Notices

Thanks to both of you.

Nice box, by the way.

So any news on any word possessor really running ON OS 2008?

Well, I just got back into the US less than a week ago, so I will be settled in enough to start working on it soon. I did get accepted into Google Summer of Code to work on AbiWord (not directly on the Maemo port though) so I will have some time concentrate on AbiWord. As always, any Maemo hackers are encouraged to take a look at the bug list. I'll touch up the packaging sometime soon here - possibly partially replace it with a modified version of my new Ubuntu packaging which does some nice stuff (includes plugins in the main package, etc)

By the way, another way to play around with Linux and X-forwarding on a Windows machine is to get a free VMWare Appliance of one of the distros and set it up, in Windows, with its own IP address on your network. Then install SSH and some other apps and have fun!

Also, you can have Abiword running on your tablet today if you install PenguinBait's KDE and Johnx's Debian then use a chroot to run the Debian compiled Abiword. But we're all waiting for Ryan's Hildonized version...

Here's some screenshots of Debian AbiWord running on my tablet. For a (under construction) howto on getting Debian set up this way, see my wiki.

Note: This version of AbiWord is not "hildonized" and is therefore difficult to work with on the tablet, especially under OS 2008, and especially on an n800, which has no keyboard. You'd probably have better luck running it under KDE.

The About screen


My demo.doc Word document. Compare this to the original Word document. Pretty mangled.



Here's the icon I made for it. You click on the icon, and then you wait in suspense for what seems like a long time (but is only about 28 seconds), and then you get the splash screen.

You can compile that non-hildonized version of Abiword for the tablet fairly easily, actually -- although let me say WOW, that debian chroot with icon setup is slick.

It has the same disadvantages as the current abiword build for N800 users, though.

I've just gone back and added a bunch of stuff to my Debian chroot wiki so that you, too, can run abiword without compiling... And Epiphany-Webkit browser. And Gimp. And hundreds more applications.

Because I believe that "you can compile it fairly easily" is an oxy*****

Hey, it's all relative. Believe me, there is a difference between something easy to compile and hard to compile. Especially when we're talking about the IT, where you have a gcc toolchain that is much older than the one in current (read: debian and ubuntu) distros, and you're sometimes porting from i386 to armel... compared to some things I've had to do for the IT, abiword compiling is painless.

Seriously, you have a great guide there -- I might try to use it to set up boot-debian and also chrooting into it from the IT later.

Exactly. And for me, "apt-get install abiword" is an order of magnitude easier than compiling anything.

I have to say, as bad as AbiWord is, it is better than KWord. You know that picture that AbiWord misplaced in my MS Word demo document? KWord doesn't even load the picture! And what's with Bitstream Vera? What happened to Times New Roman?



Just for reference, here is the document in Word again:


Here it is in AbiWord: