For those who are interested (and I know that many out there are not) here's a brief outline of my experience with Corel's Wordperfect Office 2000 Suite for Linux. If you want the short, brief, bottom line comment - don't buy it. The systems used were: PII 300MHz Dell Inspiron 7500 SuSE 6.3 Redhat 6.1 256Mb RAM 128Mb RAM Yes, I purchased the aforementioned product (the Deluxe version). Mainly because I needed a coherent set of office applications to deal with those who send me Word documents, Excel spreadsheets etc. (though I'm slowly "learnin'" them not to do so). Yes, I know it's not a native Linux application, but some of the reviews I had read sounded impressive, especially concerning the filters for documents written by M$ products, and if it worked adequately well for my needs then I was quite happy to run it under WINE. I first installed it on my SuSE system at home (SuSE 6.3, KDE). Corel don't tell you anywhere in the package that it won't install properly on a SuSE system. I eventually discovered through this list that a special script (downloadable from Corel) was needed. Well, it turns out that even that doesn't really work that well, and some kind soul has made the effort to create a good workable script (though I didn't know this at the time - thanks to those on this list who let me know about it). Anyway, I got through the installation with this script from Corel. It worked nicely. I thought I'd experiment and add some of the extra fonts. To add fonts, Corel use what is basically a version of the Bitstream Font Manager. I looked in the manual (yes I RTFM), found out how to use it and opened it up. Oops....it froze my whole system. Nothing has ever succeeded in doing that in the 4 years of abuse I've put my machine through. I had to hard re-boot (in fact, in that one evening of playing with this software, I had to hard reboot my system more times than I have since I bought it about 4 years ago). I hunted around the CD and found a document that is reproduced nowhere else, nor is it mentioned anywhere else. I read said document and found that it talked about the fonts. Corel use their own fontserver which has to be set up properly. I followed the instructions, tried again to start the font installer....system freeze (I couldn't even get a console). What followed was do until really pissed off repeat with variations end I send in a detailed email to Corel Support - their answer was pathetic. They told me that Corel used their own fontserver and then repeated the instructions that were in the hidden document. So far I've sent in 4 (quite calm, polite and rational) requests to Corel Support and received answers to only two. By now I had discovered several others having significant problems with WPO and SuSE. So, I completely uninstalled it (no trivial matter, you have to delete each rpm in turn by hand - and there's a lot of them). I suspect that the reason WPO didn't get on with SuSE was that I was running xfsft - though when I mentioned this to Corel Support they ignored the comment. However, my experiences related below tend to counter that since, unless I'm mistaken, Redhat doesn't run xfsft by default and my Redhat installation is pretty pristine. So, on with the saga. I then decided to install on my Redhat system (Redhat 6.1, Gnome). All went well. In fact it was pretty nice. I even installed some new fonts, everything was fine. It barfed a couple of times in trying to read in some particularly egregious Word documents, but otherwise I was fairly happy with it. This morning, I tried to add some extra fonts. Everything went well, fonts were installed. I started Wordperfect, CRASH!!!!! Not just a little hiccup, but major software crash, screenloads of nasty looking error messages, I mean major, major crash. Here are some examples of the errors (which by the way, appear by the screenload): Building font metrics. This may take some time... err:win32:CRITSECTION_WaitForCriticalSection Critical section 0x82d6dd4 (X11DRV_CritSection) wait timed out, retrying (20 sec) err:win32:CRITSECTION_WaitForCriticalSection Critical section 0x82d6dd4 (X11DRV_CritSection) wait failed Unhandled exception: critical section 082d6dd4 wait failed in 32-bit code (0x080ccbb1). err:win32:CRITSECTION_WaitForCriticalSection Critical section 0x82d6dd4 (X11DRV_CritSection) wait timed out, retrying (20 sec) err:win32:CRITSECTION_WaitForCriticalSection Critical section 0x82d6dd4 (X11DRV_CritSection) wait failed Unhandled exception: critical section 082d6dd4 wait failed inside debugger, exiting. Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0x00000000 inside debugger, exiting. Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0x00000000 inside debugger, exiting. etc. ad nauseam..... Others also include: err:win32:CRITSECTION_WaitForCriticalSection Critical section 0x82d6dd4 (X11DRV_CritSection) wait timed out, retrying (20 sec) Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0x00000000 in 32-bit code (0x00000000). Loading symbols: /usr/lib/corel/wine/bin/wine /usr/X11R6/lib/libSM.so.6 /usr/X11R6/lib/libICE.so.6 /usr/X11R6/lib/libXpm.so.4 /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 /usr/lib/libncurses.so.4 /lib/libm.so.6 /lib/libutil.so.1 /lib/libdl.so.2 /lib/libc.so.6 /lib/ld-linux.so.2 /usr/lib/gconv/ISO8859-1.so /usr/lib/libaps.so.0 /lib/libnss_files.so.2 GDI WINEPS WPROCS DISPLAY SYSTEM KERNEL GDI32.DLL KERNEL32.dll ntdll.dll In 32 bit mode. Register dump: CS:0023 SS:002b DS:002b ES:002b FS:008f GS:0000 EIP:00000000 ESP:4034f464 EBP:4034f488 EFLAGS:00010246( R- 00 I Z- -P1 ) EAX:00000000 EBX:000001af ECX:40370510 EDX:40370514 ESI:000001af EDI:40376f38 Stack dump: Symbol h_errno is invalid 0x4034f464 (_end+0x1019a4): 0807ca98 000001af 00000000 00000000 0x4034f474 (_end+0x1019b4): 00000000 40013000 08373fe0 7fffffff 0x4034f484 (_end+0x1019c4): 4034f64c 4034f4a0 080ce6da 000001af 0x4034f494 (_end+0x1019d4): 00000000 4034f64c 00000000 4034f4b8 0x4034f4a4 (_end+0x1019e4): 080509e2 7fffffff 00000000 00000000 0x4034f4b4 (_end+0x1019f4): 4034f580 4034f4d0 08050d4a 00000000 0x4034f4c4 (_end+0x101a04): etc...... I tried running the setup script again (which resets the users config files)...running any of the Office programs led to another severe program crash. By now I'm curious. I launch Netscape to visit the Corel site....Netscape won't launch. I launch an Eterm...well, sort of; it starts but part of the frame is missing and I can't type in the terminal window. It seems that WPO has completely messed-up the X-server (similar to the case with SuSE but not as badly). So, the Wordperfect Suite or Linux is probably not even a beta. It's obviously been very poorly tested and is badly documented. Having found several of the Corel usenet groups I've discovered that I'm not alone. Quite a few users have removed it from their systems are generally very disatisfied with Corel, their product and the response of the Corel technical support. So, it's back to using StarOffice, though I might venture into Applix. If anyone can give some good advice as to why WPO is giving so many problems, I'd be glad to hear them. -- Adrian Burd, Dpt. Oceanography, Texas A&M University http://www-ocean.tamu.edu/~ecomodel -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/