I remember the Linux Corel WordPerfect app. I filled out a registration form for a free copy once. It worked fairly well but by then I had been corrupted by WordPad into only liking M$ Office-like word processing applications.

Then StarDivision came out with a free version of StarOffice 5.0 and I never looked back. :) Linux StarOffice 5.1 installed into 120MB fairly comfortably, perfect for that first laptop with the 500MB hard drive.

To those who don't know the history: StarDivision, a German company I believe, made StarOffice first, a very close Microsoft Office clone. Then they released a proprietary Linux version, and made it free to test the waters. Then StarDivision was acquired by Sun Corporation. Sun made the source code for nearly all of StarOffice into Open Source (excluding the very proprietary Adabas database software) and OpenOffice.org was born.

Whats interesting is that the Linux version of Adabas was released along with StarOffice 5.1 and 5.2, so if you put up with the StarOffice desktop you could have a database application as part of the suite for free. I don't know if OpenOffice.org has added a database app yet. I doubt it, the assumption seems to be that MySQL is easier to learn than it is. :(

--- Jack [email protected] wrote:

Well H E Double Hockey Sticks! It's about time! ;')

I've also heard that there is and has been a Linux native version of WP for some time. I haven't used it in a while. I have an older registered and commercial version around somewhere. I found it worked ok. Don't remember if I had any complaints or speed issues, it's been that many years.

Brian D.

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