Henry's Open Source Apps
Henry Bush of TAFE Tasmania lists his favourite utilities
Posted 22.11.2005 | Updated 23.05.2006 | Contributed by Andy Mallett & Henry Bush


Thought you might like to know what open source software I use. All of these products are available for both windows and Linux.


Text Editors

Emacs
  • a good text editor with lots of great features
  • designed for programmers by programmers
  • an interface that is different from most applications
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html

JEdit

  • a Java application, so runs on any operating system
  • lots of plug ins available to do most things that you could think of
http://www.jedit.org


Web Browers

Firefox
  • I am sure that you know about it already
  • found a great plugin that blocks lots of useless crap like flash (noscript)

Lynx

  • text only browser
  • no install
http://lynx.browser.org


Email Client

Thunderbird

- created by Mozilla, the people that brought you firefox

http://www.GetThunderbird.com


Calendar program

Sunbird

- more from Mozilla

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird.html


Office Productivity Software

Open Office

- I have not use MS Office now for over 12 months now and have not had any problems

http://www.openoffice.org


Graphics

The gimp

- Never need to use photoshop when you have this one

http://www.gimp.org


IDE

eclipse
  • when a text editor just is not enough
  • some very major players in software are suporting this project like IBM, Sun, Macromedia
http://www.eclipse.org


Specialist Software

JUnit

- Automated software testing tool

http://www.junit.org


ANT

- Like only make for Java

http://ant.apache.org


Tomcat

  • a Java servlet engine
  • can be used standalone or as a module in apache to deliver Java servlets and JSP


Checkstyle

- an automated code verifier

http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net

Most of these software tools are available as plug ins for eclipse as well as running standalone. Josh also plays Neverball an open source game. What I have see of it, a well polished game:

http://icculus.org/neverball

Hope this list gives you some other areas to look into that you might not have known about.



- A&H.