(LinuxWorld) -- HancomLinux's booth was one of the busiest at the recent LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco for good reason. HancomOffice is the latest entry in the Linux office suite sweepstakes. I tested an alpha version of HancomOffice recently, and am optimistic about its prospects. Let me tell you why.

StarOffice 5.2 is the most popular office suite available for Linux. It runs on Windows, Solaris, and Linux. It has two major problems -- size and speed, suffering from too much of the former and not enough of the later. Starting StarOffice 5.2 the first time in a session, for example, takes 35 seconds on my desktop system. Admittedly, my desktop is a mere 1-GHz AMD K7 with 512 megabytes of RAM.

When StarOffice finishes loading, it spreads itself hither and yon. At idle it runs seven processes and gobbles up 47 megabytes of memory on my computer. (In an earlier version of this story, I misinterpreted gtop's memory usage report for StarOffice.) If I kill and restart it later in the session, it takes about 3 seconds to pop up. Despite StarOffice's porcine appetite I use it whenever I need to convert to or from Microsoft document formats. I'm happy it is available.

HancomOffice 2.0, like StarOffice, will be a multiplatform product running on Linux, Mac OS/X, and Windows. The alpha version of Hancom Office 2.0 I tested loads in about 3 seconds the first time, and consumes a dainty 5 megabytes of memory. The toolbar and memory footprints are small enough that you can leave it running all day without making your machine gasp for swap every time you do something else. This is goodness.

StarOffice 5.2 includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing tool, database, calendar, and e-mail client. It also offers good interoperability with Microsoft Office documents. HancomOffice 2.0 will bring a mix of applications from its previous releases (they are big in the Korean, Japanese, and Chinese markets) and several from TheKompany.com, the commercial venture Shawn Gordon began for KDE applications. The component list includes a word processor, spreadsheet, graphics tool, presentation tool, database, flowcharting/diagramming tool, HTML editor, and an e-mail client.

HancomOffice 2.0 will use Kivio as its flowcharting/diagramming tool, Rekall for its database manager, Quanta Gold for its HTML tool, and Aethera for e-mail. TheKompany.com will continue to offer standalone versions of each of these products.

To tighten the bond even further between HancomLinux and TheKompany.com, Shawn Gordon, CEO of TheKompany.com, will act as CEO of HancomLinux US. He's responsible for LancomLinux's distribution and sales in North America. I visited with Shawn to learn more about the partnership.

Gordon explained he had been in discussion with Hancom Linux since meeting its officials at Fall Comdex 2000. They had talked about putting together a scripting package for the Hancom spreadsheet, but the deal eventually fell through. He kept up with the progress being made on HancomOffice, though, and one day it hit him. "We essentially had Visio, Access, Alpha, and Front Page, and they had the rest," he said. He told Hancom, "We should talk about getting together and doing an office suite."

Curse of the retail Linux apps

I also asked him about making money with Linux, a troublesome task. Gordon told me that TheKompany.com could be in the black by the end of the year. As to HancomOffice's success, much of the problem in the past in selling Linux applications is getting retailers to stock them. HancomOffice 2.0 neatly sidesteps the retail conundrum.

Why? Retailers aren't asked to stock HancomOffice in possibly non-existent Linux or Macintosh sections of their stores. They can put it anywhere, including right in the middle of the Windows applications. The same CD-ROM will install and run on Windows, Linux, or Mac OS/X. Retailers burned by stocking pure Linux apps that were sales dogs won't blink when putting HancomOffice 2.0 on the shelves. Retailers should like the idea of one SKU (retail-speak for "item") serving the needs of Macintosh, Windows, and Linux users.

Gordon likes the timing. "I personally think we are at a very good point because of the Microsoft XP upgrade, and the expenses involved, and the hassles involved, because we don't even have to get people to move to Linux necessarily."

He also likes the two layers of scripting that will be available in HancomOffice 2.0. One is aimed at programmers, and the other at non-technical users. All applications will share the ability to do raw Python scripting, which Gordon compares to Visual Basic. The apps will also share a more user-oriented scripting capability called AV, built on top of Python. "They (end users) can have a document in (Hancom)Word and do a mail merge, Gordon said. "It could be out of a DB2 database, because of how we have set this up, and generate 400,000 letters."

A preview version of HancomSheet is currently available for free download at the Hancom site (see Resources below for the URL). I grabbed it to make sure I had the latest version, and then tried to open a gnumeric spreadsheet. No joy. I unearthed an old Excel spreadsheet and HancomSheet opened it just fine. HancomWord is the app furthest behind in the rewrite, Gordon admitted. It does not function at all in the alpha version I used. Aside from that, the preview of Hancom Office 2.0 leaves me hungry to see more. I will definitely take a long, hard look at it when it's released.

Hancom's schedule calls for the product to appear on the shelves by the end of November, which might prove optimistic.

If Hancom 2.0 lives up to its promise, it could be good for Linux in a number of ways. I think there are many like myself who would pay for a lean, nimble, full-featured office suite for Linux. As such, it has a chance at being a profitable venture. Perhaps more importantly, it will make Linux a more attractive choice for business and government, allowing Linux a chance to breathe outside the server room. Finally, those purchasing Hancom Office 2.0 for Windows today will have one less reason not to switch to Linux tomorrow.