OpenOffice.org is the darling of the FOSS office suites, and it is a nice suite. It's cross-platform, and OpenOffice.org Writer is a first-rate word processor with a lot of advanced features. But it's not the only good option for Linux users: Abiword and KWord are excellent lightweight word processors with good feature sets, and both are licensed under the GPL. All three are wonderful. In this two-part series we're going to dig into KWord 1.6, and mine some of its hidden jewels.

AbiWord is a free opensource word processing program like Microsoft Word or Openoffice. Abiword is a light weight multi-platform word processor and is rapidly becoming a state of the art Word Processor, with lots of features useful for your daily work, personal needs, or for just some good old typing fun.

There are really only two mainstream competitors to OOo Calc, one from the GNOME Office suite and the other from KDE’s KOffice Project. However, I’ll also look at a bit more of an exotic solution after that as well.

As word processors for Linux keep picking up in popularity, household names in the computer industry are getting into the act. Like Sun Microsystems, Novell and IBM Lotus are both offering word processors based on OpenOffice.org's open source Writer application, but none of these offerings is exactly alike.

Sometimes you just need to write text! You don't need rich formatting and you most definitely don't want Microsoft Word HTML markup. The text console open source WordGrinder app makes word processing as straightforward as you can get.

You may think that word processing is all about WYSIWYG and GUI, but WordGrinder is living proof that a word processor that runs in a terminal does make sense.

OpenOffice.org isn't the only game in town for open source word processing. One of the best, and underexposed, open word processors is AbiWord.

* Part 1: Introduction to Snort intrusion detection and prevention
* Part 2: Hardware and network setup requirements
* Part 3: Installation prerequisites
* Part 4: Compiling and configuration with MySQL
* Part 5: Configuring Snort and setting up rules
* Part 6: Editing the snort.conf file

Every few years, I check in on how OpenOffice.org Writer compares to Microsoft Word. The first comparison came in 2002, the second in 2005. In those two comparisons, OpenOffice.org emerged as superior, not least for its greater stability.