I am reviewing the free downloadable version of Corel Wordperfeect for Linux. I highly doubt the $99 personal version is much better, as the only major addition I know of, is the ability to add new fonts.

I bought a copy of this on Ebay a few weeks back for 3 bucks, so I figured, what the heck. I popped it in my cd drive, unpacked the gzipped archive and fired up the install. The graphical install failed to start.

I figured, no prob - I'll use the text install. It started, but it did little else returning about 100 errors of file not found and what not.

I hit the net to try to find some install help and it wasn't long before I found out that WP8 is based on the old Libc5 and old Xlib6g packages. OLD I TELL YOU.

Well, I installed these legacy packages and restarted the instillation prgram. ALl it returned was, "Nothing more to do". It turns out you have to delete all the install files, and unzip the gzipped archive again. I did, and the graphical install went smoothly after this I must say.

I fired up the program to find about 2 or 3 usable fonts: Helvitica, Courier, and of course, Times (if you can call this ugly font usable).

Helvitica is the only one I use and the only smooth, non-typewriter looking font in this whole package. The rest are a bunch of symbols or greek fonts. VERY POOR!

I hit the net to try to figure out how to install new fonts, and found, you can't - Not in the download version. You have to go buy the personal version for around 99 bucks. Forget that.

If you have WP7, you can use its font installer as it is the same exact version used in WP8.

So, I have 3 fonts I can really use, but even they look dreadfully ugly and jagged on the screen. But how do they looked printed?

Off to setup my printer now which is one of the most highly supported printers in linux (but also a very qwerky one) - An old Epson Stylus Color 400. At the time, I had LPRng installed as my printing system...

I went to Corel's site and found that WP8 for linux uses WP's DOS printer drivers - Which is nice in theory considering they have support for almost every printer known to man.

I quickly found, downloaded, and installed the Epson driver and hit the print button. It started printing alright, but it printed out some greek gibberish.

Off to the net again to find a solution. I found that most printers don't work right under WP using their respective DOS drivers. Isn't that nice. What you have to do is install a postscript driver (like the Apple Laserwriter - works well) and pipe its output to ghostscript using something like magicfilter. If you don't have a postscript capable printer, you're probably screwed.

Well, I did this, and it prints well. Very well actually. The fonts look jagged on the screen but print out nice and smooth.

Well, I was having problems with LPRng a week or so later, so I decided to install CUPS instead. To my dismay, WP8 quit printing! Why, I still do not know and could not figure it out. Now I am forced to save my WP documents in postscipt and manually print them out.

In conclusion, it is nice of Corel to provide a decent free version of WP for linux users, but it just doesn't deliver. You'd probably be better off using that bloated piece of mess called StarOffice, that is, if it will install on your machine. (It locked my machine up completely.)

There's also a suite out there for linux called applixware, but it's around 100 bucks, and I haven't ever even used the demo version.

All in all, it is usable and beats using gedit or something like that as you can spell check and whatnot.

3 out of 5 stars.


Recommended: Yes