Office Suites Available on Linux

Office suites are rarely found on Unix/Linux boxes. There is no reason for this! There are several available, particularly for Linux. Some are commercial products, such as WordPerfect Office 2000 and Applixware; others are free and open-source.

See also: Jon's Linux Office Project.

• http://www.sot.com/en/linux/soto/
• http://en.hancom.com/

Corel's office suite is a port of their Windows-based product; Applix's is a Linux-specific product.

Corel WordPerfect Office 2000

Corel have taken an interest in linux, releasing their own distribution. They have released a Wordperfect-based office suite for Linux (around 100 or 150 US Dollars depending on version).

The Standard Edition includes Corel Linux, Adobe Acrobat Reader, WordPerfect 9, Quattro Pro 9, Corel Presentations 9; the deluxe version adds Paradox 9.

One can obtain a reduced-functionality version of WordPerfect for free from here. Download is free, but for use for greater than 90 days registration is required.

Applixware

Applix have sold their Applixware suite for some time (99 US Dollars). It integrates Words, Graphics, Spreadsheets, Mail, Presents, Data and SHELF/Builder.

It is (apparently): Fast. Native. Stable.

AnywareOffice is a (java) Web-browser-based office suite.

Here is some of their blurb:

Take your whole office with you, without having to carry a thing! ... Anyware is an integrated family of data and document integration products, including the Anyware Desktop (with AnywareOffice) and the Anyware Application Server... AnywareOffice - office productivity applications, including Words, Spreadsheets, Presents, Graphics and Mail... Anyware Desktop - Its AnywareOffice PLUS! With Anyware Desktop, you also get a development environment for application customization and an optional ODBC database client. (Note: Anyware Desktop was formerly titled Applixware.) ... Anyware Application Server - Extend the power of the Anyware Desktop by making it possible to access and work on documents from any web browser.

StarOffice is a full-featured office suite available for free download. The latest as of the time of writing is 6.0 Beta. It is much faster and less resource-hungry than previous versions --- the parts (StarWriter, StarCalc...) are now separated.

StarOffice is full-featured and imports MS proprietory format documents well.

A Little History

Once-upon-a-time Star Division, from Germany, offered StarOffice. This was available for It's available for Solaris (SPARC), Solaris (Intel), Linux (Intel only), Windows 95/98/NT and OS/2! The suite was available for free for all operating systems except Windows, for which it cost a little money. The project was not open source.

Star Division were bought by Sun; they offered and supported StarOffice. I quote:

It's a powerful, cross-platform office productivity suite that delivers seamless access to applications and files...'s It's supported by enterprise-quality training and service programs. It's absolutely free. It's available now.

Sun have now made StarOffice open-source. As a result the OpenOffice project was born (see below).

Open Office

OpenOffice.org is an open-source project created for the design of radically flexible and language-independent XML-based office-productivity software. Sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Inc., and hosted by CollabNet, Inc.

OpenOffice developed from the StarOffice code released by Sun (see above).

Linux, Solaris, MacOS X, MS Windows...

Finally, office apps which are free as in beer, and also free as in speech, that is, you get the source code if you want, usually copylefted.

KOffice

KOffice, part of the KDE project. The suite is not yet finished but is very usable.

Siag Office - A Free Office Package for Unix

Siag Office 3.4.7 is a tightly integrated, free office package. It consists of the spreadsheet Siag, the word processor PW, the animation program Egon, the text editor XedPlus, the file manager Xfiler and the previewer Gvu.

The Siag Office apps can write to PDF, which is dead handy.

GNOME Office

Finally, the GNOME Office suite: parts of it are at an early stage, others are "complete", e.g., the excellent GIMP. The word processor, Abiword is not yet finished, but is stable and usable.

LyX

If you like (La)TeX check out LyX.