Corel To Test WordPerfect For Linux 426
prostoalex writes "CNET News says Corel will introduce a native Linux version of its WordPerfect Office product on April 15th . This will be a pilot project, as Corel executives want to find out whether it's worth competing with the other products (namely StarOffice and OpenOffice)." The piece mentions: "Corel previously produced a Linux-native version of WordPerfect 8, released in 1998, and offered a Linux-translated version of WordPerfect 9 in 2000, when Linux was still a cornerstone of the company's broader strategy."
The Corel stable of products (Score:5, Informative)
Then Corel got ahold of it, and the added feature sets were late in coming but full of promise, but the damn program just never worked. We got accidentally on some kind of instant-updates-at-all-costs program, maybe because I was vocal on Compuserve at the time, so I can't fault Corel on the number of update CDs we received each month. But the thing just didn't work.
Our word processor was WordPerfect. It was wonderful around 5.1. I beta-tested its Postscript drivers and this was in the days when the Apple rep ran away because he couldn't believe a Laserwriter was being driven by a PC through the serial port. We loved WP. Then Corel got ahold of it, and we had to move on to a product that, well, actually worked most of the time. So we went to Word, but it was a struggle because everyone tried to use WP secretly. What's wrong with a "Reveal Codes" option? Nothing. Why doesn't Word have one? Because the people who design it don't use it for creating pretty language. But we simply couldn't keep using WP, because it broke enough files to affect our ability to perform as a publishing house.
We also used Xara, which was cheap and powerful. Bugger me, Corel got ahold of that, too, and killed it.
Corel's the sort of company that one would love to support as a kind of perpetual underdog, but the reality is that there's been something perpetually wrong with their development cycle: stuff just gets buggier, and buggier, and buggier until it's too frustrating to use.
I'm sure there's room for a Wordperfect-like product, but it's a real shame Corel is the vehicle to provide it.
OK, help me out... (Score:4, Informative)
Am I missing something? Maybe this Corel thing will fill the bill.
(and by the way, O.T., yellowdog linux + simultaneous OS X + ibook = Nirvana.)
Re:Corel still exists? (Score:5, Informative)
People may adopt this for the same reason that they refuse to switch from Microsoft Word to OpenOffice -- familiarity. Even though OpenOffice provides all the functionality the vast majority of people will ever use, they stay with what they are familiar with, and at rather high costs. There is a rather large group of users who "grew up" on Wordperfect, and that's still what they prefer today. If this crowd decides to transition to Linux, and the price for WP on Linux is right, they may choose to use it.
Now, my personal opinion is that this attempt to re-enter the market will be unsuccessful. First off, the number of Wordperfect users has dwindled. Second, the adoption rate of Linux on the desktop is still too low. My guess is that the number of Wordperfect users who are switching to Linux is very low (although not non-existant). The second barrier to success comes, as you said, from OpenOffice. But more importantly, Sun offers Star Office. With Star Office, you get all the features of Open Source (a la OpenOffice) with commercial-level refinement and the backing of a large company. Those who want free can choose OpenOffice, and those who want support (or don't trust free) can choose Star Office for a reasonable price.
I think the only chance WP for Linux has is if Linux adoption on the desktop gains some serious momentum -- probably exactly what they are hedging their bets on. That will allow them to take advantage of the non-techie users who are a little apprehensive already about switching, and promise them that at least SOMETHING about the new environment will be familiar. Good places for them to start are with Linux distributions that have made it into the retail space at stores that target the thiry- and forty-something crowds, as well as some of the distributions that stores like Wal-Mart are offering on their low-cost PC's. Another possible idea is to approach retail stores like K-Mart or Target, and then team up with a Linux vendor and hardware vendor to offer a low-cost PC that includes WordPerfect. Finally, if they can conquer the internationalization problems that others have mentioned, they may have a real chance for market penetration in some of the developing countries.
OK. I'm out of breath now. :-)
The file format was OPEN and it was great... (Score:5, Informative)
It was an open file format and I could strip out all the formatting code and parse just the content.
There were other things about that were good, like linking files and so on, but the open files were great.
Re:To little to late? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:OK, help me out... (Score:2, Informative)
I'd love to see (native GUI) WP on Linux & Mac (Score:3, Informative)
People seem to complain when it looks like the GUI is hacked to work with Linux or whatever... sounds like something like this calls for wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) [wxwidgets.org], since this toolset provides native GUI elements on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Re:Why the animosity? It's a good thing! (Score:3, Informative)
Well, one quick example that I use quite often is the ability to easily have text on a line that mixes left justified, centered, and/or right justified elements. Very handy for titles, headers, and footers. No "tables" or "text boxes" or messing about with tab settings, just a simple meta-key combination.
It's not (easily) do-able in MS Word or in OOo.
Now, I don't know that would justify the purchase price by itself but it's part of the reason why there are still people (like myself) who would, for example, prefer to be productive and buy our own copies of WP rather than use the copy of MS Word provided by The Company and be pissed off at the lameness of the app.
