German softwarehouse SoftMaker (http://www.softmaker.com/english/ )has versions of their wordprocessor (Textmaker) and spreadsheet (Planmaker) for the Zaurus platform, and for general Linux as well, for that matter.
I sent them an e-mail, asking if they would consider porting their apps to the 770 (I've been using them for some time on Windows and Linux and find them generally marvelous). Anyone care to join me in the nagging and the whining?
" well, we do support linux, however our software needs the x86 libraries, so it
" doesn't run on this device. Additionally the demand for a version for this
" device is very small, so porting would be very expensive for us.
As I have no idea of the 770 installed base or about the actual difficulty of changing libraries, I could only reply this:
" OK, thanks. I guess I'll have to resort to Abiword and Gnumeric then. I do hope
" I won't start liking them too much, or I might forego on Softmaker applications
" alltogether.
" Best regards,
Actually, the above was the second answer I got from them. The first one was, quite predictable, that they don't support smartphones. It took another mail with explicit links to convince them that the Nokia 770 was not a phone. It seems Nokia made a commercial booboo by not adding something explicitely non-phoneischly to their model name; "770" really is not enough to tell people that this is not a cellphone.
How does it run in Zaurii if it needs x86 libs? This seems like a poor response, they hardly know what they are talking about.
I wouldn't know. Still, both Textmaker and Planmaker are excellent software and, very important to me, they behave identically in every platform I've tried them on.
It's a shame they're apparently not interested in a 770 port.
As a datapoint, June 2005 I asked for a straight linux-arm version of textmaker for the zaurus and got the below response.
On the zaurus, abiword gives me lots of problems with importing big word documents (even with a swap file), while textmaker does a pretty good job.
I would think on the nokia, textmaker would perform better than abiword also if the folks at softmaker thought it would be profitable.
I did purchase the previous version of textmaker for the desktop (windows and linux) -- but didn't find them compelling enough to use.
Originally Posted by
Hello,
as you are the only customer (so far) needing this version so it is very hard
to maintain another port of the software. In short: Currently we don't want to
have another port which has to be maintained, especially not for a single
person (you pay US$50.00 and we have to spend about US$300.00 a month to
maintain the port ;-) ).
> Hi,
>
> I have already purchased TextMaker for Windows, Linux (i386), and Zaurus
> (Qt/Embedded).
>
> Is it possible for you to offer the Linux version also compiled for the
> Arm
> processor (in addition to the i386 version)? On my Zaurus CL860 I have
> switched
> over to pdaXrom (X-Windows based rom) and would love to be able to use
> TextMaker again
> on it. Maybe just compiling the Linux version for the Arm processor
> would work
> since the CL-XXXX models are 640x480 resolution.
>
> Just asking . . .
>
