Dragging and dropping the icons from the CD to you KDE desktop will create ready made icon launchers for the Hancom applications. If you wish to place icons on your desktop, the Hancom CD includes them. Loading the HancomShell2 executable will open a little Hancom Launcher, as you can see it in the screenshots. Hancom Office comes with Word 6.0, Word 5.2, Sheet, Presenter and Painter. Installation takes about 400 MB on your hard drive and, as I already mentioned, as long you are using a more standard Linux, it should go just fine. However, I noticed that only half of the four Qt 3-based Hancom applications actually worked with my multithreaded library (and in fact worked better than the one Hancom suggests), while the rest worked only with their included library version. Either creating a file linking to the multithreaded version of the library or copying the included in the Hancom cd /lib/libqt.so.3 file on your /usr/lib/, should fix any of these problems. As it turns out, because Gentoo Linux is optimized for utter speed, it installs the multithreaded version of Qt, libqt-mt.so.3, but not the libqt.so.3 one. However, under my Linux distribution, Gentoo Linux, I run into a problem where the “install-m” executable wouldn’t start, because it could not find the libqt.so.3 library. The installation is graphical and very easy to use. Installation under Red Hat or Mandrake should go very smoothly indeed all you have to do is mount your CDrom and run the installation script.

The Hancom Office 2.0 Standard package the company sent me comes in a DVD case, which includes a CD and two printed pages, an installation page and a registration one. Update: From the Hancom press release: “ 200 Million Arabic Speakers Finally Have an Affordable, High-Quality Alternative to Microsoft – And Save 90% in the Process.”

In latest news, Hancom has canned their Professional version of their office suite (contained more applications in assosiation with TheKompany), and they now going with the Standard version, which is the version we review today.

The company used to offer a Windows version of their product, but they have since completely focused on the Linux platform, even though their product is pretty portable as it is based almost solely in the Qt 3 tooklkit. Hancom Office 2.01 is the latest version from the Korean company Hancom Linux, released only a few days ago.

Hancom office s viewer installed itself