COVER STORY Office Suites A tour of OpenOffice alternatives DIFFERENT DRUM Neil Kesterson, Fotolia Kesterson, Neil If OpenOffice is too fat and feature-rich for your taste, try one of the of- most popular, and significant, software packages on Linux, free distribution of fice alternatives. We found much to like and much to wish for when the StarOffice suite helped determine the fate of a business that drew its revenue we put six office suites to the test. from commercial Linux office software. Applixware includes a word processor BY MIRKO ALBRECHT (Words), a spreadsheet application (Spreadsheets), a vector graphics appli- inux was once without a full-fea- Open Source area, the alternatives in- cation (Graphics), a presentation pro- tured office suite, but now several clude KDE’s KOffice suite, Gnome Office gram (Presents), and a file manager of Lsuites offer word processors, (which is actually a compilation of its own (Data). In addition to this, the spreadsheets, and presentation tools for smaller standalone tools), and smaller suite includes a macro editor (Macro- the Linux desktop. OpenOffice isn’t the alternatives such as Siag Office. The editor), a developer environment for only solution – and probably it isn’t even commercial, closed-source camp in- smaller programs (Builder), and even an the best solution for many users. Some cludes ThinkFree, SoftMaker, and the email client (Mail). users object to OpenOffice’s enormous Applixware office suite by VistaSource, VistaSource offers a fully functional memory requirements and lengthy start- which was the first commercial office 145 MB, 30-day time-bombed trial [1]. up time; others simply don’t need all of suite for Linux. We took a tour through Unpack applixware-6-x86-linux.zip its various features. some of these Linux office suites. in your home directory and enter Both free and commercial office suites cd ~/applixware-6-x86-linux to change have appeared over the past few years. Applixware 6.0 to the new directory. Some packages grew under the umbrel- Applixware has a fairly tumultuous his- If you intend to install the software las of the major GUI projects. In the tory. Although it used to be one of the globally, you will need root privileges. 34 ISSUE 75 FEBRUARY 2007 WWW.LINUX - MAGAZINE.COM Office Suites COVER STORY user needs for an important keynote pre- sentation; the functions are quite easily accessed. In contrast to this, the data- base module is pretty unaccessible to the occasional users, unless the users hap- pen to know their way around the com- mand set of an Oracle database. Although Applixware will read and ex- port Microsoft’s Word, Excel, and Power- point formats, it is unable to handle data from OpenOffice applications. The Applixware help is a minor high- light. It not only provides tips for the in- dividual applications, but also offers a learning tool to help remove the head- aches from those important first steps with the office package. Applixware: Conclusions Although Applixware’s set of features is fine for home users and many office users, its old-fashioned, non-intuitive Figure 1: Applixware, the office suite veteran. user interface rules it out for users with modern distributions and state-of-the-art Typing ./install launches the small, con- are a different matter, and the program window managers. sole-based installer, which installs App- modules are nicely integrated. For exam- In networks with older hardware, the lixware in /opt/applixware. The vendor ple, if you double-click a graphic in the office suite could still play a useful role, does not attempt to integrate the pack- Applixware Words, the vector graphics thanks to its execution speed and rela- age with the system environment, leav- drawing tool launches automatically. tively large functional scope. However, ing the users to manually set up links to Spreadsheets tables can be easily em- professional users are likely to run up the program and to the file extensions bedded in other program modules. against Applixware’s technical restric- all on their own. The suite comprises a number of mod- tions fairly quickly, especially with more To launch the program initially, you ules, including a mail merger, a module complex layouts. need to pop up a command line and for tables of contents, a spellchecker, a In this light, the EUR 70 (US$ 90) ask- enter /opt/applixware/applix. Doing so thesaurus, and even a macro editor. ing price for a single license seems inap- takes you to a dashboard with some Unfortunately, many of the functions propriate, and we can expect to see the icons for launching the Words, Spread- do not lend them- sheets, Data, Macroeditor, and the selves to intuitive Builder programs. use. For example, You might expect to be able to access Words does not the other program modules via the File auto-detect HTML menu, but this will