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I just add a bit on that list from top of my head.
Although I think the listed app goes beyond what the so called 'average pc user' wants, but there goes...

1. Konqueror ( http://www.konqueror.org/ )

2. Email - Sylpheed ( http://sylpheed.good-day.net/ )

3. I think Evolution is more like in this place.

4. Lately "Sound Juicer" is taking more attention too

5. VideoLAN aka VLC ( http://www.videolan.org/ ) and Ogle ( http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/ ) [and Goggles ( http://www.fifthplanet.net/goggles.html ) for Ogle GUI wrapper] for DVD watching.

6. There are plenty way to do this, but the typical ones could be 'Jinzora' ( http://www.jinzora.org/ ) and 'MusicPD' ( http://www.mpd.org/ ), even plain Apache does it fine too, in a way.

8. If you want easier to manage iptables wrapper, Shorewall ( http://www.shorewall.net/ ) and there are other wrappers too.

9. KOffice ( http://www.koffice.org/ ) and by individual components, Abiword ( http://www.abisource.com/ ), Gnumeric ( http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/ ), Gnucash ( http://www.gnucash.org/ )

10. Inkscape ( http://www.inkscape.org/ ) or Sodipodi ( http://www.sodipodi.com/ ) for vector graphics.

11. Miranda ( http://miranda-im.org/ ). Windows only.

13. Hmm , Samba? ( http://www.samba.org/ ), WedDAV (Look parent post), FTP (plenty ftp daemons, ex : http://www.proftpd.org/, http://vsftpd.beasts.org/ etc)

16. GPhoto ( http://www.gphoto.org/ ), EOG ( http://www.gnome.org/ ? ), GQView ( http://gqview.sourceforge.net/ ). The latters are for just viewing mainly.

20. FreeNX ( http://www.nomachine.com/ , http://freenx.berlios.de/ ) http://www.poptop.org/ ), L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/l2tpd ), RP-L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/rp-l2tp/ )

24. Postfix ( http://www.postfix.org/ ), Sendmail ( http://www.sendmail.org/ ), Exim ( http://www.exim.org/ ), Cyrus ( http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/ ), Xmail ( http://www.xmailserver.org/ ), qmail ( http://www.qmail.org/ )

25. Spamassassin ( http://spamassassin.apache.org/ )

26. Same as above.

27. XSane ( http://www.xsane.org/ ) for sane frontends.

30. Buzzmachines ( http://www.buzzmachines.com/ ) I could be wrong...

31. 'various GUI frontends' - X CD Roast ( http://www.xcdroast.org/ ), K3B ( http://k3b.sourceforge.net/ )

32. Don't know any opensource ones...

Agreed; photoshop had probably my least-favorite graphics interface (most adobe stuff is horrible in that respect) until I saw GIMP. Krita, on the other hand, will solve all of that for me. Can't wait 'till it's in my distro :)

Is that a llama in one of the Krita screenshots?

And have you noticed that programmers seem to be curiously obsessed with certain animals? You know, llamas, badgers (because they run Linux, of course), wombats, grues, dragons (the compiler book). Did O'Reilly start the fad with their books on computers and technology, or are they simply followers?

Actually, it's even better than that. If you suspect the usual KDE naming convention (Add K in front of whatever), and remove the K, you get "rita". Which means "draw" in Swedish...

My only strange question is how it got that name, when none of the developers seems to have a swedish origin. Or am I missing someone?

Some of my best VB code was one that converted money to words. The other was report printing depending on what the user selected...all was done on the fly. I have no idea how I'd implement that in kexi. This I guess will call for learning a new language. I know there is an opensource one on sourceforge but it's not there yet.

