liam_on_linux | Entries tagged with corel

In fact, there are two free versions: one for Classic MacOS, made freeware when WordPerfect discontinued Mac support, and a native Linux version, for which Corel offered a free, fully-working, demo version.

But there is a catch – of course: they're both very old and hard to run on a modern computer. I'm here to tell you how to get them and how to install and run them.

WordPerfect came to totally dominate the DOS wordprocessor market, crushing pretty much all competition before it, and even today, some people consider it to be the ultimate word-processor ever created.

Indeed the author of that piece maintains a fan site that will tell you how to download and run WordPerfect for DOS on various modern computers, if you have a legal copy of it. And, of course, if you run Windows, then the program is still very much alive and well and you can buy it from Corel Corp.

Sadly, the DOS version has never been made freeware. It still works – I have it running under PC-DOS 7.1 on an old Core 2 Duo Thinkpad, and it's blindingly fast. It also works fine on dosemu. It is still winning new fans today. Even the cut-down LetterPerfect still cost money. The closest thing to a free version is the plain-text-only WordPerfect Editor.

Edit: I do not know if Corel operates a policy like Microsoft, where owning a new version allows you run any older version. It may be worth asking.

But WordPerfect was not, originally, a DOS or a PC program. It was originally developed for a Data General minicomputer, and only later ported to the PC. In its heyday, it also ran on classic MacOS, the Amiga, the Atari ST and more. I recall installing a text-only native Unix version on SCO Xenix 386 for a customer. In theory, this could run on Linux using iBCS2 compatibility.

When Mac OS X loomed on the horizon, WordPerfect Corporation discontinued the Mac version – but when they did so, they made the last ever release, 3.5e, freeware.

WordPerfect 3.5e�

(Image source.)

Of course, this is not a great deal of use unless you have a Mac that can still run Classic – which today means a PowerPC Mac with Mac OS X 10.4 or earlier. However, hope springs eternal: there is a free emulator called SheepShaver that can emulate classic MacOS on Intel-based Macs, and the WPDOS site has a downloadable, ready-to-use instance of the emulator all set up with MacOS 9 and WordPerfect for Mac.

To be legal, of course, you will need to own a copy of MacOS 9 – that, sadly, isn't free. Efforts are afoot to get it to run natively on some of the later PowerMac G4 machines on which Apple disabled booting the classic OS. I must try this on my Mac mini G4 and iBook G4.

The non-Windows version of WordPerfect that lived the longest, though, was the Linux edition. Corel was very keen on Linux. It had its own Linux distro, Corel LinuxOS, which had a very smooth modified KDE and was the first distro to offer graphical screen-resolution setting. Corel made its own ARM-based Linux desktop, the NetWinder, as reviewed in LinuxJournal.

And of course it made WordPerfect available for Linux.

Edit: Sadly, though, Microsoft intervened, as it is wont to do. The programs in WordPerfect Office originally came from different vendors. Some reviews suggested that the slightly different looks and feels of the different apps would be a problem, compared to the more uniform look and feel of MS Office. (The Microsoft apps in Office 4 were very different from one another. Office 95 and Office 97 had a lot of effort put in to make them more alike, and not much new functionality.)

Corel was persuaded to license the MS Office look-and-feel – the button bars and designs – and the macro language (Visual BASIC for Applications) and incorporate them into WordPerfect Office.

But the deal had a cost above the considerable financial one: Corel had to discontinue all its Linux efforts. So it sold off Corel LinuxOS, which became Xandros. It sold its NetWinder hardware, which became independent. It killed off its native Linux app, and ended development of WordPerfect Office for Linux, which was a port of the then-current Windows version using Winelib. In fact, Corel contributed quite a lot of code to the WINE Project at this time in order to bring WINE up to a level where it could completely and stably support all of WordPerfect Office.

I'm not sure if the text-only WordPerfect for Unix ever had a native Linux version – I didn't see it if it did – but a full graphical version of WordPerfect 8 was included with Corel LinuxOS and also sold at retail. Corel offered both a free edition with fewer bundled fonts, as well as a paid version.

This is still out there – although most of its mirrors are long gone, the Linux Documentation Project has it. It's not trivial to install a 20-year-old program on a modern distro, but luckily, help is at hand. The XWP8Users site has offered some guidance for many years, but I confess I never got it to work except by installing a very old version of Linux in a VM. For instance, it's easy enough to get it running on Ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10 – Corel LinuxOS was a Debian-derivative, and so is Ubuntu.

The problem is that even in these days of containers for everything, Ubuntu 8 is older than anything supports. Linux containers came along rather later than 2008. In fact, in 2011 I predicted that containers were going to be the Next Big Thing. (I was right, too.)

So I've not been able to find any easy way to create an Ubuntu 8.04 container on modern Ubuntu. If anyone knows, or is up for the challenge, do please get in touch!