not be the case with links; instead, this program. The asterisk next to File users are expected takes you to search results in a fairly to call a time-con- non-intuitive manner. suming dialog to Users who are familiar with KDE or insert HTML links Gnome will probably not appreciate the manually. old-fashioned program interface. The Also, Applixware fluttery background, which is made up looks a bit over- of many dots, is strenuous for the eyes loaded with the and you will quickly notice that the large number of di- wheel on your mouse doesn’t work in alogs added onto documents or the file manager. the program at var- From a usability point of view, the Ap- ious places. plixware office suite is firmly rooted in The presentation the last millennium; the email program, program is an ex- unfortunately, is non-intuitive and pro- ception to this, vides only rudimentary functionality. however, because The suite’s speed and set of features it has everything a Figure 2: Siag Office is hardly worth installing. WWW.LINUX - MAGAZINE.COM ISSUE 75 FEBRUARY 2007 35 COVER STORY Office Suites demise of the office suite that formerly populated DoD machines. Siag Office 3.6.0 The only application to make more fru- gal use of system resources than Applix- ware is Siag Office, which makes the of- fice package useful in combination with ancient machines with 386-class CPUs. Besides the siag-3.6.0.tar.gz [3] pro- gram package itself, the homepage for the suite [2] has the neXtaw and Mowitz libraries, which you will also need to download. After unpacking the archive by typing tar xfz Paketname, become root, and follow the usual steps, ./config- ure && make && make install, to install. To set up the office package itself, you need the netpbm or libnetpbm package, which every popular distribution will typically install by default. To install Siag Office, again first unpack the archive, and then run the three usual commands. Figure 3: SoftMaker Office 2004 offers a word processor and spreadsheet, but it lacks a Before doing so, make sure you com- drawing program and database tool. ment out line 26 in ~/siag-3.6.0/xegon/ xegon.h as follows: selves as image files labeled filename.xx If you are interested in trying out Soft- in the home folder. Maker Office, you can download the 30- /* extern AppData app_data; */ The Siag spreadsheet also takes some day trial [4] from the SoftMaker homep- getting used to. For example, you can’t age. The two 16 and 17MB archive files Keep in mind that if you don’t do this, press the Tab key to navigate between contain the stand-alone versions of Text- make will stop mid-way. cells, and you have to press Enter to Maker 2002 and PlanMaker 2002, which After completing the build stage, sit complete input in a cell and move to the together form SoftMaker Office 2004 back and enjoy the view of a totally next cell. Generally speaking, its set of for Linux. A newer version, SoftMaker disappointing and hopelessly obsolete features is insufficient for normal chores. Office 2006 for Linux, is currently still office package. Besides the Siag (siag) The Xfiler file manager is ridden with under development. spreadsheet, which lends its name to the buggy graphics, and mouse actions are Drop the two .tgz archives with the suite, there is the Pathetic Writer (pw) restricted to selecting files or folders. TextMaker files into your preferred in- word processor, an animation and pre- Double clicking will not open a file; in- stallation directory, for example, /opt, sentation tool (egon), a Postscript viewer stead, users are expected to press Enter. /usr/local or your home directory, and (gvu), a file manager (xfiler), and a text unpack the archives. You can now editor (xedplus). Siag Office: Conclusions launch TextMaker by changing to the The Egon animation tool simply failed I can’t imagine anybody being happy textmakertrial directory and typing to execute in our test; when we tried to with the Siag Office package. Numerous ./tml. The PlanMaker spreadsheet is lo- launch Egon, it terminated with a mem- errors and the complexities of the instal- cated in planmakertrial, where you can ory error. The remaining office suite lation process will soon have you look- launch it by typing ./planmaker. components are no motivation for users ing for a more usable solution. Like Applix, SoftMaker does not auto- to spend time bug squashing. matically integrate the two programs Pathetic Writer has only rudimentary SoftMaker Office 2004 with KDE, leaving some manual work functions for formatting simple texts. Al- The current Linux version of commercial for the users. However, the word proces- though the suite can launch a calculator office software by Nuremberg-based sor does give users an excellent collec- and insert the current Xclock tool output SoftMaker (Germany) is not really a full- tion of features.