On Wed 21 Jul 2004 at 11:42:05, Christopher Bailey said: > Photoshop7 > PaintShopPro7 > Photo Impact
The GIMP -- it's so good I no longer use anything else, even in Windows. > Adobe Illustrator Sodipodi -- an adequate replacement. You will also want to check out Dia, which is like Visio with a broader vision. > Camtasia You can't do screen recording directly, but you can set up VNC and do this through vncrec. > FrameMaker7 > Quark Express > Corel Draw Scribus > Benchmark > SearchAndReplace I don't know what these applications are, or exactly what they do. If you can describe them (or tell me what companies wrote them), then I can figure that out. > BI Query Most of the data visualization programs available for Linux are designed more for scientific data rather than business data. On the other hand, when it comes to graphing, there's not a huge difference (and as a scientist, I think most business people I know could stand to learn a bit about statistics and meaningful data presentation :), so you can try MayaVi, scigraphica, xgobi, or the granddaddy of all graphing programs, gnuplot. > Corel (Paradox) Sun's StarOffice has a database component, or you can get a *real* database system like MySQL or PostGreSQL (which really isn't hard to set up) and use a front end for one of these. > VisualBasic No drop-in replacement for this one. Though it's becoming a lot more end-user-friendly, Linux still has and always will have deep roots in the Unix-hacker-culture soil. Visual Basic in an anathema to everything this culture believes in, so the most honest answer you'll get to the question "What can I use as a replacement for Visual Basic?" is "A real programming language." Now I say that in all kindness, because having done VB development many years ago, I can honestly say that there's nothing than can be done in VB that can't be done better in another language, and there are a lot of things that can be done in other languages that can't be done in VB. If there's one thing that the Unix hacker culture knows, it knows how to program and how to design a good language in which to do so. BASIC is not one of those languages. So where to start? Being able to write a shell script for bash is about the bare minimum for Unix programming competency. Being familiar with Perl is extremely valuable. Other than that, you should learn at least one other scripting language, Python and PHP being perhaps the two most popular, though Ruby has a small but vocal group of supporters. Awk and TCL aren't used as much anymore, but they still show up in older programs, so aren't totally avoidable. Java and even Fortran show up in places, but don't worry about these unless you have to (or really want to). If you want to do GUI programming, Perl and Python (and probably Ruby too) have extensions for using GTK in X Windows. They -- and TCL -- also have extensions for Tk, but I've found programming for GTK to be much easier. You can even use Glade to design your windows graphically, just like you do in VB. However, you can't do much Unix programming and entirely avoid C. You may be able to get away without writing any C code (I did for about six years), but if you're going to admin your own Linux box, you ought to learn at least enough to coax a program to compile (ie, fixing Makefiles and #includes where needed). Now I know this sounds daunting and not worth the effort, and you may ask the question in frusturation "why can't I just write it in Basic?" It's just like learning a human language other than English. Not only do you get the advantage of learning a different language, but you learn your native language better, too. -- Soren Harward <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- http://theboard.byu.edu/ "Americans are always attempting to run away from conformity, but unfortunately they always start running in the same direction." -- Art Buchwald
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