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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

In the late 90s WordPerfect was also ported to Linux and there was a distro centered around having it built in. I think it was Corel Linux.

A few years ago for I'm not sure what reason (boredom?) I found those old WordPerfect binaries and ran them on recent Linux. The tricky part is that it required libc5 support. But it worked.

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Apparently WordPerfect started out on Data General minicomputers.

Stuff on porting it to (modern) Linux (2022)

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/20/wordperfect_for_unix_...

https://github.com/taviso/wpunix

WordPerfect was bought by Novell in 1994 and then they sold it to Corel in 1996.

Corel even released their own ARM based computer running Linux. The Netwinder.

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3288

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/50921/Corel-Netwinde...

A friend of mine got WordPerfect for SCO Unix running under Linux using the iBCS subsystem to run other x86 Unix binaries on Linux.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Binary_Compatibility_Sta...

So smol. Dual NIC even!

Any other office software ported to SCO?

There are several projects which have build scripts which patch the old WordPerfect binaries to run on modern distributions, for instance:

https://github.com/taviso/wpunix

Architecturally, many Linux distributions are removing 32-bit support, so these old binaries don't have much time left.

Well 32-bit kernels yes. 32-bit binaries not so much.

Besides, it should be possible to patch them. Just append zeroes to every memory operation. Or run them within QEMU or something. This stuff is so old that any performance penalty will be unnoticeable.

> many Linux distributions are removing 32-bit support,

Are they? Fedora, sure, but they're Fedora. The only others I've seen are deprecating 32-bit host support while retaining multilib support for applications.

It's gone from rhel 10, which will cause my successor great difficulty.

I am retiring next year, and I will not be fixing this.

They'll just install Debian, probably.

"The corporate standard is rhel."

"But the engineering group uses Ubuntu extensively?"

"The corporate standard is rhel. We cannot discuss anything else."

As I am soon retiring, I won't have to watch this demolition derby.

Of course running a 32 bit binary is a different, lower effort problem than say, running on a 32-bit kernel.

For me was Corel WordPerfect the much better software the Microsoft Word. I almost forgot I ever used WordPerfect. I was much more intuitive to use.

I'd happily buy the WordPerfect suite if it were available on Linux. Corel products always worked better for me than MS.

I would kill just for the [Reveal Codes] functionality on any word processor.

I “grew up” on Worgperfect 4.2 and loved the Reveal Code feature. Always fully transparent on what was where and what it did.

That's the biggest reason i loved WP.

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