New features:

• OASIS file format support (almost complete)
• Copy/Paste and Drag-n-drop use the OASIS format
• Inline text frames can be navigated into using Left and Right keys

So OASIS support in KOffice is almost there. The final 1.4 release is scheduled for mid-June (see the release schedule)

New features:

• OASIS file format support (almost complete)
• Copy/Paste and Drag-n-drop use the OASIS format
• Inline text frames can be navigated into using Left and Right keys

So OASIS support in KOffice is almost there. The final 1.4 release is scheduled for mid-June (see the release schedule)

Oh I don't know... I run it on my desktop... oh... and I run it on my users desktops at work too... Openoffice and Koffice are quite sufficient for MS Office replacements. Firefox makes a fantastic replacement for IE and Thunderbird for Outlook. I could easily go on. The issues you have mentioned... some of them worthwhile, are still somewhat minimal. Build a good image, specify / build all the boxes the same... it's cake after that...

Since Adobe has axed FrameMaker for Mac, that means I am stuck on Windows for ever. And no, Scribus is not a replacement for FrameMaker, and neither is KWord. I wish they were, but they're not.

No, the OOo KDE Integration is another project. Visit http://www.koffice.org/

Desktop Linux has, for the most part, stagnated because KDE and GNOME won't merge into one mega-standard.

Desktop Linux has stagnated because neither KDE or GNOME are good enough. They are incomplete. Merging the two together would just create a bigger incomplete, not good enough, system, and subsequently, other projects would be founded to make up for it's flaws.

If you're running GNOME, a KDE app, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice, you've got at least four major libraries now sitting in your memory.

But *why* are you running those in the first place? If you're running GNOME, why use Firefox over Epiphany, the offical GNOME browser? Why run OpenOffice over Gnome Office?? If you're running KDE, why not use Konqueror and KOffice? Why do you need to run KDE apps when you're using GNOME as your environment (and vice versa)?

The basic answer that people give for using a "non-standard" app (eg using GNOME apps in KDE) is that the "standard" solution either isn't good enough or doesn't exist. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

Merging the two would just be encircling them in a bigger fence. If wouldn't stop anyone else from doing something better on the other side.

Krita?

Kivio

I don't use KDE anymore, and haven't used this in a long time,
but remember it as being a very friendly visio-like program

• R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda, mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib, qtl, dbi, rmysql), out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program;
• A complete teTeX, TeX, and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing, along with TeXmacs and LyX for wysiwyg editing;
• Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, Lua, and Scientific and Numeric Python;
• The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as Gnumeric, kate, Koffice, jed, joe, nedit and zile;
• Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, and matwrap;
• Computer-algebra systems Maxima, Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC and YaCaS;
• the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
• GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
• The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers;
• the OpenDX, Plotmtv, and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
• it includes apcalc,aribas,autoclass,

1. OpenOffice.org pride themselves on having such an open file format that anyone can use, but tell me:

   Are there actually any programs other than OpenOffice.org that can read/write in OOo formats?

Right now? Yes. Others are in the works.

(We need to write PDF files from time to time and only OpenOffice does that... sure we could buy and install adobe acrobat... expensive... no point in that when they get what they want for free with OpenOffice.)

Secure code is HARD to write!

Even properly structured, carefully written stuff will contain securiity bugs! It requires attention, more attention, and yet more attention still.

It requires proper layering of the code so that the number of variables to track at any one point is as small as possible.

Spend lots of time on design. Draw flowcharts to cover key areas of your application. kivio is your friend! Consult your flowcharts before you make changes to the program. A well-layed-out flowchart can be worth more than reams of notes in the code.

Above all, structure your code so that the default behavior is secure in the event of a failure.

For example, you've done something stupid, and you're passing unescaped text to the database.

Whoops!

1) Why are you passing text directly to the database? If you communicate with the database with a proper API, you *can't* pass unescaped text to the database.

2) Are you capturing the errors from the database, so that you aren't displaying any obvious sign (to the public) of what's gone wrong?

3) Is the database connection transacted, so that you can return to a known good state?

4) Do you have some kind of error trap or handler so that you can find out exactly what the errors were and fix them in a sane way?

