finding your way around?
|
open source applications packages
There are a lot of cheezy text editors out there; seems like everyone writes one just to see if they can (I did a programming language, but that's me). I won't be going into those, nor will I be giving a long list of minor command line utilities. This page is for big desktop applications of significance, the kinds of things that most people use computers for.
It is my opinion that we aren't far off from a time when the only money to be made in the software field will be on custom and vertical-market applications and games because of packages like these; ironically enough a good number of these projects often have large companies behind them that released these packages as open source primarily for business reasons (either to leverage outside talent or to compete with (ahem) somebody else. Don't let that stop you from taking advantage.
- Mozilla is the open source version of Netscape Navigator/Communicator 6.x and up, and (now that AOL Time Warner has given up in the browser wars) probably the future of the application. Mozilla was the first high-profile commercial foray into the open source world; while it was something of a failure from a PR standpoint, Mozilla in its unadulterated form has become the browser of choice for many hacker types (at least those who aren't using Konqueror from KDE). Mozilla is also a mixed bag of many useful spare parts, including two different Javascript engines and a high-speed HTML renderer called Gecko. Mozilla also has one of the most W3C-compliant browsers available. NPL/MozPL
- Galeon is a slimmed-down browser built around Mozilla's Gecko engine with a vanilla GTK+ front end. Unlike Mozilla, it doesn't have skinning capability (one of the biggest drains on processor cycles that people complain about), but it seems to be a perfectly good web browser nevertheless. GPL
- OpenOffice -- Originally StarOffice (made in Germany, now owned by Sun), OpenOffice is a full office suite under the GPL. It's not quite ready for primetime yet, but early issues like lack of printing ability have been dealt with. Note that the downloads for both binary and source releases are gigantic (30-60MB on average, much larger untarred). GPL
- OpenSSH -- Part of the FreeBSD, the OpenSSH project is designed as an Open Source version of the original Secure Shell protocol. It is intended as a replacement for the old and no-longer-trustworthy telnet protocol and seems to be the standard for remote logins nowadays (some Linux distributions no longer include telnet functionality, having discarded it entirely for ssh support).
- The GIMP -- Created in response to the lack of good image-editing software on the Linux platform, the GNU Image Manipulation Program is roughly equivalent to Adobe's Photoshop Elements in capabilities (it lacks color separation and a couple of other big-ticket commercial features but is sufficient for most other purposes). It is the source of the GTK+ interface library and is the leading Unix-platform image editing application. It sports script-fu, one of the few high-profile uses of the mostly-academic Lisp dialect Scheme.
|
