I wrote a sizable list of "likely to be handy" free/open-source software
on the board last night. It's far from complete, and you can generally
search the packages of your favorite *nix distribution. Anywho, in case
it helps someone ...

Pidgin, Kopete - Multi-protocol IM client
Gimp, Cinepaint - Image editing
Inkscape - Vector Graphics/Image editing
Python, Ruby, Perl, Ocaml, Mono (C# and .NET implementation), (chunks
of) Java, on and on - Programming languages
Octave - MATLAB-like numerical computing
R - Statistical computing
OpenOffice - MS Office-like suite
Latex, Lyx - Typesetting, used by many scientific journals
Firefox - Web browser
Thunderbird - E-mail client (with Lightning/Sunbird plugin, calendar too)
Evolution - Outlook-like E-mail + Calendar ... can communicate with MS
Exchange servers
Nvu - WYSIWYG HTML editor
Liferea - Feed reader
Apache, LightHTTPd, nginx - HTTP servers
GTK+, Qt, FOX, WxWidgets - GUI (plus more) toolkits
SDL, Cairo, OpenGL - 2D (and OpenGL is 3D) Graphics libraries (would you
like to write a game?)
GNOME, KDE, XFCE - Desktop environments
Compiz, Metacity, Fluxbox, Xmonad, Ion3 - your choice of window
management UI
Eclipse, Netbeans, Komodo - Integrated Development Environment
Emacs, Vim, Nano, Gedit, Kate - Text editors (with syntax highlighting)
Mplayer, Xine, Totem - Video players
Amarok, Banshee, bmpx - Music players
LAME, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis - Audio encoding
mencoder, transcode - Video encoding
k3b - CD/DVD burning
Grip - CD ripping
CVS, Subversion, Git (many more) - Version control
Frozen Bubbles, ltris (many more) - Games
PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite - Relational databases
nmap, Wireshark, Kismet, Snort - networking "swiss army knives"
Valgrind, Kcachegrind, gprof - Profiling (why is my program slow?)
Graphviz, Tulip - Graph (of the vertex and edge variety) visualization
Gnuplot - Plotting graphs (R does as well ...)
OpenSSL, GCrypt, GPG - crypto
Xen, KVM, QEMU, Bochs - virtualization and emulation
Beagle - desktop search
Lucene, Ferret, Sphinx - Fulltext search libraries
ctags, OpenGrok, Glimpse, LXR - Source code indexing
tar, zip, rar, gzip, bzip2, 7zip - File archiving and compression
rsync - securely transfer and backup files to a remote machine (also
does checksums to detect errors, can be used locally as well)
Flex, Bison, Ragel, ANTLR, ... - Parser/lexer generation (handy for
CMSC430 and maybe CMSC452)

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