At the end of the March column, I said that I suspected that installing some Linux applications, and actually using Linux a little, would probably lead to more adventures. And of course, that is just what happened.

The Mandrake 8.1 Power Pack Edition supports StarOffice, and a wealth of other applications; that's how I installed the StarOffice office suite on my system.

I made a few simple choices during the early steps of installing Linux; later on, the StarOffice installer started up and I had to make a few more simple choices to complete the installation. It was very easy.

Although installing StarOffice was easy, I found various incompatibilities when I tried to use the product; more about them later.

Basically, a Linux package is a file or set of files containing all the parts of an application, plus information needed by Linux to install, update, or uninstall the application without much help from you. Package files are not quite the same as DOS/Windows "ZIP" files; with ZIP files, you have to "unzip" the file contents to extract the application's installer or uninstaller program, you have to run the installer, and you usually have to manage updates yourself. On the other hand, package files are not self-installing executable programs, either; you can't run them directly. And finally, packages come in several different flavors, from different Linux distributors.

When it started, rpmdrake asked for my root user password, so that it could have the privileges it needed to install packages. After that, it reviewed its own lists of the package files on my system to show me which packages it believed were already installed.

It also showed me a list of packages that I could install (because I had the package files on my distribution CD-ROMs), but that I hadn't installed yet. I could view the lists in an alphabetical list by package name, or in a tree list by package functionality (games, office tools, programming tools, etc.). For any package, I could see a description of the package (written by that package's author, sometimes in rather poor English or in very technical computerese); version information for the package; and a list of the files included in the package.

If I turned on the checkmark symbol next to a package in the "Installed" list and then clicked the "Install/Remove" button, rpmdrake uninstalled the package. If instead I turned on the checkmark next to a package in the "Installable" list and then clicked the button, rpmdrake prompted me for the Mandrake CDs that it needed, and then it installed the package onto my system.

The installer put a new GQview shortcut in the K desktop's Start menu, and the viewer ran properly when I started it.

I figured that, like Windows, the K desktop GUI had a way for the user to manage shortcuts and menus; I found it with a little poking around. By right-clicking on the K desktop's task bar, I launched the K "Menu Editor," and browsed my way to the menu that held the shortcuts for the games. To my surprise, the menu entry for the uninstalled game was no longer there. I'm not sure whether the act of launching the Menu Editor made it "refresh" the menus, or whether the act of rebooting Linux and the K desktop environment removed the dead entry after a delay. Regardless, the menu became correct without my explicitly correcting it, and it remained correct.

I was able to use the "Define Sources" button to browse to directories of packages on some other CDs that I mounted, but rpmdrake refused to add the packages on those CDs to its database of Installable packages. It didn't report any problems; it just didn't list the packages. Browsing the somewhat terse entry in the user's manual hinted that rpmdrake only worked with "Mandrake-compliant" packages, so I decided to try "KPackage" instead.

KPackage's GUI was similar to rpmdrake's, and it also didn't understand the packages on my non-Mandrake Linux CDs. KPackage did have on-line help, but it was rather technical and couldn't help me figure out how to install those packages.

All I had to do was double-click on a .rpm file to install it. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any way to display a summary of what the package contained before installing it via Konqueror. And with hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of packages on various CDs, it wasn't practical to learn about each .rpm package by installing and uninstalling it.

Using Konqueror to install packages directly from their .rpm files is convenient, but you have to know in advance what .rpm file you want, and you have to know that you haven't already got an earlier version of that package installed on your system.

So for now, I can only use the easy-to-use package managers with the packages that came with my Mandrake distribution. There are command-line tools for working with packages—for example, "rpm," Red Hat's own package manager—but they are also not so very user-friendly; I didn't explore them.

The main older method uses files with the ".tar" (for "Tape Archive," I believe) extension. Basically, .tar files are like DOS/Windows .zip files: they are a compressed collection of files and directories. You are responsible for extracting the contents of the .tar file to the right place on your Linux system, and you must run the correct "scripts" and commands to install the contents after you extract them.

