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

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

• Netscape communicator
• Flash plugin for Netscape
• wget. With wget, you can download an entire WEB site to your local driver.
• Real Player. Audio/video player for Internet.
• Apache Web server.

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

• Mysql : SQL server

Games

• Linux games
• Loki games
• Hopkins FBI
  

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