5) Have you tested your code with DELIBERATE bugs so that you know how it will behave in the event of a failure?

The hendling of any errors from that should *NEVER* be made clear to the outside, only that "an error has occured".

The goal is a system designed with multiple layers of protection so that a failure at any point does not result in a security breach! It should fail securely, so that problems result only in error reports, NOT SECURITY HOLES.

Easy to say, damn hard to do...

what other good, solid business apps are available for Linux?

Abiword, Gnumeric, and Evolution are also cited a lot, these are GNOME packages. Then there is KOffice, part of KDE, which few seem to use or talk about, but which does seem solid and extensive.

The Mac is the only true desktop replacement contender. When Microsoft Office becomes available for Linux, that's when Linux will become a serious contender.

I would love to sample some of that iCrack you're smoking. 1) not everybody needs or even wants an office suite. even counting "business machines" which are the vast majority of windows licenses, only about 30% have any sort of office suite installed. I can't cite a source, but my company does very large scale samplings of global business machines annually. 2) microsoft is not the only source of excellent office suites.

OpenOffice, on the other hand, is a real standard being adhered to by an ever-increasing number of tools.

As a bonus, the suite also deals with the MS-Office non-standards pretty well (lots of people are using it today simply because it was able to recover corrupted MS-Office documents for them), and writes files in several other standard formats (PDF, HTML without the crap, PNG, yadda yadda).

here.

There exists a technical committee at OASIS to make the OpenOffice format a standard (OASIS OpenOffice).

The OASIS format is not simply the OpenOffice format. It contains a number of changes to make sure it works well for other office suits as well.

Two office suits are currently implementing to support OASIS as their native files format: OpenOffice/StarOffice and KOffice. I hope others will join in as well.

Abiword is a good, fast word processor. Something like a full featured wordpad.
Frontends to MySQL, there are many. If you like MSAccess, rekall mimics everything, even its evilness. There is a new kde project, kexi aiming for the same objective.

The tools are there, the problem is that the ones who need them, like MSOffice.

.

I use Kivio. Works well. And is relativly feature rich. I believe is supports most of what you're looking for.

KWord is a FrameMaker-like word-processing and desktop publishing application

Yes, I know you have software that absolutely must run on Windows. But the vast majority of popular computing tasks can be accomplished quite well on Linux.

Try it out for yourself and find out why none of us KDE users can live without its Browser, its E-mail client or its complete office suite.

So if we're all here high and mighty that Linux Will Solve World Hunger because of this, why aren't we doing everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) we can to solve this? It is certainly true that almost everything has been ported to Linux, but many applications have yet to appear on places like Sourceforge and Freshmeat. Sure, yeah, I've started Yenta on sourceforge as a replacement for Act! or Goldmine, but it was only recently started - with little useable code to speak of.

(Yes, I need help with that project.)

Point to this rant is that we still have a way to go before it becomes acceptable to just drop Windows in favor of Linux, but it is also up to us to make sure that if, God forbid, a worm or series of them comes out, we can patch in a hurry.

Part of the koffice project. Like the other apps mentioned, it isn't quite there yet, but it works, perhaps good enough for you. If nothing else it is a project to watch.

I personaly would rather run old version of photoshop using wine, than run gimp. Way more powerful and simpler to use. At least until Krita comes out.

It took me all of 2 minutes with Google trying to find links for all the software you mentioned - and greatly enriches your post.

Other than that, thanks for the pointers.

====

ImageMagick

K3b - DVD/CD burner software

Plone - The most mature open source CMS.

Mamboserver - Not as mature or featurefull as Plone, but very nice as well.

OfflineIMAP - Simple, reliable, powerful

Kstars - and KDE Technology in general

The ones that are almost there but could use a hand to make them more intuitive:

GNUCash - Can't wait for their Gtk2 version.
Mr. Project
KOffice - has a great technological underpinning.