At best, it's irritating, once you've been spoiled by a graphical package manager; at worst, it can hash up your system, if you don't do it properly, or if the installation scripts you run weren't designed well. I remember very good UNIX system administrators spending many hours trying to install large applications from .tar files. I don't want to get involved in that on my Linux system, and I certainly don't recommend it for anybody else, unless it's absolutely unavoidable.

I've done it many times for UNIX systems, and I've found that it's almost never a trivial task. Sometimes, you have to modify the source code to work on your system; it's a job for a programmer, not an end user, and so I won't cover it in this column. 'Nuff said!

Of course, it's the same way with Windows, and it was the same way with DOS. (And before DOS, it was the same with the Ataris, Commodores, Apple IIs... even the CP/M systems like the Morrows, the Osbornes, and the Cromemcos!) My advice for Linux is the same as it was for those earlier systems:

1) Search for, acquire, and install only that software which you really need; and

2) Join a user group to get software recommendations and installation help from experienced users!

(I hope to describe that project in depth in a later column; basically, it's a tool for business executives that helps them with strategic business planning. It's based on a live seminar that has received top reviews from thousands of executives around the world; I'm very pleased to be the one to implement it for the first time on a computer.)

The documents were created with Microsoft Word, and the slides were embedded in a Microsoft PowerPoint slide show. I got the files onto the Linux PC via a floppy disk, and then opened them with StarOffice by clicking on their icons in the Konqueror explorer window.

I also used StarOffice to export the PowerPoint slides in several different formats. One option created a set of HTML pages containing the slides and a master table of contents on the index page; that worked pretty well.

I also tried exporting the slideshow in Windows-compatible .bmp format. That worked, too, except that it only exported the current slide (unlike the HTML export option). I did have to teach the Konqueror explorer which graphics viewer to use to show the .bmp file; I tried both the KView Image Viewer, and the GQview viewer, and they both worked properly.

I tried AbiWord out anyway, but I wasn't too pleased with the way it handled the Word files. A simple text file was shown with rough edges on the fonts; the text was streaked at times, especially after changing the viewing zoom; page breaks were in the wrong places; the cursor control keys didn't work; ellipsis marks showed up as question marks; and, when I looked for a way to turn the page footers on and off, I saw that the on-line help was for an earlier version of the program, and was in an HTML form that couldn't be easily searched. When I printed a sample page, it didn't print the page number, and the page break was in the wrong place. The quality of the printed text was about the same as when I printed the document under Windows using Microsoft's Word Viewer.

Next, I opened the same document with StarOffice. Like AbiWord, it wasn't able to show the pages as well as Word Viewer could. The on-screen fonts were rough; the page breaks were in the wrong places until I turned off the footers; ellipsis marks showed up as question marks; and some of the sentences had line feeds in the wrong places.

A printout put the page breaks in the right place, but only if the footers were turned off, which caused the page number to not be printed. The printed text quality was the same as with AbiWord. That didn't surprise me; both programs printed to the LaserJet in PostScript mode (which probably explains why printing took a while, too—although StarOffice took less time than AbiWord).

I also tried out a Word document that contained a lot of large fonts and large colored areas and shapes. Both AbiWord and StarOffice did very poor jobs displaying the pages of that document. The words overlapped or were in the wrong places or sizes. The background and text colors were wrong. AbiWord did the poorer job: in some places it didn't even show the words at all. Neither program reported any problems with the file; they just didn't render it properly. I didn't even try printing that file.

Still, I wouldn't advise a business to use these particular Linux applications to work with Microsoft files from clients; it's sure to be a frustrating experience, as the final outputs will not look the same under Linux. Perhaps it works better going the other direction: it may be that documents created with these Linux applications can be opened and displayed properly by genuine Microsoft software. I didn't have enough incentive to try that, though, after seeing these problems. User beware!