you know Python, but Hancom doesn't even provide that much info.
I prefer Gimp anyhow, but it is nice to see something that can compete with pbrush and "photo editor".
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Hancom Office costs $59.95, cannot export to Word .doc format, cannot do fonts anti aliasing, and works only with standard (RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake) Linux distributions.
On the other side - CrossOver Office costs $54.95, and it's running your own copy of Office 97 & 2000 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, even Outlook and Explorer!), does fonts anti-aliasing, runs on all Linux distributions, reads/writes .doc formats perfectly, and your money supports the biggest code contributions to WineHQ tree.
Now - could someone explain to me why would I need to buy Hancom Office?
Hetz (Heunique)
"...almost any Windows user...a Dell, HP, Gateway, Compaq...90% chance..."
To mangle a metaphor, what does this have to do with the price of dried plums in Korea?
I am not "almost any Windows user"; in fact, I'm not a Windows user at all, except for a few rare instances where I have to use one of the university machines to get around truly horrible Windows-isms in some important (for 2 seconds) Web sites.
I didn't buy my computer, unless you count the fact that the floppy drive came with the 486 SX-22 that my parents bought years and years ago. I guess I still have a valid license for Windows 3.1 and Microsoft Works.
I'm not "90%", I'm a Linux user. I don't steal commercial software, and I don't want to buy Microsoft Office...not even from UMBC for $20. I don't want to run emulated software; I want a Linux office program that does what I need.
The ironic bit is that I agree with you; this doesn't look to be worth the price. OpenOffice does everything I need, apparently better than this, and it's free (in both ways). Why would I buy this?
That said, it's good to see people trying, though it would also be nice to see them work to improve existing implementations (this is all mentioned above by other people). Someone else above mentioned the Korean car industry, and this ties in with what I've been saying about Asia: this is where the "revolution" will occur. People who can't afford Micrsoft prices, or don't want to give that much money to (or trust) a shady United States company. There are LOTS of people in Asian countries, and most of them aren't nearly as firmly stuck in the land of Microsoft and consumer culture as the majority in the U.S.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
LyX has all those! You need to put the MS Word mindframe to one side, of course, but LyX can produce any kind of document under the sun with great efficiency.
One thing I like is that LyX can do equations very, very well. Much better than Word, even, and I respected Equation Editor when I used Word 2.0. Show me formulas working properly in Abiword (not there yet) or KWord (severely broken).
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
...spamming software too. How else will the propogate the good will of people like Alan Ralsky and Empire Towers?