The Small Print: While I can’t guarantee its efficacy and good behaviour on your system, every program here has stood the test of time on mine. Aesthetics are important, too.
Note: Since moving to Ubuntu I’m naturally restricting this list to what I can use on it, with or without WINE.
Writers’ Software
Open Dict
The website is undergoing reconstruction, but it’s available from the Applications/Add/Remove in Ubuntu.
I thought it was very limited at first, until I discovered I could connect to the Dict server via Tools, thus having a range of dictionary and thesaurus resources at my disposal, including The Collaborative International Dictionary of English, Wordnet, Moby Thesaurus II, etc. Excellent. I used to use Wordweb, a fine dictionary and thesaurus which you can use on Linux through Wine, but I somehow bungled Wine in Ubuntu Gutsy.
CeltX is a very interesting piece of film script software. The official description on the development website describes Celtx as ‘‘a project collaboration tool for people who work in film, TV, theater and New Media. Celtx is being developed using the Mozilla application framework and is released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL)’’. That is, it’s open source. It’s cross platform, too (Windows, Mac, Linux). What I’ve found most impressive about it recently is its TypeSet feature, providing automatic formatting of your script to industry and international standards. The Celtx Server uses the very powerful LaTex typesetting tool to deliver perfectly formatted scripts.
Tellico, a free, open source collection manager available in many Linux repositories. There are presets for a wealth of collections—books, DVDs, wine, coins, and the like—but you can put in and take out the labels you really care about. And unlike most programs of its kind, Tellico stores its collection files in XML format instead of SQL databases, making it easy to export your data and visualize it, amongst other perks. It downloads detailed information, including book/dvd covers, ISBNs, etc, from the Amazons, Library of Congress etc, making your input a doddle. Excellent.
Freemind
is a premier free mind-mapping software written in Java. A high productivity tool, the operation and navigation of FreeMind is reputedly faster than that of MindManager because of one-click ‘‘fold /unfold’’ and ‘‘follow link’’ operations. I normally don’t like Java programs, but this is excellent, particularly if you are engaged in large, complex work. Requires the Java Runtime Eviroment, but the website gives instructions about that, and you probably have it already.
Project Gutenberg
Here you can download hundreds if not thousands of out-of-copyright books in text format for free. So if you’re looking for Alice in Wonderland or The Poems of William Blake, for example, look here. Please check the copyright laws of your country before downloading an eBook
Open Office
It could do with a skins facility, like Firefox, but what matter. (It may happen in version 3, coming this autumn/fall). Amazing full office for free. Now if only it could make ebooks. (Well, actually, it can, if you consider PDF as an ebook).
Website Software
I GRAPHICS : I used to use Irfan View, via Wine, for simple graphics jobs such as cropping, resizing, etc. However, again because of my problems with Wine, i’ve come to grips somewhat with the initially intimidating GIMP for these jobs,
thanks to some quick tutorials. Gimp is well served by tutorials, but the main problem for a beginner is that it can do so many things, and finding the simple job you need to do can sometimes take a while. Resizing is simple enough. Open the image then choose Image / Scale Image. But what really won me over was when I needed to make a colour in an image transparent. See The Gimp: Making Colors in a GIF Transparent. I’ve a long way to go with the GIMP, but I think the way forward is to use Google when you want to do a particular job, rather than wading through a tutorial. Unless, unlike me, you’re a methodical person, of course! In case you didn’t know, you can use the GIMP in Windows, too. It’s the main open source alternative to Photoshop, which I’ve never used, and I believe unless you are a graphics professional, it pretty much does everything that Photoshop does.
Once again, I thought I’d have to stay with a Windows program for colour/color picking, again through Wine. ColorCop is a nifty Windows program, it must be said.
But with my Wine problem I hunted that bit more for an alternative, and to my surprise I found that Agave did the trick. I say surprise, as it’s not immediately obvious, and at first glance it seems to be about generating 6 different types of color schemes, which it does very well. But click on a color/colour button beside the drop-down menu and up pops an excellent colour/color picker, complete with eyedropper that you can drag anywhere onto your screen to select that color/colour. Also available in the Ubuntu Add/Remove. And according to the website, you can Drag and Drop between Agave and the Gimp, as well as many other programs.
FileZilla FTP was my favoured ftp program in Windows, and I’m delighted to say there’s now a full Linux version, which I use. Superb. Open source.
If you’re using Ubuntu you’re probably using
The Firefox
browser, now Firefox 2, just has to be the best thing that’s happened the web. It’s secure, it’s fast, and it’s versatile. It’s plain when you download it, but click on Tools/Add-Ons to very simply turn it into a powerhouse that looks the way you want it to. The jewel of Open Source, it’s also cross-platform - Windows, Mac and Linux. Get Firefox!
The first thing I did when I installed Ubuntu was to ditch Evolution and install
Thunderbird
also cross-platform - Windows, Mac and Linux, and open source. Thunderbird is the email
companion to Firefox.
If you have more than one email account, you might find it a bit quirky to set up,
(check everything!) but once you do, it’s very powerful, with a number of extensions and even themes. My favourite plugin, by the way, is the Lightning Calendar, which fits very neatly into Thunderbird and saves my sanity on a daily basis.
Sound
Audacity A bit like Irfan View in that when you see it first you wonder can it do anything at all, and then you can’t do without it.
Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You can download direct
from Sourceforge, or it’s available in Add/Remove in Ubuntu.
I tried all of the music organizers in Ubuntu Add/Remove, and threw them out in favour of Songbird, which I’d also used on Windows. Once again it’s based on Mozilla, and like Firefox it’s very easy to install an extension. The two extensions I use are Wikipedia, which automatically displays the Wikipedia information for the artist, and Album Art Manager, which of course displays the album cover art. Extensions are available from the website. Note: There is currently a rather confusing heading on the home page that says Songbird is for Developers, but it is of course for ordinary users too. NB if you’re migrating to a new version, please read this.
MySQL and PHP Software
PHP, especially in combination with the MySQL database, is a wonder.
I don’t pretend to know the first thing about them, but I’ve got a few
things working because of them, and with more ease than I thought possible,
being used to cgi scripts.
WordPress
has made my weblog and now most of my sites possible. I’ve no real experience of full-blown weblog software, so I can’t compare it, but I took to WordPress straight away - and of course its title appealed to a writer - and setting it up was a breeze. You can tweak it to your heart’s content though css (cascading style sheets), which also appeals to me. The development is ongoing, which means it can only get better, and like Firefox, there are plug-ins, of course. Requires MySql and PHP (see above).
If you want to use Wordpress locally, ie on your computer for testing templates etc, click here
Miscellaneous
Open Source Toolset at WikiMedia
Stellarium
Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.
It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go. Easy and lovely.
Some other open source resources
The Top 50 Proprietary Programs That Drive You Crazy - And their Open Source Alternatives
