Linux Desktop for university staff

[Murat Tepegoz]

Dear all,
I am trying to build a linux desktop especially for the assistants and
professors in the universities. I wrote down my alternative programs curerntly
using. Please add comments, new programs, or suggesstions. Write down also
your favorite programs so that others will learn.

By the way, I installed xp to HP dc7100 workstation, and non of the hardware
is found by default. No graphics card, not sound. I downloaded the vendor
specific drivers from hp, and installed them. Then I installed FC3 to the same
machine, and (except a small problem of the sound card) everyting worked
perfectly without any configuration change, without any driver from hp's site.
So, this is the success of fedora and similar distros.

Here are my favorites:
----------------------

Office: Openoffice.org. Write and calc are perfect alternatives to word and
excel. Abiword always crashes abnormally. I could not try koffice yet. I use
kile for latex.

Visio: I don't think that OOo draw is as successful as visio. So I searched
for an alternative.  One alternative may be inkscaper.  It is really cool, and
quite handy. There are also win32 binaries. I guess inkscaper is a perfect
alternative to visio. Another one may be scribus. Its gui is not as friendly
as inkscaper (I guess), but it is also very successfull. Can kivio be another
alternative?

Email Client: Thunderbird. Evolution has not binaries in the windoze
environment. So i perfer thunderbird.

Calendar: Mozilla's sunbird. Small, usefull.

Browser: Firefox, of course.

HTML editor: Now, dreamweaver is a perfect tool for html and php editing.
There are a number of alternatives to this: NVU: This is a very successfull
program with WYSIWYG, but it is still buggy I guess, and does not parse php
scripts. Screem and bluefish do parse php codes, but does not support WYSIWYG.
So I could not find a perfect alternative to dreamweaver yet. Any comment?

Matlab: Matlab is also available in linux world if you have enough money.
Instead, octave is a good alternative. It uses almost all my m files till now,
no problem, except simulink. 

Photoshop: GIMP. no need to say anything.

PDF reader: Non of the pdf viewers (gpdf,xpdf,etc) follow the links in the pdf
files. So i prefer installing old Acrobat Reader 5 for linux from adobe.

Origin: this is a perfect data plotting tool. Non of excell like tools
(gnumeric, ooo calc) can be used as an alternative to this tool. Maybe grace
should be tried, but I could not find binaries for that. And could not find
time to compile it. Any comment?

Filezilla: gftp is good enough. kbear is buggy (always crashes somehow).