But the "Ex WP8 Users" site folk have not been idle, and a few months ago, they released a big update to their installation instructions. Now, there's a script, and all you need to do is download the script, grab the WordPerfect 8.0 Downloadable Personal Edition (DPE), put them in a folder together and run the script, and voilá. I tried it on Ubuntu 20.04 and it works a treat so long as I run it as root. I have not seen any reports from anyone else about this, so it might be just my installation.

Read about it and get the script here.

Edit:

For more info, read the WordPerfect for Linux FAQ. This includes instructions on adding new fonts, fixing the MS Word import filter and some other useful info.

From the discussion on Hackernews and the FAQ, I should note that there are terms and conditions attached to the free WP 8.0 DPE. It is only free for personal, non-commercial use, and some people interpret Corel's licence as meaning that although it was a free download, it is not redistributable. This means that if you did not obtain it from Corel's own Linux site (taken down in 2003) or from an authorised re-distributor (such as bundled with SUSE Linux up to 6.1 and early versions of Mandrake Linux, and the "WordPerfect for Linux Bible" hardcopy book, and a few resellers) then it is not properly licensed.

I dispute this: as multiple vendors did re-distribute it and Corel took no action, I consider it fair play. I also very much doubt that anyone will use this in a commercial setting in 2021.

If you are interested in the more complete WordPerfect 8.1, I note that it was included in Corel LinuxOS Deluxe Edition and that this is readily downloaded today, for example from the Internet Archive or from ArchiveOS. However, unless you bought a licence to this, this is not freeware and does not include a licence for use today.

r/linux - A blast from the past: native WordPerfect 8 for Linux running on Fedora 13. It still works! [pic]

r/linux - A blast from the past: native WordPerfect 8 for Linux running on Fedora 13. It still works! [pic]

(Image source.)

Postscript

If you really want a free full-function word-processor for DOS, which runs very well under DOSemu on Linux, I suggest Microsoft Word 5.5. MS made this freeware at the turn of the century as a free Y2K update for all previous versions of Word for DOS.

How to get it: Microsoft Word for DOS — it’s FREE

Sadly, MS didn't make the last ever version of Word for DOS free. It only got one more major release, Word 6 for DOS. This has the same menu layout and the same file format as Word 6 for Windows and Word 6 for Mac, and also Word 95 in Office 95 (for Win95 and NT4). It's a little more pleasant to use, but it's not freeware — although if you own a later version of Word, the licence covers previous versions too.

Here is a comparison of the two: Microsoft Word 5.5 And 6.0 In-depth DOS Review With Pics

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(Hacked together from a few Reddit comments. Pardon disjointedness.)

Corel LinuxOS was a great distro. I reviewed it at the time.

It was the first serious big-backer effort to make Debian user-friendly and to make a Linux distro that could rival Windows NT 4 as a credible business desktop OS.

It has a custom remix of KDE -- I think KDE 2 -- heavily rewritten to make it more like WinXP. So they looked at Konqueror and discarded it as a bad job (overcomplex, trying to do too many different things... as KDE itself eventually decided too).

It had its own file manager, very like Windows Explorer. A real pleasure to work with. It even browsed Windows networks, better than anything can today.

IMHO, having used KDE since version 1, it was the best version of KDE ever and the only one I liked using. (2nd place: Red Hat Linux' Bluecurve edition in RH 9, before the Fedora/RHEL split, but that was just a really good theme and replacement of all the KDE apps with best-of-breed alternatives, which usually meant Gtk apps.)

I think Corel defaulted to Netscape Communicator as its web browser & email client -- Firefox didn't exist yet.

It was the first Linux ever to have display setup and adjustment using a graphical tool. You could just pick a colour depth from a drop-down, and drag a slider to adjust screen res. Just like Windows. This was world-beating stuff in the late 1990s -- nobody had ever seen anything like it on any Unix before. (Except maybe NeXTstep on its proprietary hardware. Which didn't do colour at all in the first versions.)

And of course it had WordPerfect, too. Remember this is before StarOffice (later OpenOffice later LibreOffice) was acquired by Sun and made freeware and later FOSS.

WordPerfect started out on Data General minicomputers in the 1970s. It was ported to everything early on. There were versions for the Atari ST, Amiga, OS/2 and classic MacOS as well as for MS-DOS.

The original edition was text-based and famed not only for its speed and very useful "reveal codes" function, which split the window into 2 showing editable markup in the bottom half, but also its very rich printer support.

In the era of text-based OSes, pre-GUI, it was common for apps to have to provide their own printer drivers. The OS maybe managed spooling but nothing more. No drivers. If you wanted bold or underline, you had to write all your own drivers.

WordPerfect did this better than anyone. It supported just about every printer in the world and did it better than anyone.

This early text-mode WordPerfect also ran on text-based Unix. I had a customer who wanted it on SCO Xenix 386. I installed it. It worked and the printer support was great, but fought for control with SCO's spooler. I had to edit SCO's "printer drivers" (really just shell scripts with minimal start/stop/set paper size control) in order to get it working.

