2008-11-07

A great alternative for OpenOffice, MS Office, the "永中Office"

永中Office, which is produced by this company called "Evermore Software"(www.evermoresw.com.cn) located in Wuxi, China, has announced its personal edition as free (as in free lunch), both for the Linux and the Windows platform, which you can download from here. Java is used to produce this software.

永中Office has a similar look as MS office and is almost 100% compitable with most of M$'s office document formats(In fact, Word, Excel and PPT). But it *CAN NOT* parse OpenOffice's ODF, which is sad news for the FOSS community.

This free(as in free lunch, again) personal edition offers functions to create word processing, electric table and slides documents.

The reason I switched from OpenOffice just now to 永中Office is that the later have a much more faster loading and processing speed than the former, although 永中Office is written using the same language as OpenOffice. Speed means time, which dominates.

PS: this software can't show its window and dialogs normally when compiz is running. But it can be fixed by editing the startup script which is usually "/usr/bin/eio" by changing it to:

#!/bin/bash
if test -n "$(grep "Ubuntu" /proc/version)"; then
export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit
else
export AWT_TOOLKIT=XToolkit
fi
pidof compiz >/dev/null&& export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit
exec 4<&0 0<&4 $line1/EIOffice.bin ${@:+"$@"} 2>/dev/null


Note the line

"pidof compiz >/dev/null&& export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit"

which is newly added to choose the correct AWT TOOLKIT when compiz is running, thanks to the post at here.