I have used PowerPoint upteen times over my career as I occassionally speak on Computer Security issues from general to specific audiences. I have always been forced to use PowerPoint simply because there seems to be nothing better out there at the moment. I have looked at KPresenter , Prosper, OpenOffice's Impress, and maybe one or two others. I love Keynote's features and gloss, but the expense of buying a very powerful 15" Powerbook to get it to work smoothly is somewhat of an obstacle to me. I'd love to have it, but I need it to run smoothly, and I'm not sure I can justify a $2000 expense for something I do about once a quarter.

Seriously guys - is there something out there I don't know about? I hate to open PowerPoint, but there doesn't seem to be anything even close to it right now. We have one Mac for checking web sites (G3 iBook), and otherwise run Linux and WinXP. I'd prefer to avoid WinXP if at all possible!

Suggestions? I'll look at ANY alternatives to PowerPoint!

I have used Powerpoint upteen times over my career as I occassionally speak on Computer Security issues from general to specific audiences. I have always been forced to use PowerPoint simply because there seems to be nothing better out there at the moment. I have looked at KPresenter , Prosper, OpenOffice's Impress, and maybe one or two others. I love Keynote's features and gloss, but the expense of buying a very powerful 15" Powerbook to get it to work smoothly is somewhat of an obstacle to me. I'd love to have it, but I need it to run smoothly, and I'm not sure I can justify a $2000 expense for something I do about once a quarter.

Seriously guys - is there something out there I don't know about? I hate to open PowerPoint, but there doesn't seem to be anything even close to it right now. We have one Mac for checking web sites (G3 iBook), and otherwise run Linux and WinXP.

Suggestions? I'll look at ANY alternatives to PowerPoint!

Impress

KPresenter

Keynote

Any others out there?

From: John Dean (john@rygannon.com)
Subject: Re: Rekall not longer available from theKompany.com - a fabrication
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
Date: 2003-11-03 11:05:06 PST

Here are some facts which I can back up with copies of email sent to the team by Shawn Gordon

1. I worked for TKC for a little over 2 years
2. The first 2 months I recieved not a single cent in payment
3. The 3 month I was paid the equivalent of one weeks pay
4. I never once in two received a full months money
5. In June we were all told to find alternative employment until TKC gets back in it feet again
6. My last pay month was May 2003

Both Mike and I are willing to write off TKC debt if Shawn agrees to allow us to release Rekall under the GPL.

--
Best Regards
John

SVG: XML based.

This is is a good thing. That way you can manipulate it with the DOM, parse it with SAX, transform it with XSLT, etc. You never need to write annother parser.

Humongous bloat.

If you're referring to features... SVG is only part of the standards you need, it's finely tuned to doing Scalable Vector Graphics, nothing else.

If you're referring to download speed, refer to this.

No decent tools.

1 2 3

Players are glacially slow.

Development of flash player for environments other than the latest version of MS Windows on x86 is glacially slow.

what's more, SVG is useful in settings other than web pages, such as desktop publishing.

http://wvware.sourceforge.net/

This an open source library for Reading and writing .doc formats. It is used both by Abiword and Kword. Try it today, and in the unlikely event one of your documents dosen't import, You can report it so the library can improve.

The biggest task in breaking the Office monopoly is the file formats, so help break it.

Its time to promote open source, and for people to improve it.

Photoshop = Gimp, the lastest version is much improved, with a DECENT GUI, masking layers, the beginings of CMYK support and much much more. There is no need to complain about the gimp, and if you need a feature that is not there, Then you can help. Also check out the gegl project, which will add much wanted stuff such has weird colourspaces and 48-bit support

Illistrator = Karbon. Sodipodi is nice, but its designed as an SVG editor only, Karbon has a more illistrator like interface and supports more file formats. As usual, give feedback, its how open source improves.

InDesign = Scribus. A powerful DTP application, its a lot to explain on this page, so go and read the page and don't forget to help.

