On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, Bastiaan Edelman, PA3FFZ wrote:
> Are there enough programs for Linux?
> At least I need: Word
> Something like adobe photo shop
> Drawing electronic diagrams
> Excell
>
Lots of... and most of them free, in comparison with Windows, where very
few programs are free.
Suggestions
Instead of Microsoft Office --- Star Office (free for non comercial use)
It is as powerful as the former (at least from my point of view). It also
manages to convert the Microsoft Office docs pretty well (not perfect,
but, still I haven't seen anything better). Open Office is also Star
Office, but Open Source. There are also commercial suites like the one
from Corel. These should solve the problem of finding a Word/Excel/PowerPoint
replacement for Linux.
Free and lighter software for not so powerful computers:
- AbiWord -- very promising WYSIWYG text editor. My favourite for writing
various small documents. (I can't run Star Office in 16 Meg of RAM)
- Siag Office -- small office suite comprising a text editor, spreadsheet,
simple tool for drawing animated images, file manager, ASCII editor. Lacks
features though.
- All sorts of things that come with Gnome or KDE.
- Finally LaTeX. This are professional text proofing and formating
engines, providing high-quality results. I always use LaTeX when writing
papers, booklets, user manuals and other things like these. There is also
a nice GUI interface for LaTeX, called LyX.
Adobe Photoshop -- Adobe or/and Corel should have something commercial,
but Gimp is everyone's favourite (and free). For vector graphics there is
the good old XFig, but I use another program called Sketch for that. For
technical drawings I have installed QCad (Autocad like and also free), but
I haven't yet used it for a serious job.
Electronic Diagrams -- Eagle, of course does everything. It is
very popular and very cross-platform and quite cheap.
There are many Spice flavours, too.
There is also a nice GNU utility called gEDA (for schematic diagrams
only). It is part of a GNU project aiming to provide a whole suite of such
programs.
> An equivalent to BASIC to devellop controllers to control electrical and
> mechanical equipment.
>
I think I know what you mean here. You do realize that bit-banging the
parallel port when using a multi-user multi-tasking OS is rather
complicated, but it is possible. I'd use C for that and a version of those
embedded Linuxes, but DOS still remains a better choice.
Still I am developing projects employing members of the AVR
microcontroller family from ATMEL, using AVR-GCC.
> Now I am switching to and fro DOS and Windows, A third OS will not make
> things easy. Would be nice to delete Windows but that day will only come
> if linux offers the same wild variety of programs.
>
> CU Bastiaan
Cristian Burneci
DHP Technology S.R.L.
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://users.pcnet.ro/dhptech
Bucharest, Romania
