At work I’m surrounded by people who need to poke me whenever Linux is on news (by people I mean Thiery L aka asthierix). Thiery usually feeds my imagination with lots of crazy ideas. In fact, he’s the one who got the programming bug into my brain.

Today he poked me to look at something on his screen. That looked familiar … but wait, did I see well? I noticed an Ubuntu kind of environment running an MS Word like application. I said “wine”!!! But no, it’s wasn’t. It was actually Kingsoft Office Writer. I had read about it months earlier on slashdot maybe but at that time the gui wasn’t so catchy.

Back at home I was geared to test drive this application. A little bit of googling and I came up with the following to install the same on Ubuntu derivatives:

####32bit systems

wget -O kingsoft-office-NoobsLab.deb http://goo.gl/Zw0VG
sudo dpkg -i kingsoft-office-NoobsLab.deb

####64bit systems

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
wget -O kingsoft-office-NoobsLab.deb http://goo.gl/Zw0VG
sudo dpkg -i kingsoft-office-NoobsLab.deb

I installed the “kingsoft” package on a 64bit Linux Mint machine. The end product was something like this:

I kind of like the menu. Compared to other Office packages on Linux, this one is neat.

To get MS Core fonts on Ubuntu derivatives, do:

sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

I’ve just installed the package, I don’t know of glitches for now. Will post additional info & feedback as and when I continue testing.

DEB package used from noobslab.com.