When I want the page to look the way I want and not how some ^%#$^%*!$ paper clip thinks I want, there still isn't anything out on the market better than WordPerfect.
who cares (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Too little, too late ? Hopefully not (Score:3, Informative)
Taking from personal experience. In my "soft eng" class in College two of us [out of 6] decided that LaTeX was the way to go for our design documentation. We started the document [wrote a fair bit] then handed it off to the other part of the team [the other 4] so we could get to coding the damn thing.
They took our LaTeX and converted it back to MS Word. Net effect? Errors in the TOC, none of the figures had labels, etc....
I'm not saying you can't produce good documents with Word [for you OSS types replace Word with any other WYSIWYG editor] it's just that to get document finess is much harder.
That and once you learn the basic tags [e.g. chapters, sections, figures, labels, references] writing in LaTeX isn't that hard or slower.
Tom
Re:Lets hope Corel doesn't screw this up. (Score:3, Informative)
Recent numbers I have seen in articles about Linux (cannot find em right now) on the desktop seem to suggest that is untrue. Linux desktops apparently are almost on par with the Mac Desktop numbers.
You have other numbers?
"/Dread"
Re:Lets hope Corel doesn't screw this up. (Score:3, Informative)
About two years ago they took it down with no explanation. Go figure.
They'll fsck it up (Score:4, Informative)
I've still got that package in its original box on the shelf above me, and AFAIC they owe me about a 90 buck refund (interest accrues on money loaned does it not?).
It has never, and I even copied the script to my HD where I could edit it, been able to install and run here.
I called them at the time, (on my nickle!) and was basicly told that if I wanted support, to install their old crappy version of linux. Early 2.2 series kernel and all...
'scuse me but fsck 'em, and the camel that rode in on them.
Gawd, am I glad 4/01 is over...
Cheers, Gene
Re:Statistics... (Score:5, Informative)
Linux desktop sales:
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/2267
Re:Too little, too late ? Hopefully not (Score:3, Informative)
Word Perfect once you get used to some of its idisyncracies is significantly better at handling longer more complex documents than MSWord, again IMO. However you still run up against its limitations sooner than you'd like.
There is other software actually designed to handle larger documents though (Framemaker is one such program) which combines the nicities of WYSIWYG with the 'it does what you tell it to not what it thinks you want' level of LaTeX.
I like this! (Score:2, Informative)
This is interesting, because if you think about it, what does a small law firm need most? A good word processing application (no "Office suite") and security from prying eyes for that client/attorney priveledge. Hmmm... Linux can be much more secure than Windows, and with the addition of a lawyer's favorite document processing application, WordPerfect, we may just see a new niche for Linux...
Re:Wrong product! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Lets hope Corel doesn't screw this up. (Score:5, Informative)
This was the original intention, and in fact the reason Corel put so much work into the WINE Win32 API's in the first place. They had intended to compile their entire product line against Winelib to produce "Linux native" binaries.
Unfortunately, they were unable to get WordPerfect to build in the GNU development environment. Well, actually, they phrased it as, the GNU development environment was unable to build WordPerfect, but considering the existence of megaprojects like OpenOffice.org and Mozilla that build just fine under GNU, I don't think that's true.
So anyway, they just kept on building on Windows, making sure that they didn't use any API's that WINE would barf on (or fixing those API's in WINE as they went) and when it was time to ship the "Linux Version" they just boxed up the Windows binaries along with a single-purpose version of WINE (some people started calling these "Winelets"). Needless to say, the entire Linux community scoffed this in unison.
So, I hope they're serious about a truly native version this time. If it's WINE, no good. If it's Winelib, that would be somewhat acceptable. If it's a continuation of the WP8 series, still built against Motif, it's just not going to look good next to modern Linux programs. Unfortunately, if they want to get taken seriously at all, they're going to have to go the extra mile and rebuild the front end with GTK or Qt. If they're truly smart, they'll use one of these toolkits and build a truly portable application.
Re:Lets hope Corel doesn't screw this up. (Score:4, Informative)
Instead, they installed a complete Wine environment and commands like 'wordperfect' that started the word processor were really just scripts that called 'wine' to load the win32 binaries.
The trouble was that a) their version of wine was a hacked up fork and would ONLY work with their binaries, but b) they didn't change the components so as not to interfere with other wine incarnations (i.e. winehq, codeweavers). So, whenever WordPerfect for Linux was loaded, no other Wine applications would run because of things like wineserver conflicts.
There were innumerable problems with the suite, but that was one of them.
This is smart (Score:4, Informative)
I just bought the cd version of Corel Linux 1.0 in order to get the deb package of WordPerfect 8.1. It was only 2 dollars on eBay. It still works even in Debian unstable. You just have to fiddle with the dependencies a bit.
You can still download WordPerfect 8 for Linux and install it, though the legality of this isn't completely clear. Corel at one time made it available for free download. Several sites continue to offer it and Corel has done nothing to stop them. See the WordPerfect on Linux FAQ [linuxmafia.com] for more info.
