Linux Expo

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Some items of possible interest to XyWriters at this year's Linux Expo:
CodeWeavers (www.codeweavers.com) offers CrossOver Office, which lets one
install MS Office directly on Linux; the brochure has the cryptic
statement "CrossOver Office is capable of running a wide range of Windows
software, but CodeWeavers supports the following applications," followed
by a list of the componenets of MS Office 97 & 2000, plus Lotus Notes and
Quicken. So whether XyWin or NBWin would run is a question.
Acronis (www.acronis.com) offers partitioning (PartitionExpert 2003),
boot manager (OS Selector8.0), and backup and restore (True Image 6.0) to
all media (CD/RW, DVD, Zip, et al.). These support Linux's ReiserFS file
system, which they claim is not elsewere supported.
SuSE Linux (www.suse.com), one of the major Linux distributions (or
"distros"; prepackaged set of Linux CDs with installer, tools, and
applications) will be offering the latest version of OpenOffice, the
freeware version of Sun's StarOffice; it can open Word files, and offers
a spreadsheet and presentation package. (OpenOffice wasn't ready for
release at the show, to a lot of people's disappointment.)
The Bulletin of the Free Software Foundation (www.fsf.org) has
some hair-raising news about MicroSquelch's nefarious doings. A piece by
founder Richard M. Stallman dissects the Micro$oft-Intel "trusted
computing" initiative, which makes Big Brother look like a truly
benevolent despot by comparison. According to Stallman, under this
scheme, "the computer includes a digital encryption and signature device,
and the keys are kept secret from you," the end user. "Proprietary
programs will use this device to control which other programs you can
run, which documents or data you can access, and what programs you can
pass them to." It sounds like a paranoic's nightmare, but..."
Several people I spoke to thought that XyWrite would not need much
rewriting, since it is written in Assembler, to be ported to Linux, but
of course the problem is finding a developer that would be interested,
and then the developer's finding the owner of record and getting
permission.
Patricia