See also: last week's On the Desktop page.

Note: An asterisk (*) denotes a proprietary product, (w) denotes WINE based tools.

Office Suites
Ability (*)(w)
Anywhere Desktop (*)
(formerly "Applixware")
GNOME Office
HancomOffice
KOffice
StarOffice / OpenOffice
Siag Office
WordPerfect Office 2000 (*)(w)

Java / Web Office Suites
ThinkFree Office (*)
Teamware Office (*)
Cybozu Office (*)

Desktop Publishing
AbiWord
iceSculptor (*)
Impress
Maxwell Word Processor
Mediascape Artstream (*)
Scribus

Web Browsers
Mozilla
Netscape (*)
Opera (*)
Konqueror
Galeon

Handheld Tools
KPilot
JPilot
Palm Pilot Resources
Pilot Link
SynCal

On The Desktop

KOffice 1.1 released. KOffice 1.1 is out; see the announcement for the details. The list of changes is lengthy and impressive. These changes include:

• KWord: a new formatting engine is powering the whole thing. KWord is now more careful in its on-screen formatting, so that you should see things the same size as they will appear on paper. Table support has been redesigned, and there is a new formula widget as well. You can now embed KPresenter objects into a document, and KWord can be embedded into other applications as well.

• KSpread: A whole list of new functions has been added. Hiding of rows and columns is now supported. The undo mechanism has been improved.

• Kivio: this application (a flowcharting program) has been integrated into KOffice.

• Kugar is another new application; it is a database reporting tool.

Those interested in KOffice might also want to look at the KDE dot News story on the release, which, among other things, points out a number of the shortcomings that the KOffice developers still have to address. The proprietary format filters seem to be at the top of that list. As a work in progress, KOffice certainly will have areas that could be improved; that does not, however, change the fact that this free office suite has come a long way in a short time, and shows no signs of slowing down.

Webmin/Debian update.   Last week we said that Debian developers were looking seriously at the Webmin administration interface but we weren't sure if they were adding it to the Debian distribution. Well, they are. The Webmin maintainer for Debian, Jaldhar H. Vyas, tells us:

Webmin packages are available in the testing and unstable distributions and I will make unofficial packages for stable available from my websiteWebmin packages are available in the testing and unstable distributions and I will make unofficial packages for stable available from my website.

Desktop Environments

Gnome Board Meeting. Daniel Veillard has sent us the minutes from the August 21, 2001 GNOME board meeting.

Interview: James Henstridge and libglade. The GNOME folks are starting up a series of interviews with their developers; the first is this interview with James Henstridge, developer of libglade and several other things. The interview concentrates mostly on libglade and its future.

Sun's Desktop Division making headway (linuxpower). Christian Schaller interviews a number of GNOME developers at Sun. "Still, most of the Sun hackers and their work is not well known to all members of the GNOME community and definitely not to the Linux community in general. To do something about this, I decided to interview some of the members of Sun's Desktop Division and ask them what kind of things they are working on. The number of people interviewed here is still just a small subset of the people working at Sun on GNOME and GNOME related technologies. Most of the people in this interview work at Sun's offices in Ireland."

KC KDE Issue #20. The Kernel Cousin KDE is back with "... stories on continuing efforts to improve Konqueror's support for EMCAScript (JavaScript), security issues when using webform completion, efforts to create SCP and SFTP KIOSlaves, and much more."

Office Applications

Abiword Weekly News. Well, he said he'd be gone for two weeks, but Jesper Skov has published another issue of the AbiWord Weekly News this week. Topics this week include lots of discussions on new feature requests such as tabbed windows instead of multiple top level windows and better PalmDoc support.

Desktop Applications

Bonobo Clipboard 0.1 'Hey! It compiles!'. The first release of the Bonobo Clipboard, version 0.1, has been announced. Since this is an early release, several testing programs are included.

And in other news...

Roundup Issue Tracking System. Version 0.2.7 of the Roundup Issue Tracking System has been announced. " Roundup is a simple-to-use and -install issue-tracking system with command-line, web and e-mail interfaces. It is based on the winning design from Ka-Ping Yee in the Software Carpentry "Track" design competition."

Simutrans for economic simulation (Linux For Kids). Linux For Kids reviews Simutrans, an economic simulation game that is similar to Railroad Tycoon. "The graphics are very good, with little animations a la Simcity. There is an AI that competes against you by building its own roads and tracks between lucrative spots on the map. You only make money by delivering the goods, not for manufacturing. Once you build the roads, you will see houses starting to pop up, and car traffic starting to use the roads you built for your trucks."

Section Editor: Michael J. Hammel

Note: An asterisk (*) denotes a proprietary product, (w) denotes WINE based tools.

Desktop Environments
GNOME
GNUstep
KDE
XFce

Window Managers (WM's)
Afterstep
Enlightenment
FVMW2
IceWM
Sawfish
WindowMaker

Minimalist Environments
Blackbox

Widget Sets
GTK+
Qt

Desktop Graphics
CorelDRAW (*)(w)
GIMP
Kontour
Photogenics (*)
Sketch

Windows on Linux
WINE
Win4Lin
VMWare

Kids S/W
Linux For Kids

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