At the August 2000 LinuxWorld Expo, I found a unique company by the name of Chilliware. Although its products were still vapor during the show, it had announced an aggressive rollout of many applications. When the 2001 expo in New York arrived, Chilliware had actually delivered several products. The first was iceSculptor, a QT-based desktop publishing system.

Chilliware actually tries to make money from Linux applications. The company's model is similar to the one Corel used until recently. Chilliware is developing its own Linux distribution and selling closed-source applications for revenue generation. That model failed for Corel, but a slightly different approach from a more nimble competitor may yield different results.

The Chilliware product line is extremely interesting to me. Even though I am a geek, I am becoming increasingly involved with business communications and marketing. I have long awaited a decent PIM and email program. Evolution, Magellan, Netscape, and Pine still just don't cut it. I need an application with the capabilities of ACT or Outlook (without the obvious problems) and a good desktop publishing program.

But I digress.

There are two products from Chilliware that I have desperately wanted to try since last August. They are Nexxus, the still-vaporware-but-often-promised contact manager, and iceSculptor, which claims to be the first real Linux desktop publishing program. (It should be noted that CorelDRAW has been around a lot longer than iceSculptor.)

My editor sent me the Chilliware software. The CD came with Mohawk (an Apache configurator), Mentor Pro (a documentation creator), and iceSculptor. I inserted the CD, watched it automount, and clicked on the click-me.html file in the root of the CD. Then I clicked on the iceSculptor dynamic option to install the program. I am running KDE2, and when I chose the product, KDE automatically started kpackage and promptly informed me that I had to be root to install the program. D'oh! I knew that. Really.

So I logged in as root and restarted the process. The kpackage program launched, I clicked install, and the program kindly informed me that I had the wrong architecture and could not install the product! At first, I was a bit confused, and then I saw the name of the RPM file. It was called iceSculptor_1.05-00003_dynamic.i686.rpm. The key part is the "i686."

Apparently, the engineers at Chilliware decided that if you run Linux, you must run an Intel Celeron chip or above. If you run a Pentium or an AMD K6 series, you are out of luck. That is amazingly bad product management.

To give you an example, the folks at Red Hat didn't even release software for i586-based machines (except the kernel, and only by request) until version 7.0. Many, many people run i586-based machines. I run an AMD K6-2 550. Now, compiling for a specific family of processors does have its advantages (most notably performance). However, if you compile for different processors, at least compile for the most common one. If you compile for the i586 line, you can get the whole Pentium family, and the whole AMD family from the K6 on up.

We have a Celeron in our development box at work, and I wasn't about to give up on the product, so I dropped the RPM onto the Celeron machine and installed it. I had to install the static version because the Celeron does not have the Qt library installed. The CD file installed using RPM with no problems. The X Window System is not installed on that box, so I used the -display option to run the program on my workstation while executing on the development machine. I granted the Celeron rights with xhost so it could display to my workstation. I then started the program by typing iceSculptor, and voilà, a nice little splash screen appeared on my desktop.

I would display a shot of the splash screen, but iceSculptor promptly locked my workstation cold. I had to kill the process on the Celeron just to get my desktop back. I figured it was an anomaly, so I tried it on another machine; same result. I tried this on three machines, and each produced the same result: a complete lockup when executing iceSculptor remotely. Ok, it must be the development machine. Nope -- I also tried a brand-new PIII that we built for a customer. For some reason, iceSculptor does not like to run on a remote desktop.

I contacted the folks at Chilliware about the problem, and they were very helpful. They informed me that I had received a "press" version of the software, which did not include the software's tarballs. They stated that the tarballs should run on any Pentium-level machine. I calmly explained that even if I had the tarballs, I would not have installed it. I said that there is a reason RPM and other package managers exist. They suggested I try RPM's --ignorearch option to install the application locally.

I had completely overlooked that option before. When I used it, iceSculptor fired up instantly. The Chilliware folks did note the problem with running on a remote desktop while running the application remotely, and said they would look into it. Though still grumbling, I could at least review the product.

The first thing I noticed was that although iceSculptor utilizes the qt library, it does not appear to be KDE-aware. Items like drag-and-drop do not work between KDE Konqueror and iceSculptor, and don't work on GNOME either. That is extremely unfortunate: a graphical program for Linux should support one of the two major desktops.

I also noticed some inconsistencies with the product on launch. It honored the color scheme that I set up with KDE, but did not honor the text style settings. The text on the menu bar was about two sizes larger than the text I have on all other windows. At startup, the software presents you with a single-framed window that appears to be drawn incorrectly (more on that later). Creating a new document is simple: just click on the now-industry-standard icon that looks like a blank piece of paper, and you are prompted to specify the type of document you would like to work with.

I selected Newspaper and set my page settings to Letter. After hitting OK, a new screen with a white page on it came up.

Maybe I am just being picky because of the effort I had to go through to get iceSculptor running in the first place, but the font window was the wrong size. It cut off many fonts, rendering them unreadable. The single-frame window is actually a two-pane window. The window to the right opens as a sliver of space, but is actually a useful tool. (See Figure 1.) If you resize it, you can see what it does. (See Figure 2.) It is very similar to the layer feature in Photoshop and the Gimp. You can view and edit each object as you select it. That is very useful when dealing with complex documents. You can build a document around objects that are independent of each other. You can then use the Document Layout tree to select each object separately for editing.

Figure 1. The two-pane window with the sliver on the right. Click on thumbnail to view full-size image. (15 KB)	Figure 2. The sliver turns into a tool if you resize it. Click on thumbnail to view full-size image. (16 KB)

iceSculptor supports the features you would expect from basic desktop publishing programs, but not as well as I would have liked. For example, inserting an object -- such as an image -- is as simple as selecting the object box, sizing the box, right-clicking the mouse and selecting Insert Image. Unfortunately, the product can't resize the images once they are in the document. (See Figure 3.) I have the same complaint with KWord. All major programs, even word processors such as WordPerfect, allow you to resize an imported graphical object. Additionally, if you select an image from the image library, you are unable to browse your local drives, and are limited to the library they have provided you. You can manually copy files to that library, but I doubt that anybody wants to copy their clip art disks to their hard drive.

Figure 3. Example of a cropped image inside an object box. Click on thumbnail to view full-size image. (29 KB)

iceSculptor reminds me of a lot of older applications when they first started out. When Windows 3.1 came out, there were a lot of applications, but many were very basic because they had just begun to move out of the DOS space.

That is not to say that the application does not work or that it is bad. It is actually just fine for what it is, a basic desktop publishing program. It appears to be stable; it has not crashed on me once since I got it to run, and except for a few odd inconsistencies, it works very well.

But iceSculptor needs a few things before it can swim with the big fish. It needs a basic image-editing tool that resizes imported graphic objects. Chilliware needs to fix the inconsistency with fonts and the way the windows are drawn. The product needs import capability; there is no way to import a document from Word, PageMaker, or KWord. As iceSculptor was designed with Qt, it should at least support the drag-and-drop functionality of KDE2.

The first release of iceSculptor is missing too many features to be considered a contender. A better choice might be the Applixware 5.0 suite: a complete office suite that includes decent desktop publishing capabilities, is more mature, and is currently cheaper at $49.99 than iceSculptor, which costs $79.95.

• Chilliware
• Applixware