Open Source Software

The terms Free and Open Source often are used interchangeably though a certain Robert Stallman could have a thing or two to say about that. Right now, I am in the process of separating out the content that you find here. The first sign of that is the appearance of an Operating Systems page to complement the already existing More on Ubuntu one. That pairing leaves you to find what else might be available to you with less restrictions placed your usage than is the case with proprietary software. Much of what’s to be found here will be without charge but freedom can come with a price so I don’t that all open source software comes without any monetary cost.

Desktop Environments & Window Managers

These are primarily a Linux bunch though I have seen their escape to the UNIX world too. Not so long ago, the only cause of controversy was caused by the choices espoused by fans of a particular environment but the changes included in GNOME 3 and in Unity have been the cause of contention. Recently, I did some customisation to the former to make more suitable for me and I am growing to like it too. After a decade of stability, it seems that diversity really is invading the mainstream desktop environment market. What that never takes from you is the possibility of finding something that with which you can live and that’s one of the hallmarks of Free Software and Open Source Software.

GNOME in its version 2 incarnation always has felt more natural to me as a user interface though GNOME 3 is looking acceptable if very, very different too. LXDE is another option that earns my favour while KDE never has dome it for me for whatever reason. Unity feels like a compromise and less polished compared to GNOME 3, as the latter is implemented in Fedora 15 anyway. After all of those, there are some lightweight alternatives for those wanting either minimalism or have older machines that cannot take the strain of anything else. Optioins like Window Maker will run on top of GNOME or KDE so it might be an option when those dominant desktop environment go places that make you not want to follow.

Enlightenment

FVWM

GNOME

GNUstep

KDE

LXDE

Openbox

Ratpoison

Unity

Window Maker

Xfce

Databases

The first of these, acquired by Sun Microsystems before that got swallowed up by Oracle, powers an awful lot of the web while the second continues to lurk too.

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Programming and Scripting Languages

Many of the computer languages that power the web are themselves open so here are the bigger players. Others will join them as I find them.

Perl

PHP

Python

OpenJDK

More Desktop Software

Eclipse

It’s the PHP variant that I use but its roots are in Java development and there seems to more to the project than might be expected at first. If it seems sluggish on Linux, it might be worth checking out the JRE that is on you system because what comes as default with Debian certainly was suboptimal and changing the Sun JRE really did speed up things.

Emacs

A long standing UNIX/Linux text editor that has been doing battle with Vi for longer than many can remember. Like the alternative, it has keyboard shortcuts that do anything but make concessions to Windows conventions, add needless steepening of any learning curve unless you find the appropriate option (CUA) that allows for some emulation of mainstream keyboard shortcuts. Nevertheless, there is a GUI variant too that makes life easier and I have to concede that it has a history that is longer than even Microsoft itself. As if that weren’t enough compensation, it is a powerful piece of software whose functionality goes much further than text editing whose surface I have only barely begun to scratch. The logic of the interface may be different to that to which many are accustomed but it is consistent and well thought out nonetheless.

Filezilla

This my FTP client of choice and its advent has made the need to buy such software extinct. That it works on both Windows and Linux is a bonus.

GIMP

The ubiquitous Photoshop challenger is maturing nicely though its interface may not please some.

ImageMagick

Using a command line tool for image processing may seem counter-intuitive but there are operations where you need not have much user intervention. Included among these is image resizing and conversion between file formats and yours truly has done both. Processing many files at a stroke comes naturally to this very useful and talented piece of software too.

LibreOffice

With Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems, there have been some feathers ruffled in the open source and free software community and one example of a change coming from this is the forking of OpenOffice. It is that act that has brought LibreOffice into being and it seems to be gaining ground, particularly given its inclusion in Ubuntu 11.04. While there haven’t been any dramatic changes so far, time may see this becoming very different from its OpenOffice parent.

Mozilla Fennec

Describing it as Firefox for mobile phones should be all that you need to know. There’s a PC emulator available too.

Mozilla Firefox

There’s no way that I could not what might the de facto standard web browser for Linux….

Mozilla Seamonkey

The original Mozilla suite still lives on and this is how it’s called nowadays.

Mozilla Sunbird

Mozilla’s contribution to the personal organiser scene.

Mozilla Thunderbird

An email client that I might have been using were it not for Evolution’s being more to my liking.

NEdit

UNIX/Linux offers plenty of text editors so here’s another of the less well known ones that I have encountered. Syntax highlighting is part of the offer and some menu customisation is possible too. In essence, it is a straightforward text editor that works with Windows keyboard shortcuts but that can be no bad thing.

NetBeans

You cannot feature Eclipse in a software listing without having NetBeans too. In fact, it was NetBeans that I first encountered and that was many moons ago. There is a PHP variant available but that seemed very sluggish when I tried it and turned back to Eclipse, with which I have stuck ever since. That poor performance may have been caused by the variant of Java that was available to it so I may give it another ago when I have the time.

OpenOffice.org

Is this the office suite of choice for Linux? It certainly felt that way before Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and upset a few open source developers. Now, the appearance of LibreOffice is going to make things look a little more interesting.

Privoxy

Here’s the description from the website:

Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk.

It’s available for a number of platforms, including Linux and UNIX, and offers a way of blocking ads in Google Chrome, which is how I got to hear about it. Ubuntu users can snag a copy from the usual repositories too.

Configuration is by means of editing text files but the default settings have sufficient so far. Setting a browser to use it means searching through settings for the means of making it use IP address 127.0.0.1 and port 8118 for ordinary and secure HTTP connections.

Songbird

Sadly, this project no longer officially supports Linux but a community support option remains. Quite why they are concentrating with providing software for Windows and OS X is beyond me because it based on the guts of Firefox. That may come as a surprise to some and the latest version (1.4.3) certainly looks good in the flesh and there’s 7digital and Last.fm integration too. Now that it doesn’t work on Ubuntu 10.04, I am using Banshee instead but hey ho…

UFRaw

This reader and manipulator of raw digital camera image formats acts either alone or as a plugin. It also can be used via the command line or using a GUI. That makes it flexible for those times when you need things to happen without much input from yourself.

VirtualBox

Apart from the fact that 64-bit operating systems are not supported in the OSE version, this is an excellent piece of virtualisation software that makes you wonder why you’d pay for something like VMware Workstation. There is also a closed source variant but the open source equivalent has what you’d want for personal use anyway.

Webian

In many respects, this is a full-screen browser in the mould of Google’s Chrome OS. Because so many applications are there to be found online these days, it is tempting to live off what is in the cloud instead of having the software installed on your system. Of course, that needs an internet connection and that the provider of such services don’t disappear overnight on you. Given that the live of providers now includes the likes of Google, Microsoft and Adobe, one would hope for a certain longevity.

John Hennessy
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