Linux Index

Best-of softwares

In this page, you will find a list of recommended software. However, I have to admit I need to update this page.

Window manager

You can choose the graphical environment you prefer. KDE and Gnome are the most popular.
  • KDE is included with the most distributions.

Office tools

  • http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker : framemaker (professionnal text processing). Only a beta version is free for download.
  • Star Office is the most popular Office Suite. It works under Linux and Windows. It's free and if you are familiar with M$ Office, you can easy find your way because the interface is very similar. However, it's far more better than M$. Moreover, you will be able to read most of the M$ files.
  • Acrobat Reader to read '.pdf' files.

CD writter

  • cdrecord is a shell program to write a CD.
  • Xcdroast is a graphical interface for cdrecord.
  • CD Paranoia is a CD ripper : it converts audio CD tracks to '.WAV' files. It's a command line program.

Multimedia

  • Xaudio is a MP3 player.
  • Blade encoder is a free MP3 encoder : it converts '.WAV' files into '.MP3' files.
  • K blade is the blade graphical interface for KDE.
  • mtv MPEG player

Internet

Graphics

  • Gimp. Image manipulation. This is a serious concurrent of Paint Shop Pro.
  • xfig is a vector drawing program. Normally included in most distributions.
  • XV is a image viewer.

Emulators

The following emulators are normally included in most distributions.
  • Wine : Windows emulator. It is sometimes useful to execute a program that you don't have under Linux. This is not perfect and doesn't work every time.
  • Dosemu : Dos emulator. Reported to work very fine
  • VMware : PC emulation : the perfect solution if you want to run M$ Windows under Linux

Engineering

  • Gnuplot is a very simple but powerful plotting program.
  • Scilab is the equivalent of Matlab.

Programming

  • Emacs. The editor of choice for any programmer. But it won't be appreciated for users who have played with Windows for a too long time. Emacs is well-known for his keyboard shortcuts.
  • Tcl is the ideal script language with graphical possibilities. Possibility to call C functions. Mainly used to glue applications out of different softwares.

Database

Games