To say TextMaker is easy is an incredible understatement. Loading the program on your Linux machine is the essence of simplicity. You can either download a trial version or order the CD from the Softmaker download page. When you decide to purchase the trial version, or get the CD, it will cost you €49.95 if you are in Europe or US$49.95 if you are outside of Europe.

One thing potential customers should note: the trial version is crippleware, as saving to Word or RTF formats is disabled until you kick up to the full version.

I simply popped the CD into the drive and mounted the disk to /cdrom, as root. Next, I copied the tml02.tgz file to the /usr/local/bin directory. Then, I unpacked TextMaker with the following command:

tar xzvf tml02.tgz

Next, I just did a cd into the newly created TextMaker directory and typed:

./tml

First time TextMaker users will then need to put in your name, email and serial number during the first load to make the program operational.

The program took an astounding 2.5 seconds to come up on my old 300-MHz PII laptop. How's that for fast? Life on a laptop just doesn't get any better. Putting TextMaker to work was almost as easy as getting it on my machine.

Next: Using TextMaker »