This used to be the case for me, but IMHO linux has effectively come of age
in application support terms, and now there's no reason for any would-be
linux user to put up with Windows on the desktop any more. Linux is
faster, more resilient, and less resource hungry.
All of the following are applications that my Linux (RedHat) desktop machine
has installed, or I have used at some point.
I never have to reboot my machine and change OS's to get various bits
of hardware to work, and I've not had to reboot my machine because of a crash
in well over six months which is why I use linux.
It is very important to bear in mind that some of this stuff relies on the
Linux kernel to work, and building an
appropriate Linux kernel can be a long(ish)
and complicated process, which can be rendered unnecessary by the pre-packaged
versions supplied by RedHat,
only be attempted manually by fairly experienced
Linux-ers.
Although it is important to note that for the following to work
Please
let me know if any of these links have become out of date, or if there is
Office Suites:
OpenOffice
OpenOffice supports PowerPoint (.PPT), Microsoft Word (.DOC), Microsoft Excel
Internet Chat:
X-Chat (X-Windows IRC client)
Gaim can support ICQ/IRC/MSN/AIM via various plugins, all integrated into one
Multimedia:
Static Imaging
SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) /
XSane (X-Windows Front End for SANE)
Video Production / Streaming
Linux QuickCam VC drivers (now incorporated into the Kernel)
There a number of video cameras and input devices supported by the Linux kernel
Video Playing
MPlayer (Movie Player For Linux)
It has seemed until recently that RealNetworks don't really have their hearts
For the moment, Mplayer, and Xine with appropriate codecs (URL's to come) seem
MpegTV can play Video CD's under Linux.
For DVD's, however, Mplayer does not support proper DVD navigation menus (yet,
this could be changed in version 1.0 final), although you can navigate DVD's
through its own menus. However Ogle does include full support for DVD
navigation menus.
CDParanoia (TAO CD recorder)
The latter two are frontends for various other CD-writing applications, but the
Mobile Phone/PDA:
You can use gsmlib to communicte with your mobile phone (provided it is
The latter two utilities allow you to syncronise your Psion with (files on)
Browsers:
Opera
Browser Plugins:
Plugger (Linux Plugin Manager)
Plugger makes lots of things work properly under linux. It takes the form of a
News Readers:
Netscape, Mozilla, Sylpheed, and a whole host of other multi-platform
Email:
Sylpheed(V. Fast GTK Mail Reader)
Sylpheed is as fast as a really fast thing. Netscape and Mozilla are I suppose
Hardware Support
Linux Network Drivers
The above are perhaps the best places to look for hardware support information
If there's anything missing here, you could always try www.linux<hardware type>.org,
Also, there are a surprisingly large number of very modern graphics and sound
cards becoming supported under Linux, some vendors (eg. NVidia) are not quite
getting into the swing of the Open Source ethos, but provide their own drivers
none the less. SoundBlaster Live/Audigy, NVidia Riva, GeForce 4, and more, for
example.
Documentation/Help:
Linux Documentation Project
Music Software
Hitsquad Linux Music Software
General Useful Links
Emulation of Other Platforms
WINE (MS Windows, most versions)
If all else fails, you could use the WINE Windows emulator for Linux (or for
Should the unthinkable happen, it all gets rather complex, but recovery of some
content is usually possible.
Here's a quick and dirty commandline recovery method, which can get you
you will almost certainly need a 2.4 series/version Linux kernel.
an application area that you are interested in that is not covered.
StarOffice(Sun Office Suite)
KOffice (KDE Office)
AbiWord
Xpdf (X Windows PDF Viewer)
Gnome Office
Evolution?
(.XLS), and numerous other major office file formats, and can be used as a more
or less complete replacement for the Microsoft office suites under Linux
LICQ (Linux ICQ)
Gaim (Gnome 'Aol Instant Messenger')
piece of software in one window, so you don't have to run five applications at
once to message people under each standard and will probably become
the defacto standard Linux messenger system
gOCR (Open-Source Character Recognition)
GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program)
gPhoto (Digital Camera Application)
RealProducer (NOT FREE, NOT OPENSOURCE)
RealServer (NOT FREE, NOT OPENSOURCE)
FFMpeg
at this time, perhaps the most noteworthy of which is any Hauppauge BT8*8 based
video card, this being most video capture cards.
Xine
RealPlayer (NOT FREE, NOT OPENSOURCE)
XMMS (X MultiMedia System)
SMPEG
MpegTV
Ogle
in the opensource/non-windows movement until the recent release of their Helix
media streaming set of applications, but maybe this will change.
to be the best applications for movie playing under Linux, and there's a plugin
for it which works with Opera and Mozilla to allow embedded movie/sound/etc.
playing at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/mplayerplug-in/
CDRDAO (DAO CD recorder)
cdrecord (TAO/DAO CD recorder)
gtcd (Gnome CD Player)
XCDRoast
Gnome Toaster
former in the list are back-end applications that can be driven by a text-only
interface. It would be recommended for the linux-newbie to install at least
one backend, and at least one (compatible) frontend.
supported, check the page for that) via IR or Serial, download the
contents of the address book(s), last calls made/received, to send
SMS's, and other more weird technical stuff.
your PC, and convert them to useful file formats.
Netscape
Mozilla
Konqueror
Lynx (Text-Only web browser)
Quicktime
Shockwave Flash
single plugin that allows you to direct various MIME types and file extensions
to a given application on your machine(much more flexible than windows, no?),
via one relatively simple configuration file.
applications contain news reader applications.
Mulberry(NOT FREE, NOT OPENSOURCE)
(Also Mozilla, Netscape Communicator)
Evolution
"standard" paced mail clients, and on that basis Evolution is a standard-to-slow
paced email client. That is, in terms of speed of operation and download of
emails etc. None of them are considerably less user-friendly than the others.
Video 4 Linux
Linux Printing Home Page
for their respective hardware groups under Linux.
which is surprisingly likely to be successful...
Linux Home Page
gTick (Linux Metronome Application)
Linux Software
Icewalkers (Linux Applications Database
UAE (Ultimate Amiga Emulator, there is a Unix version)
XFellow (A Linux Port of the Fellow amiga emulator)
ArcEm (Acorn Archimedes)
BBCmicro (BBC Micro, oddly enough)
Basilisk II (68K Macintosh Emulator)
ALE C64 Emulator (Commodore C64)
Daphne (Multiple Arcade Laserdisc Emulator)
fMSX (MSX emulator)
that matter any other platform, as above), and see if you can emulate Windows
sufficiently. Thus far I've found WINE to be shockingly effective. I've been
able to run countless silly .EXE files that have been emailed to me with WINE.
I have a sneaking suspicion that it doesn't like non-trivial realtime aplication
very much though, but this could turn out to be entirely unjustified.
out of trouble even if you do a quick reformat of the drive and lose all the
superblocks, and presumably on any linux filesystem type.
grep -iab <string> <filesystem dump>
Use a blocksize of one byte, so you can use the byte offset,
and a guess at the file size to get the file back.
dd if=<filesystem dump> skip=<grepped byte offset> bs=1 of=/home/foo count=8000
Better methods, if you've just deleted a few files (on an ext2 or ext3
filesystem) you want back can be found using Google
for any of the following: e2necromancy, e2recover, lde, e2undel, e2extract.