“Last week, I mentioned that I was having some problems with
Corel’s new WordPerfect Office 2000 suite for Linux. Just hours
after that column went online, Gavriel State, engineering architect
for Linux development at Corel, came to my rescue. With Gavriel’s
tips in hand, I had WordPerfect behaving beautifully in no time.
And although Corel still has some wrinkles to iron out, I’m happy
as a clam.”
“To recap the problems I was having: WordPerfect crashed a few
times for me; the Bitstream FontTastic font server didn’t seem to
work with XFree86 4.0; and I couldn’t get WordPerfect to print on
any Linux distribution except Corel’s.”
“Gavriel sent me a patch that makes WordPerfect Office
initialize correctly on Caldera OpenLinux and prevents WordPerfect
from crashing the first time you use it. To be fair, Caldera is not
one of the distributions that Corel advertised as tested and
compatible with the suite. Fortunately, the patch is extremely
minor. (I’ve included it below.)…”
“So, all in all, WordPerfect Office 2000 could be the killer
productivity suite for Linux. If Linux takes off on the desktop the
way I expect it to, WordPerfect may someday reclaim its crown as
the leading word processor in the market. In the meantime, I
only have one significant item on my wish list for the next update
to Corel WordPerfect Office: I want the calendar and address book
to sync up with my PalmPilot. Fortunately, Corel is planning to add
that feature in the future.”