GoLive = Quanta. Quanta is the best OpenSource Website creator. Support for wysiwyg is in the CVS, so help them out ;).

I use these tools everyday and FOR PRODUCTION work, remember don't complain on slashdot about $APP dosen't have $FEATRURE. Either help fix it if you can program, or submit a feature request in bugzilla. I have several times and gotten the features I wanted. So, if you are tired of Adobe lock in, then help open source.

Have your engineers been good enough to fix these ones yet?
Or should I continue to advise anyone who is doing any important statisical analyses (eg medical research, construction engineering or even any non-trivial finance) to on no account process their numbers with your number processing program
I call you for 9 years on crucial bugs in your most popular and best piece of software.
Gnumeric
OpenOffice.org
KSpread

There's a few. Karbon and Sodipodi seem to be the most popular, but are not the only by far.

Finally the Linux desktop has a quality word processor that is faster to load than OpenOffice.org and includes proper footnotes. It also no longer uses its own font directory.

Koffice Loads faster than OO, has proper footnotes, has never had its "own" font directory, and is properly integrated into the rest of KDE.

"They will be in an advisory capacity. We're still running the school," said Ellen Savitz, the district's chief development officer. "There's no fear of a corporation somehow overtaking the educational focus."

Well, I for one am HAPPY that Microsoft, through their completely benign efforts, will help push the technology direction of this school. Thank goodness, I say!

So, there will be no restrictions against running machines with other O/S's on them? No problems with students handing in presentations on say KPresenter or KWord, Open Office, or just plain HTML.

This is not even touching upon the complete lack of security around wireless protocols upon which confidential student information may be moving.

I certainly hope that MS's role remains consultative, and that they don't try and coerce or blackmail the school into the exclusive use of certain MS-centric solutions for the Student learning enviornments. If it were my kid, I would want them to learn about all kinds computers, not just the ones that run Windows.

Even if all of the computers were running Windows (possible), then the kids should still be exposed to non-MS products for using and programming computers. Give them the chance now to see that there are choices.

"They will be in an advisory capacity. We're still running the school," said Ellen Savitz, the district's chief development officer. "There's no fear of a corporation somehow overtaking the educational focus."

Well, I for one am HAPPY that Microsoft, through their completely benign efforts, will help push the technology direction of this school. Thank goodness, I say!

So, there will be no restrictions against running machines with other O/S's on them? No problems with students handing in presentations on say KPresenter or KWord, Open Office, or just plain HTML.

This is not even touching upon the complete lack of security around wireless protocols upon which confidential student information may be moving.

I certainly hope that MS's role remains consultative, and that they don't try and coerce or blackmail the school into the exclusive use of certain MS-centric solutions for the Student learning enviornments. If it were my kid, I would want them to learn about all kinds computers, not just the ones that run Windows.

Even if all of the computers were running Windows (possible), then the kids should still be exposed to non-MS products for using and programming computers. Give them the chance now to see that there are choices.

I couldn't surf the web back in the day until I had downloaded a web browser. At least the format's open and you have a few readers with your favourite distro if you use Linux. In fact, there are quite a few open source programs that can generate PDFs (I hear that KOffice is working on a feature that allows you to open PDFs in KWord).

I am very puzzled by the anti-pdf crowd on slashdot. At least it is an open format.

I tried version 1.0 and almost immediately switched to koffice (on linux). (At work, I tinkered with OO and AbiWord, but for the most part I have to stick with department standards, so I still have MS Word there.)

I recently installed the 1.1 beta, and it was dramatically better. Documents that choked 1.0 opened perfectly in 1.1. It even does a great job at handling PowerPoint presentations. (The main glitch I've noticed is it doesn't get the "path" correct when connecting two boxes with a connector line, but I imagine most simple presentations just have words and pictures.)

I love the Flash export for presentations and the PDF export for documents. No more having to print to a PS file and convert it, or install some PDF writer print driver. I also like the ODBC data interface, although I haven't yet figured out how to create a new datastore to add things to.

