OK, I'm a little disappointed:
I picked up a copy of Wordperfect Office 2000 Deluxe for Linux today. I
haven't found a free wordprocessor yet that I like, so I decided to give a
commercial product a try. So far, I'm not impressed. When I pay about $150
for an application, I assume that it will be written for my platform. Not
so with Wordperfect Office. Typing "wordperfect" at the prompt invokes a
wrapper script that calls WINE with the program "wpwin9.exe." That's right,
I've just been sold the Windows version of Wordperfect Office, with the
addition of a hacked copy of WINE that allows it to (almost) run on my
Linux laptop.
The installation began smoothly enough. The setup script detected my Debian
system and used dpkg to install the application components. At the end of
the install, I type "wordperfect," only to be answered with a segmentation
fault. After digging through the Wordperfect directories, I find an
undocumented script, "setupWPO2000," which manages to fix things. Granted,
running a script isn't exactly painful, but it would be nice if their fancy
User Guide mentioned it. So now it actually starts, but it's slow, ugly,
and inserts tildes into my document names (like MS-DOS does with Win95
filenames). Last I checked, UNIX had support for long filenames.
And Corel actually tries to pass itself off as a Linux company, what with
Corel Linux OS and all.
But on the bright side, Wordperfect Office 2000 Deluxe does come with a free
penguin beanie toy. Almost makes up for the many DLL files now littered
around my filesystem.
--
[ Nathan Saper (natedog@well.com) http://www.well.com/user/natedog/ ]
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