The result was not great. In the end the customer switched users who needed wordprocessing from terminals to PCs running local copies of WP, and a terminal emulator for talking to the SCO host.

(SCO did not include networking -- it was an expensive optional extra on an expensive OS. X.11 was another extra. A C compiler was another.)

So WP always ran on Unix, for about 40 years, from before Linux was invented.

The first full-GUI WYSIWYG version, I think, was on OS/2 2. That was later ported to Windows 3 (and wasn't very good at first).

That's the version that they ported to Linux, version 8 of a full native rich Unix app, but an old Unix app with an old design, probably originating on SCO and running on various 1980s proprietary non-x86 Unixes, such as AIX, Solaris, etc.

I used it and liked it but it was a bit clunky. Printer support was good, though, which was a weak point on Linux back then.

So when Corel did a Linux distro, a selling point was the inclusion of WP 8.

There were 3 separate versions of WordPerfect on Unix.

#1 -- the original text-based version, no GUI, for proprietary Unixes with no GUI, such as SCO Xenix.

#2 -- the later graphical version, derived in part from the OS/2 and Windows 3 codebase, which was bundled in Corel LinuxOS. This was WordPerfect for Linux version 8, and it was a full native Linux app.

#3 WordPerfect Office

So about #3...

Corel got really into Linux around the end of the 1990s. It ported graphical WYSIWYG WordPerfect, it did its own distro, and it did its own ARM-based hardware, the Netwinder.

But there was no Linux office suite yet. WP 8 was the first credible commercial wordprocessor for the OS yet.

So Corel, flushed with confidence, and having now acquired WordPerfect Corp and part of Borland (for the Paradox database and Quattro Pro spreadsheet) and having its own Windows office suite, decided to port the whole thing to Linux.

But only WordPerfect was portable, cross-platform code. The other apps (Paradox, Quattro, Impress (presentations), InfoCentral (PIM) etc.) were Windows-only.

So it used WINE, specifically winelib. This was a related project to WINE but instead of letting you run Windows binaries, winelib lets you port Windows apps to Linux by providing Windows-compatible APIs to link to.

The result is a native Linux binary, although often called WHATEVER.EXE, which installs and runs natively -- but displays everything by calling winelib functions which translate Windows API calls to Linux ones.

That's how WordPerfect Office for Linux was written. Custom, tailored versions of the apps, with stuff that was totally Windows-specific removed, and features adjusted to work with winelib. But still, not a true native Linux app -- a suite of big complex Windows apps ported to Linux via WINE, and so dependent on WINE. And this is 20y ago and WINE wasn't very mature yet.

It worked and it was the first native (ish) Linux productivity suite, but it was buggy and unstable.

But then Corel did a fateful deal with the enemy. With Microsoft.

To improve adoption of WordPerfect Office on Windows, some gullible Corel boss was persuaded that what WPO needed was to be more compatible with MS Office. And the way to do that was to license the Office look and feel, i.e. the custom menus and toolbars, and the Visual BASIC for Applications macro language.

(Aside: you should realise that VBA was bolted on to MS Office when Office was quite mature. Word had its own macro language, WordBasic. Excel had its own too, similar to Lotus 1-2-3 in-cell macros. These were ripped out and replaced with VBA. For a while Excel could run _both_. That's what Corel did too... only it didn't even own the code it replaced its macro languages with.)

Corel licensed VBA and the look and feel and bolted them onto WPO for Windows. It paid a lot. Tens of millions, US.

But Microsoft insisted that Corel kill off all its Linux work as a result.

And Corel bought it. So it killed WPO for Linux... and CorelDraw for Linux and its other Linux apps. It killed WordPerfect for Linux, the native port. It killed the NetWinder and it killed LinuxOS. A lot of people lost their jobs.

The NetWinder and LinuxOS got sold off.

Corel LinuxOS became Xandros, also a damned good distro, but with no WordPerfect and no big-company backing. There were 2 more releases then it died.

The NetWinder sold some units as a thin client and then died.

But Microsoft had eliminated the only serious rival desktop OS that existed and it got paid money to do so!

And all this did Corel little good, because Microsoft just switched out the look-and-feel in the next version of Office anyway. If you install all the versions next to each other, they all look different.

Office 4 for Windows 3 just looked like a native Windows 3 app.

Office 95 had custom skins and title bars and buttons, so it looked more like a Win95 app with weird title bars.

Office 97 dropped the fancy styled title bars but made buttons squarer and so on, brought in tooltips everywhere, and switched all the file formats so you had to upgrade.

Office 2000 brought in the horrible self-customising menus, the edges of toolbar buttons disappeared except when hovered over... And Corel didn't get it because the licensing was not forward-looking, it was for one version only.

Office XP had "intellisense" and an unhelpful Help box and wizards everywhere instead of dialog boxes.

Office 2003 had more of the same, horrible shaded gradients in the toolbars and menus.

Office 2007 ditched menus for ribbons and I stopped using it.

Summary...

Corel LinuxOS was great, ahead of its time, but Microsoft killed it.