WordPerfect 8/8.1 is a lot faster than OpenOffice, and more importantly, it reads WordPerfect files. A lot of law offices have all of their documents in WordPerfect.
There is a pretty good WordPerfect filter for OpenOffice (LibWPD [sourceforge.net]), but it's hard to compete with the real thing.
I think this will cause many law firms to consider switching to Linux.
Re:Lets hope Corel doesn't screw this up. (Score:5, Informative)
We paid Cygnus large buckets of cash to add several features that we needed to gcc. The big one was precompiled headers. Just about any Win32-targeted app needs pch, since they tend to #include everything under the sun and just assume that the compiler will go quickly.
Michael Tiemann (now CTO of RedHat) personally did the work, and made great progress with build times. Building MFC on our dual PII-400 boxes went from 45 minutes to about 45 seconds. Unfortunately, the gcc maintainers didn't like his approach to pch, and they're still trying to work out how to do a better job.
In the meantime, some of our development team was working feverishly to bring the WPO build system over to Linux - since it consisted of thousands of lines of dos scripts, we built a perl-based dos command.com interpreter that mapped the MS compiler options to appropriate gcc options as needed.
While all this was going on, we were also attacking the problem from the binary-compatibility angle, using the
After several months of continued work on gcc to get it building some of the stupidly complex C++ code WordPerfect used, we did manage to get large chunks of the suite's engines 'natively' built in gcc. But it was much less stable than the Win32 EXE builds that we had, and it was much more painful to deal with than the EXE builds.
The only thing that building with gcc gave us was debug symbols in the WP code, so we could step through WP code as well as Wine code. Once we had completed the work needed to get cross-debugging working (debug the EXE code executing on a Linux box via the MSDev IDE on the Windows side), that wasn't needed anymore.
At that point, we had no more reason to build with gcc, and so we switched over to using the EXEs. Ultimately, it improved performance, since MSDev generates better code than gcc does in many cases (still true). Despite what some people may believe, there is *NO* performance loss in running with EXE vs
Where did WPO2k/Linux fall down? Several places. The biggest one was the Font Server. We chose to use BitStream's 'Fontastic' font server rather than Freetype due to concerns over patents. That meant that WPO needed to have this custom font server running in order to get access to detailed font data such as outlines, etc. XFree86 4.0 shipped at the same time that we did and made some subtle changes to some of the x commands we were using to set up the font server. That meant that immediately, anyone running XFree86 4.0 had trouble with the product. That's where the bulk of user problems were. The font server also had some stability problems, and if it went, so did WPO.
Corel developed a patch, but never released it. I have no idea why - I was long gone by then. The patch was almost all in the Wine code, and several users figured out how to build 'corelwine' packages and get things working with it. The patch fixed some ugly repainting issues, which are among the most problematic things to get right in a Win32 implementation.
That said, other than the font server difficulties, the product ran very well. I used it for several years for real work without any serious trouble. Only in the last 12 months has it suffered due to the glibc changes in recent distributions.
I have no idea what the deal is behind this new release, but I suspect that it's just an update of the old, outdated WP8/Unix code to run on newer systems. It's almost certainly not the whole suite.
Take care,
-Gav
Gavriel State, Co-CEO & CTO
TransGaming Technologies Inc.
Re:CorelWine: Plays well with others (Score:3, Informative)
The FACTS are:
1) When it was released, the WPO wine would NOT run the other software that I ran under wineHQ wine (i.e. MS Office 97). Since there were never any real updates to WPO wine, this continues to be the case, naturally.
2) If WPO wine was running, wineHQ wine would NOT launch, and would either crash (sometimes) or hang (the rest of the time). Through trial and error on the Corel WPO4L newsgroup, it was established that so long as the wineserver process from WPO wine was running, wineHQ wine would not start correctly; kill of WPO's wineserver and wineHQ wine would then start. Yes, they were in different trees on the filesystem. No, this did not prevent them from interfering with one another at runtime.
Yes, I am still running fonttastic years later so that I can get my cobbled together WPO2K4L to launch so that I can still get at my old documents. Unfortunately, because of the glibc-2.3.2 compatibility issue, things like printing absolutely do not work any longer. If you are sure that you have a fix to any of this, FEEL ABSOLUTELY FREE TO VISIT THE COREL NEWSGROUPS and post your fix. The people who shelled out $$$$ (including myself) for WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux will be happy to hear that you have a way to make this stuff all play nicely together, as they've spent four years trying to make it happen now with very mixed results.
(Clue: some of them are damn bright people and/or Linux coders, as well.)
P.S. I now use Crossover Office to run MS Office 2002, and I still have the same conflict: if WPO wine has been launched first, cxoffice will not start properly and instead will just sit around and crank, without ever displaying a window.
I don't care if you are in the Wine business yourself (which clearly you are), empirical fact trumps whatever is in the whitepapers.