Misc. Ramblings

One reason keeping people from converting from Windows-based applications is the difficulty finding MS Office interoperable versions in Linux/KDE/Gnome.

Presently, there are two general options. Use semi-compatible office suite software such as OpenOffice, Sun's(tm) StarOffice or semi-compatible individual applications like AbiWord or KWord. For those with fast processors and lots of RAM (and lots of patience - ed.), you can try to use an Windows emulator such as WINE.

Each has it's problems. The Linux office suites are, at best, at version 1.0 levels of compatibility and stability. It is not unusual to find documents created in Windows appearing very differently in Linux. From simple things like bullet lists to complicated tables, the Linux version will look amazingly horrid. In many cases, trying to use a Linux based office suite in a production environment is an exercise in frustration as they continually segfault. And running an emulator is a slow, bug filled process.

While the long-term solution is to let Linux-native applications mature, for those that can't wait, an interim answer is to run MS Office in Linux via an emulator. Codeweavers' CrossOver Office tries to do this using WINE as a base.

I installed CrossOver version 1.3.1 without problems. The interface is a simple list of applications that they have install scripts for such as Office97 or Office2000 (sorry XP fans, no version for OfficeXP yet. Neither is FrontPage supported), Visio, Lotus Notes R5, and Quicken. Obviously, to install these applications you still have to have the software, but CrossOver emulates a Windows environment into which you can install, although not necessarily run as we shall see later, the above applications.

First up, I installed Office2000 Professional (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer, and Access) without problems although there are times when nothing seems to be happening. Conversely, running the applications found several problems. As of this writing, Access is not supported and IE has several problems (such as not being able to save favorites). A show stopping bug I had was printing which, through their own WINE PostScript driver, doesn't work.

But over and above problems in running MS Office in Linux, there are questions such as how do you download and install security fixes and updates? If you have Linux and Windows on the same drive, and Office already installed on the Windows partition, can you legally install it on the Linux partition without buying another license?

But the bottom line is you can install and run most of the MS Office applications which removes compatibility as a barrier from moving to Linux. This is a Good Thing. But do not expect things to run as smoothly (who would have thought to use the word "smoothly" when referring to Windows?) or as fast (ditto) as they do under native Windows.

As interesting as installing MS Office was, my main objective was to install and run Lotus Notes R5 since this is the mail system we use here at work. While the install went smoothly, I can not get Notes to connect to the Domino server. However, this is more a problem with the underlying operating system than CrossOver. In our environment, Notes is running on a Novell Netware server. And while Novell is switching over to using native IP, our Netware servers currently run IPX. Now as many of you know, IPX is not compiled into the Linux default kernel. And without IPX, and a bunch of betaware kludges, you can't log into a Netware server.

So, before I can even test how well CrossOver emulates Windows for the Notes R5 client, I have to get Linux to connect to our Netware server. Under Linux, this is not a trivial task so I will not be doing this until Red Hat 8.1 is out. Note that under Windows, it is a trivial task to connect to a Netware server.

But for now, if you need 100% compatibility with MS Office products, one way of doing that is to run Office in Linux. Just don't expect things to run as well as they do under Windows (heresy I say! Heresy!).

Aloha!