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

KDE 2.1.1 release announcement. The KDE folks have announced the release of KDE 2.1.1. "The primary goals of the 2.1.1 release are to improve documentation and provide additional language translations for the user interface, although the release includes a few bugfixes, and improvements to the HTML rendering engine."

The list of changes details the differences between KDE 2.1 and 2.1.1. A few highlights are: Lithuanian language support, improved translations, better docs, and new icons. Chinese support has been improved. Konqueror saw the most change with security fixes, lots of KHTML work, and other bug fixes. In general, this release appears to contain a lot more fixes than additions, stability is a good thing.

KDE 2.1.1 is available for download on the numerous project mirror sites.

Siag Office. Siag Office is a free office package for Unix. The name stands for Scheme In A Grid, where Scheme, of course, is a variant of the Lisp programming language.

With a motto like It sucks less! and a word processor called Pathetic Writer, we can assume that the Siag Office developers have a sense of humor.

Siag 3.5.0 pre1 is the recently released development version, and Siag 3.4.8 is the stable version, both are available for download.

• Siag Spreadsheet contains some rather unusual features, including use of the Scheme programming language, a built-in mini web server, a file manager, mail capabilities, and even user mangement tools. The online docs fill in the details.
• Pathetic Writer, the Siag Office word processor seems fairly straightforward, it has support for RTF, HTML, ABS, and PDF formats, and visually resembles a number of other popular word processors. The Pathetic Writer Docs give a good introduction to the program.
• Egon Animator is the Siag Office animation tool, which allows animations to be created with a GUI interface or written in Scheme. Egon Animator can save its output in HTML, PDF, PostScript, and plaintext formats. See the online docs for more information.

Desktop Environments

KDE Community Launches New KDE Zine Project. A New KDE Zine Project has been launched. "Just a few short weeks ago, discussion about the possibilities of creating a print magazine cropped up on the KDE-promo mailing list. Today, the discussion has spawned its own mailing list, the beginnings of a Web site located at zine.kde.org, and a small group of volunteers who are busy working out myriad details involved in bringing a print publication to life."

Kernel Cousin KDE Issue #3 is Out. The Kernel Cousin KDE #3 for March 23 is now available. It summarizes ten threads, including coverage of the new powerful Kant editor in kdebase, Palm Pilot ioslaves, KDE socks support, a new font selection widget with font previews, and more.

KDE 2.1, What's new, what's cool, and why you need to get it (Linux Orbit). Linux Orbit takes a look at KDE 2.1 in a feature article. "With the release of KDE 2.0 on October 23, 2000, the KDE development team upped the ante in the bid for the hearts and minds of GNU/Linux desktop users. With major improvements in features and stability, KDE users couldn't wait for the next version. When KDE 2.1 arrived on February 26, 2001, few were disappointed."

Sodipodi 'GNOME Hall of Fame'. The Sodipodi Project (which is producing a nice vector drawing editor) announced the Sodipodi 'GNOME Hall of Fame'. The SGHF is part-fun, part serious. It is intended to be a list of respected hackers of the GNOME Desktop, with Portraits of all the people in question.

Office Applications

AbiWord: Free Word processing on all platforms now! (LinuxPower). LinuxPower talks to AbiWord developer Dominic Lachowicz. "AbiWord supports a large number of document formats, and we're always hoping to add more, as they only enhance our total value and usability. Currently AbiWord can import from the following formats: AbiWord, MsWord, DocBook, XHTML, Palm Doc, Psion Word/Text, RTF, TXT & UTF8, WML, and Gzipped AbiWord. AbiWord can export to the following formats: AbiWord, Applix 4.0, DocBook, XHTML, LaTeX, Palm Doc, Psion Word/Text, TXT & UTF8, WML, and Gzipped AbiWord. We're currently working on MsWord export, as well better Applix support and supporting the KWord, MIF, Siag Pathetic Writer, and OpenOffice formats."

Desktop Applications

Mozilla 0.8.1 released. A new version of the Mozilla browser, version 0.8.1, has been released. The release notes document a number of changes, including an improved Chatzilla IRC client, an improved JavaScript Console, better theme switching, a theme uninstaller, hierarchical history, gopher support, and lots more.

Important announcement for users of KMail 1.0.x / KDE 1.x. Old versions of KMail will stop working correctly on September 9, 2001 according to this announcement. Users should update to KDE 2.1, which includes KMail 1.2 to avoid problems.

GNU nano's first stable release. GNU nano is a GPL'd clone of the UW Pico editor. While remaining close to the original, it also adds some features that were missing in Pico as well as a sane license. GNU nano is a good editor for newbie users, as it's very simple and easy to learn.

Mahogany 0.62 release. Version 0.62 of the Mahogany mail and news client has been released. This release includes numerous bug fixes, speed optimizations, and a few new features.

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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