Corel Wordperfect Office 2000 for Linux Beta Test

KiWiB0RG writes "Corel has opened Wordperfect Office 2000 for beta testing. The only requirements is that you run Linux, using kernel 2.0.30 or greater, and have experience in one of these software packages -> Wordperfect, Quattro Pro, Corel Presentations, CorelCentral and/or Paradox. "

Comments

Re:That explains it.

[Raven667]

Try looking at CUPS the Common UNIX Printing System. It aims to remove many of these shortcommings. CUPS is supposed to be able to give printer capability information back to the application, like every other OS, so that it is easy to change from Portrait to Landscape or whatever. It is compatable with BSD and SysV printing systems but its native protocol is the new IPP Internet Printing Protocol. I haven't had time to play with it but it looks like it should take Unix printing at least into the 90's.

The problem with Postscript - right on

[SurfsUp]

Using PostScript as the API for communicating printers is just a bad idea. PostScript is Turing complete. That means there's all sorts of analysis yousimply can't do to the stream sent to the printer. It isn't even guaranteed that the printer will ever finish (the halting problem). It would be a lot simpler if there was a drawing API, sort of like a subset of X, but for paper. Or heck, an XML-based page description language. Just make sure it isn't Turing complete.

Postscript isn't going away any time soon, and the glitches you mentioned will be eradicated over time in classic open-source style. The turing-complete problem isn't a horrible problem because the postscript-generating program can limit itself to generating postscript commands that are known to produce predictable results.

You can use the turing-complete features of postscript judiciously without taking the risk of your printer never halting. E.g, for doing things like headers and footers - you don't download the whole text every page, you just make up a function and call it. Not that it really matters that much with a fast printer connection.

But basically, I agree with you, why does a printer language have to be turing-complete? If it does, then why don't we make every darn interface in the whole computer turing complete? IOW, what's so special about printers?

Postscript is so firmly entrenched, though, that an alternate solution would have to be really compelling to make any headway. The easier to implement, the more compelling. So, what's easy to implement? I'd say, start with Gecko :-) and do what had to be done to it to make it render everything a printer has to render. We need that anyway (probably) so we do things like write full biz documents and books, using HTML+CSS.

Then we'd need a kickass way to talk to Gecko. XML would fill the bill, as you said.

I guess you've never run a Beta Test before

[DragonHawk]

As a developer, I can attest to the following: It is not possible to have too much information about a Beta Test system. I would really prefer an exact duplication of the test systems at the molecular level, but unfortunately, this sort of questionnaire is the best thing possible.

First of all, they are going to have to cull a list of a few testers out of the hundreds, if not thousdands, of applicants. To do that, they are going to want to pick canidates who are knowledgeable about computes, have experience with all the software involved, and have a wide variety of software, hardware, and configurations in use.

Once you get to the actual test, the exact combination of hardware, kernel, drivers, daemons, libraries, desktop environment, and everything else up to and including their background image, can make a difference. If you don't think so, you've never had to operate a Beta Test before.

I found their survey perfectly reasonable, although their were a few (excusable) DOS- and Window-ish questions on it ("TSRs" are "daemons" on Linux, etc.).

A couple of specifics --

OS and version is legit - you can run Linux programs on BSD as well, plus there are different distributions of Linux that can be considered different "OSes" depending on your definition of the term.

Windows version is legit - they could want to know if you have Windows install in a dual-boot configuration. (It could be simple stupidity, but neither you nor I know for sure.)