[ale] Converting Claris Works files to OpenOffice

[Joe Knapka]

[Submitted in the hope that some other poor soul with the
same problem will find it in the archives.]

Hi folks,

A long time ago, I wrote:

> > Hi folks,
> >
> > I recently moved the family machine from Win98 to Red Hat 8.  Every
> > thing is going well (now that we have a printer that actually works
> > reliably), except for one small snag. My wife has a boatload of Claris
> > Works word-processor docs she created under Windows (using an _o_l_d_
> > version of Claris - I bought it when we were still on Windows 3.0). I
> > naively assumed that OpenOffice would be able to import those files,
> > but that doesn't seem to be the case. I could install Claris on one of
> > the two remaining Windows boxen and convert all those files to RTF
> > using Claris, but sheesh, what a tedious pain in the posterior.
> >
> > So does anyone know of a Linux utility that will convert Claris files
> > to some format intelligible to OpenOffice?  (Using Google, I slammed
> > right into the "there are seventy-gazillion pages that contain at
> > least one of the words in your query" problem...)

At that time, I had tried installing Claris under WINE, to no
avail -- the installer claimed the machine didn't have enough
virtual memory to run Claris, which apparently meant that WINE
wasn't emulating the proper DPMI magic, or something.

Yesterday, I took the plunge and bought a Cedega subscription
(formerly WineX) from TransGaming <http://www.transgaming.com>, and
just for the hell of it, I tried installing Claris. AND IT WORKED! So
now my wife can do her own file conversions.

The other thing that surprised me is that once Claris was installed, I
could run it under stock Wine, as well as Cedega; so it's only the
installer that doesn't work right. And incidentally, while the Cedega
docs say you have to have a monster CPU and an OpenGL capable video
card, etc, to install Cedega, it works fine for me on a 200Mhz PII
with 160MB of RAM. Probably games wouldn't work, but random
non-graphics-intensive Windows software seems to run perfectly fine.

Cheers,

-- Joe

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