Thanks for the great review of KOffice in Linux Magazine issue #60 / November - thorough, fair and extensive. I'm the Krita maintainer, so it make me positively purr. Honest and thorough reviews make life very easy for us when we need to decide what to do next.
But KOffice is moving fast, so I thought I'd write to tell you about the great progress we've made for KOffice 1.5. Version 1.5 will probably be released near the end of January next year.
Krita, Karbon, and Kivio now all use Krita's greatly improved tool window implementation. That means, for instance, that the applications remember where the tool windows (we call them palettes) were when you last used the application.
Krita has 16 bit/channel colorspaces, cmyk, and openEXR HDR images - and a host of other improvements. (I regularly blog about them on planetkde.org.)
KWord, KChart, Kpresenter, and KSpread have much improved support for the OpenDocument format. We really expect to make OpenDocument the default, native document format with version 1.5, but in KOffice 1.4.2, there are already a lot of improvements to the OpenDocument support.
KPresenter and Karbon have received a lot of usability care and loving - much Karbon work was already in 1.4.2, which was released on October 11.
Kexi probably won't be integrated any better (we're planning better integration for KOffice 2.0 - which will be KDE 4-based and will probably be released late next year).
There'll be many more improvements, of course, and with 1.5 or 2.0, we'll also have added a project management application - KPlato - that's being developed right now.
Boudewijn Rempt, by email
| LM |
Thanks for the compliment. It is great to know that Open Source programmers who are working on fine projects like KOffice are tuning in to what we're doing at Linux Magazine. We'll watch for more news on KOffice 1.5.
In response to the letter from Shaun Pugh in the December issue, I know that Transgaming Technologies http://www.transgaming.com sells Cedega, which is a program based on Wine that allows you to run Windows-based games inside Linux. I haven't used it personally, but many of my friends have used it, and they say it is excellent!
You do have to pay to have it; for £33 (which is 55 Euros Or US$ 55), you get a 12 month subscription. With a subscription you get access to Cedega and the GUI front end, Point2Play. You will also find that there are older, free versions of Cedega on the Internet, and there is also a free GUI front-end called Grapevine.
We may soon have full game support for Linux, but for now, we can only hope and work with tools like Cedega.
Kevin Wood, by email
| LM |
Thanks for your thoughts. In our article on Wine in Linux Magazine issue #54 / May, p26, we dedicated a box to "Playing with Cedega." As we mention in that article, "Cedega is a version of the Wine API to which the developers have added DirectX multimedia library functions. Cedega even supports current Windows games with complex graphics, such as Half Life 2 and Far Cry."
Tools like Cedega are a good thing for now, but in the long run, it would be better if Linux versions of all these games could just run on Linux without a lot of additional effort.