Posts Tagged ‘software’

Lotus Symphony was an office suite with spreadsheets and word processor back in the 80′s when DOS ruled. Today, IBM has revived the project in a free (but proprietary) office sweet branded as IBM Lotus Symphony built upon the open source office suit OpenOffice.org. I have been aware of the project in its Beta days and even test drove it then. At the time, it was buggy and ran slow on my Windows XP work machine. Now that Symphony has seen a stable release and 3 point releases I desided to give it a try again. I downloaded and installed on my Debian Lenny system.

I found Lotus Symphony to run as fast (if not a little faster) then OpenOffice 3. The layout is different then OpenOffice and takes a little getting used to, but feels intuitive. OpenOffice.org has been critisized for not having a very userfriendly interface, and if you find that the case Lotus Symphony may be worth trying.

As a creative writing major, my word processor is the second most used application on my desktop, next to the web browser. With that in mind, there were a few advantages I like to Lotus Symphony. First is the tabbed windows, which I have long wished OpenOffice.org would implement. The second, is being a dyslexic writer a spell good check is imparative.  I have never been very saticfied with the open source spell check engines availible and intergrated in OpenOffice.org and found my self heading to the School’s computerlabs to edit in MS Word (Oh the guilt!). With that said, Lotus Symphony seems to have a better spell check engine by default. The bigist disadvantage to Lotus Symphony I have found is even though it is Free it is not open source.

You can download lotus symphony from here (to install on Debian choose ubuntu as your OS)

sudo dpkg -i symphony_1.3-1hardy1_i386.deb

NOTE: Lotus Symphony only works with 32-bit Linux

Squeeze is a useful compression utility that can handle tarballs, zip, 7zip, and rar files and is developed as part of XFCE and can integrate into the Thunar file manager with the help of xfce4-archive-plugin.

Totem is a Gnome based application for playing multi media files. I have found that with the Xine engine and libdvdccss it works great for playing movie files and DVD’s (also use w64codecs or w32codecs for proprietary media).

gThumb is a nice image viewer which can be configured for slideshows and can interface with a digital camera. you can install a Thunar extention to display inline thumbnails.

GIMP is a sophisticated and powerful open source image manipulation program comparable to Adobe Photo Shop and the like.

Audacius is a classic winAMP like audio player. If you have ever used the classic oldschool winAMP then Audacious will feel like a glove.

If you have a large collection of mp3′s and want a simple, slim but robust audio player to manage your collection of music I recommend Exaile

I don’t like using any other Torrent program then Deluge. It has an extensive interface which allows for random ports and encrypted data stream. You can even indicate not to download files within a torrent and manage file priorities.

FileZilla is an open source ftp program for multiple platforms which is easy to use.

Catfish is a powerfull GUI to help you find any file or folder on your computer

gParted allows you to easily manage your partitions with a slick GUI using GTK.