Daily Bytes

One of the features Linux needs to address in order to be a real alternative to the other OS is a decent Officce suite. Every day we are getting closer to a usable alternative. The three major components that need to be addresses are, in no particular order: Text Processing, Spreadsheet and Presentations.

The Text Processor

According to Slashdot, AbiWord 2.2 has been released today and besides numerous bugfixes it has some great new features like Mac OS X support and Text Wrapped Images.

IMHO AbiWord its still not ready to work with Real Documents ™. For that I still use LaTeX and its nice frontend Lyx.

The Spreadsheet

Suprisingly the spreadsheet has been the first issue to be taken care of with Gnumeric. Gnumeric really is one of those Open Source projects that are one step ahead of the others.

Presentations

What we didn’t have was a Presentation Application. But that seems to be changing. As today I found out there is a new (old?) project ou there calles Criawips. Criawips seems to be a very active project and going in the right direction although it’s still a very imature product.

The Suite

What’s even nicer is that AbiWord and Gnumeric already have some kind of interaction between them, with users being able to copy objects from one into the other. This two products already are part of a bigger picture: GNOME Office. Maybe will see Criawips joining in the near future.

The Footnote

And for those that are wondering: Yes I know OpenOffice, but for me, a cramped application suite that takes 5-10 minutes to open isn’t even an alternative.