Hi Rajeev,

[Via Mel because I didn't receive Rajeev's original message.]

On Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:04:14 -0500
Mel Chua <[email protected]> wrote:

> Rajeev,
> 
> You mentioned using Ubuntu (which is a mighty fine distro!) but I would 
> also suggest checking out Fedora's remix capability 
> (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Remix, and Sebastian in particular knows 
> way more about it than I do, as do others on this list). Basically, you 
> can create an image with a custom package set, and have a 
> livecd/liveusb/etc with all the programs you want preinstalled already.
> 
> As for suggestions, my subset is below.
> 
> > Analytics: R,
> 
> Not sure if this is still within what you're looking for, but octave, scipy?

There's also scilab: http://www.scilab.org/ and Sage math -
http://www.sagemath.org/ . The latter has some issues such as not having a
proper GUI interface, but rather a web-interface, as well as not running
properly on Windows. It's also a mish-mash of many existing technologies, and
not too integrated.

> 
> > Graphic Design (2D): GIMPshop, Cenon
> 
> Inkscape. Definitely inkscape.
> 

Inkscape is definitely great, but I would strongly recommend against GIMPshop,
which was a hostile fork of GIMP, which is now abandoned, and now unsupported
by the GIMP development team. You should use plain GIMP - possibly 2.7.x which
is better supported. This is the first time I've heard of Cenon.

> > IDE tools: Eclipse
> 
> Vim and emacs? :D (Okay, okay...)
> 
> > Learning Management System (LMS):
> 
> Moodle is the most popular one, but this mostly makes sense for a server 
> image, not a personal use laptop.
> 
> > Productivity package: Openoffice,
> 
> I'd swap Libreoffice for Openoffice; if you want another lightweight 
> word processor check out Abiword (or teach your students how much you 
> can do with plaintext editors -- gedit is nice if you're GNOME-based and 
> want a graphical thing, otherwise nano/vi(m)/emacs).
> 
> IMO, the three most useful Libreoffice things are Writer, Calc, and 
> Impress, in that order (word processing, spreadsheets, and 
> presentations). There are other pieces of FOSS presentation software out 
> there but they tend to be a little bit more off the wall -- but if you 
> want to play with those, jessyink (sort of like prezi), Beamer (LaTeX), 
> and techtalk (built specifically for code-centric presentations).
> 

There's also gnumeric, which is faster and more responsive than LibreOffice's
Calc and is also nice.

> > Project Management: ?
> 
> Are you thinking about things like Trac or Redmine? Those are 
> server-side as well.
> 
> I found http://www.ganttproject.biz/ to be fine for creating and 
> managing its namesake chart for a 9-month-long project, but this was 
> back in 2007 and I haven't tried it since. I've heard good things about 
> dotproject, phpcollab, and taskjuggler, but haven't used them myself; 
> there doesn't seem to be a category-killer here. Again, a lot of PM 
> tools for FOSS are web-based and more suitable to a server rather than a 
> desktop image. I'd love people to correct me here. :)
> 
> > Security: Wireshark, Nmap Security Scanner, WinSCP, Snort
> 
> Also check out the packages included on 
> http://spins.fedoraproject.org/security/ (click "List of all FSL 
> packages" on that page to get to 
> https://fedorahosted.org/security-spin/wiki/availableApps).
> 

One should note that Nmap interprets the GPL licence in a strange and incredibly
restrictive way, so it may be neither free software nor open-source:

http://nmap.org/svn/COPYING

> > Text Editor: vim, nano
> 
> gedit. There's also gvim (vim running as a GNOME app). I'm sure others 
> here will clamor for emacs.

Kate is also nice, at least when I need it to write mixed Hebrew/Latin
documents (I'm usually using gvim for coding).  

> 
> > Video Editing: LiVES,
> 
> kino, kdenlive -- see also http://opensource.com/tags/video-editing
> 

There's also avidemux (which doesn't give you a lot, but works pretty well) and
OpenShot (which I found confusing and/or buggy).

Regards,

        Shlomi Fish

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