IBM Lotus Symphony 1 with Ubuntu

IBM already launched they office products for Linux named IBM Lotus Symphony. IBM’s closed source OpenOffice-based free office suite. I'm not really impressed with this office suites but I still will gives some review with the installation tutorial. But it seemed to be this lotus symphony has a few bug and errors.

I already installed the Lotus Symphony final release inside my Ubuntu 8.04 and it works well. OK, this is the tutorial, please read carefully.

1. Before starting the installation, you might need to install an extra dependency or the installer will fail with the error: Installation requires libstdc++.so.5 to continue. Install the package libstdc++5 before continuing: sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

2. Disable your desktop effects, because it seemed to be IBM hasn't fixed the problem from Beta 3 where the installer fails with Compiz enabled. So, disable the desktop effects.

3. Open terminal and change the directory to the directory where you downloaded the file by typing: cd ~/Desktop

Allow the installer to be executed:

chmod +x IBM_Lotus_Symphony_linux.bin

Run the installer as root:
sudo ./IBM_Lotus_Symphony_linux.bin

The installer will be running and it's really similiar with windows software installation, you're just need to follow the instructions.

After the installation, You will find a launcher for Lotus Symphony under Applications->Office->IBM Lotus Symphony.

The first thing you'll find after the installation, you'll find that the Lotus Symphony has a great layour, blue and orange interface. Lotus Symphony uses a tabbed interface. Multiple documents, presentations, and spreadsheets can be switched between from one window. A neat feature is the Show Thumbnails button on the tab bar which shows a preview of all open tabs.

This is some screenshots:

Lotus Symphony uses the ODF standard file formats. In my testing I noticed that Lotus Symphony does much better rendering complex diagrams embedded in MS Office documents than OpenOffice 2.4. The font size problems I had with ODT files in the previous Beta seem to have been fixed. File compatibility with MS Office and ODF documents in Lotus Symphony is good.

Finally, this is my conclution about this office suite;
1. The software is much more slower than open office
2. IBM need to improve they office suites to keep up with open office 3.0
3. IBM really needs to fix the bugs in their Linux installer, and start providing DEB packages for easier installation.
4. But still, I like the tabbed interface and the simplicity of the layout, it's more like MS Office.

That's all of my reviews with IBM Lotus Symphony 1.0 . Hope this reviews will help you. Some tutorial are taken from tombuntu.com and lotus.com. Please give some comments for question, critism, and suggestion.