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This is an overview of the Open Source Software I use and which I am satisfied with. In other words I recommend that you try it as well. You might not need all the software here but if you want to replace some of the software you use today the lists below could be an inspiration. The list contains primarily end user products. Components which I have used when developing software are not included in the list. I will try to update the list as I start using new products. The categories are ordered with the most particular and technical products at the bottom of the page. The products on the top are products which most users would need. Most of these products work on both Windows and Linux and all of them are licensed with an open source licenses. This means that you can legally download and use these products.

Even though I recommend these products I do not provide any warranties for your use of them. Please contact the respective providers’ proper support channels if you have any problems with any of the products.

Desktop and office tools

• Firefox is the best web browser out there, at least in my eyese.
• Freemind is a very neat mind mapping tool.
• OpenOffice is an office toolkit equivalent to MS Office. Great tool which should cover all your needs.
• Sunbird/Lightning is a great calendar and it works either as a plugin for Thunderbird or as a stand alone calendar.
• Thunderbird is an email client which works very well.
• Wine is implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix. In other words, you Windows users may use your Windows applications on Linux. So no more excuses for not using Linux.

Multimedia

• Asunder is a simple ripping and encoding tool for CDs.
• EasyTAG is a tool for editing ID3 tags (song name, artist name etc) for mp3, flac files and so on.
• Grip is a ripping and encoding tool for CDs. It has plenty of configuration option and it allows you to specify file and folder names any way you want using wildcards. Grip is for the Gnome desktop.
• Mp3tag is a sweet little tool which allows you to easily edit the ID tags and the file names of your music in batches. The name is a bit deceiving as Mp3tag supports several file formats, not just mp3.
• Sound Juicer is another ripping and encoding tool for Linux. It is very simple to use.
• VLC Media Player plays all sorts of media files, works great on Vista 64 too.

File transfer

• FileZilla is a file transfer protocol (ftp) client.
• Vuze (Azureuz) is a great client for bittorrent.
• WinSCP is a neat client for secure ftp.

Image editors

• Gimp is the OSS equivalent of Photoshop. Some say it covers the needs of Photoshop users. I have really not used it that much so I wouldn’t really know. However, it is an alternative which should be considered if you are looking for a Photshop replacement.
• Inkscape is a great tool for making vector graphics. Great for making figures and illustrations for LaTeX documents.

Web tools

• Aigaion is my favorite web tool. Great for organizing publications and information about all the publications you have read. It is a must have tool for anyone using LaTeX. Aigaion exports to bibTeX and RIS and it is easy to extend it.
• Dokuwiki is a nice and easy to install Wiki tool.
• Wordpress is what you are looking at now. Great tool for bloging and making simple web pages. It has a large number of plugins ready to use.

LaTeX and bibtex

• Aigaion is my favorite web tool. Great for organizing publications and information about all the publications you have read. It is a must have tool for anyone using LaTeX. Aigaion exports to bibTeX and RIS and it is easy to extend it.
• Eclipse great platform for all kinds of things. It was originally an IDE but it can be used for many other kinds of things including writing LaTeX documents.
• Texlipse is a neat Eclipse plugin which enables you to write LaTeX documents in Eclipse.
• MikTeX the default Windows distribution of LaTeX. If you use Windows you need this to compile LaTeX documents.

Programming

• Eclipse great platform for all kinds of things. It was originally an IDE. It supports several programming languages and environments and it can be used for many other kinds of things including writing LaTeX documents.
• Regexxer is not really a programming tool but rather a quite useful tool for searching finding the text files you want out of a bunch of files. It can also perform search replace within these files. It is at least a lot easier than grep and find.

Configuration management

• Subclipse is a Subversion plugin for Eclipse. It is a simple tool if you want to use Eclipse as a subeversion client.
• Subversion is a configuration management tool particularly developed for managing software source code. I use it with LaTeX and it works great. Subversion is the server software you need to install to set up a repository.
• Tortoise is a stand alone subversion client.