Aside from a few "cosmetic" issues (faster loading, more improved filters, etc.), the main thing they need to make OO a total MSOffice killer is an Access replacement, and possibly a Visio replacement. It would be nice if they could get enough developers to tackle the same kinds of projects as the KOffice team.

As the parent post says: even if you didn't like 1.0, give 1.1 a try. It is a vast improvement.

Karbon14 in koffice can manage:
Adobe Illustrator
Applix Graphics
EPS Encapsulated PostScript
Kontour
LaTeX
MSOD Microsoft Office Drawing
OpenOffice Draw
PNG
SVG Scaleable Vector Graphics (W3C)
WMF Windows MetaFile
Xfig

No corel draw 8 yet.

Why don't you try and run corel draw under wine, or buy the Linux version of corel draw?

Adobe could not be cool with a long tradition of GNU tools using mangled names of products for their GNU "clones."

Just a few:
Linux ~= Unix - Unix was a mangled name for Multix, btw.
gawk ~= awk - There are so many similarly-named command-line utilities that Stallman had a hand in that I don't dare try to list them. I think most of them even kept the names of the original Unix programs with little/no hassle.
KOffice ~= M$ Office - This is the suite that KIllustrator/Kugar belongs to. Boy, "office" is a word about as worthy of trademark as "illustrator." Wait, was that Microsoft being tolerant of trademarks!? I think so. Adobe is more viscious that M$?
KWord ~= M$ Word - more from KOffice suite.
Kivio ~= M$ Visio - KOffice suite again.
mrproject ~= M$ Project
AbiWord ~= M$ Word
KTron ~= Tron (the movie) - KDE group again. Threw this package in there to show that even the MPAA and Disney are tolerant (but not in all cases). Then again, Tron 2.0 is coming up, so maybe attention will come back.

Adobe could not be cool with a long tradition of GNU tools using mangled names of products for their GNU "clones."

Just a few:
Linux ~= Unix - Unix was a mangled name for Multix, btw.
gawk ~= awk - There are so many similarly-named command-line utilities that Stallman had a hand in that I don't dare try to list them. I think most of them even kept the names of the original Unix programs with little/no hassle.
KOffice ~= M$ Office - This is the suite that KIllustrator/Kugar belongs to. Boy, "office" is a word about as worthy of trademark as "illustrator." Wait, was that Microsoft being tolerant of trademarks!? I think so. Adobe is more viscious that M$?
KWord ~= M$ Word - more from KOffice suite.
Kivio ~= M$ Visio - KOffice suite again.
mrproject ~= M$ Project
AbiWord ~= M$ Word
KTron ~= Tron (the movie) - KDE group again. Threw this package in there to show that even the MPAA and Disney are tolerant (but not in all cases). Then again, Tron 2.0 is coming up, so maybe attention will come back.

Adobe could not be cool with a long tradition of GNU tools using mangled names of products for their GNU "clones."

Just a few:
Linux ~= Unix - Unix was a mangled name for Multix, btw.
gawk ~= awk - There are so many similarly-named command-line utilities that Stallman had a hand in that I don't dare try to list them. I think most of them even kept the names of the original Unix programs with little/no hassle.
KOffice ~= M$ Office - This is the suite that KIllustrator/Kugar belongs to. Boy, "office" is a word about as worthy of trademark as "illustrator." Wait, was that Microsoft being tolerant of trademarks!? I think so. Adobe is more viscious that M$?
KWord ~= M$ Word - more from KOffice suite.
Kivio ~= M$ Visio - KOffice suite again.
mrproject ~= M$ Project
AbiWord ~= M$ Word
KTron ~= Tron (the movie) - KDE group again. Threw this package in there to show that even the MPAA and Disney are tolerant (but not in all cases). Then again, Tron 2.0 is coming up, so maybe attention will come back.

Kexi is the tool you are looking for then.
There are also some cool screenshots.

Artaxerxes