Contents
Linux* comes with a wealth of applications, often offering more than one solution to specific needs. The difficulty is finding the application that suits your needs best. The next few sections introduce some of the most powerful Linux counterparts of common Windows software. Each section is dedicated to one particular field of application and presents an overview of the Windows applications and Linux equivalents for several tasks. Below each table, find further information about the Linux applications with links to more information. This list is by no means complete, because software development is an evolutionary process and new applications are constantly being created.
![]() | Applications not Installed by Default |
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Not all applications mentioned below are installed on your system by default and some may not be shipped with your product. If the application you want to use is missing, ask your system administrator. If the application is provided by your product, you can install it with YaST. Use the search function of the YaST software management tool to find the name of the wanted package. |
This section features the most popular and powerful Linux office and business software solutions. These include office suites, databases, accounting software, and project management software.
Table 24.1. Office Software for Windows and Linux
Task |
Windows Application |
Linux Application |
---|---|---|
Office Suite |
Microsoft* Office |
OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, KOffice |
Word Processor |
Microsoft Word, WordPerfect |
OpenOffice.org, StarOffice Writer, KWord |
Spreadsheet |
Microsoft Excel |
OpenOffice.org, StarOffice Calc, Gnumeric, KSpread |
Presentation |
Microsoft PowerPoint |
OpenOffice.org, StarOffice Impress, KPresenter |
Data Plotting |
Microsoft Excel |
OpenOffice.org, Calc, Kst, Gnuplot, Grace (Xmgr), LabPlot |
Local Database |
Microsoft Access |
OpenOffice.org, Base, Rekall, kexi, Mergeant, PostgreSQL |
Financial Accounting |
Microsoft Money, Quicken |
GnuCash, KMyMoney |
Project Management |
Microsoft Project |
Planner, Taskjuggler |
Mind Mapping |
MindManager, Free Mind |
VYM (View Your Mind), Free Mind, KDissert |
OpenOffice.org is a stable open source equivalent to Microsoft Office including a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a database manager (Base), a presentation manager (Impress), a drawing program (Draw), and a formula editor for generating mathematical equations and formulas (Math). The user interface is similar to the Microsoft Office suite. For more details, see http://www.openoffice.org/ or read Chapter 1, The OpenOffice.org Office Suite.
StarOffice, a proprietary office suite software developed by Sun Microsystems, is similar to OpenOffice.org. It is available on multiple platforms like Linux, Windows and Solaris. It contains the same modules as the OpenOffice.org suite. It also includes certain advanced features not available with the open source version. For more details, see http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/.
KOffice is the fully integrated office suite designed for the KDE desktop. It comes with various modules, like word processing (KWord), spreadsheets (KSpread), presentations (Kpresenter), several image processing applications (Kivio, Karbon14, Krita), a database front-end (Kexi) and many other applications. For more details, see http://www.koffice.org/.
Writer is the stable word-processing and desktop publishing module of the OpenOffice.org and StarOffice. The StarOffice Writer features some advanced functionalities not available with OpenOffice.org. For more details, see http://www.openoffice.org/product/writer and http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice.
KWord is the stable frame-based word-processing module of the KOffice Suite. KWord's easy-to-use features help you to create professional looking documents and it can handle large amounts of texts. For more details, see http://www.koffice.org/kword/.
Calc is the spreadsheet and data plotting module of the OpenOffice.org and StarOffice suites. It is easy to learn and offers a wide range of features. For more details, see http://www.openoffice.org/product/calc.html and http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice.
KSpread is the spreadsheet module of the KOffice Suite. It is a scriptable spreadsheet program which provides both table-oriented sheets and support for complex mathematical formulas and statistics. For more details see http://www.koffice.org/kspread/.
Gnumeric is a spreadsheet solution for the GNOME desktop environment that can also read files created with other spreadsheets. It's built-in functions and tools are extremely accurate. For more details, see http://www.gnumeric.org.
Impress is the presentation module of the OpenOffice.org and StarOffice suites. Impress lets you create multimedia presentations with 2D and 3D clip art, special effects, animation, and drawing tools. Impress can create PDF files from your presentations, and it is able to view, edit and save files in several file formats, including the *.ppt format, which is used by Microsoft PowerPoint. For more details, see http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html. and http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice.
KPresenter is the presentation module of the KOffice Suite. KPresenter can prepare complete sets of slides containing text and graphics in a variety of formats, and embed all sorts of objects. KPresenter is also able to load presentations from Microsoft PowerPoint, MagicPoint and OpenOffice.org Impress documents. For more details see http://www.koffice.org/kpresenter/.
See Calc.
Gnuplot is a very powerful and portable command line controlled data plotting software. It is also available for MacOS and Windows platforms. Plots created by Gnuplot can be exported to various formats, such as PostScript, PDF, and SVG, allowing you to process these plots easily. For more details see http://www.gnuplot.info/index.html.
Grace is a 2D plotting tool for many platforms including Linux. It can create and edit plots with a graphical user interface. Grace supports an unlimited number of graphs per plot. For more details, see http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/
Kst is the data plotting module for the KOffice suite. It allows for real-time data viewing and plotting with basic data analysis. For more details, see http://kst.kde.org/.
LabPlot is a plotting tool for creating and managing 2D or 3D data plots and was written for KDE. Graphs can be produced both from data and functions and one plot may include multiple graphs. It also offers various data analysis methods. For more details, see http://labplot.sourceforge.net/.
Base is the database module of the OpenOffice.org and StarOffice suites. It can be used to create “self-contained” database documents with all relevant data, table definitions, reports, and forms. For more details, see http://www.openoffice.org/product/base.html and http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice.
GNOME-DB provides a unified data access architecture to GNOME. It is useful for any application that accesses persistent data. It consists of a data abstraction layer (Libgda), a database widget library and a database front-end (Mergeant). For more details, see http://www.gnome-db.org/.
Kexi is an integrated data management application. It can be used for creating databases, inserting data, performing queries, and processing data. Forms can be created to provide a custom interface to your data. For more details, see http://www.koffice.org/kexi/.
PostgreSQL is an object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, and user-defined types and functions. For more details, see http://www.postgresql.org/.
Rekall is a database management tool that supports many database applications like MySQL,PostgreSQL and Xbase. Rekall can be used for many tasks such as reports, forms, queries and others. For more details, see http://www.thekompany.com/products/rekall/.
KmyMoney is a personal financial manager for the KDE desktop. It enables users of open source operating systems to keep track of their personal finances and offers a broad array of financial features and tools. For more details, see http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net.
GnuCash is a software tool to control personal and business finances. It enables users to keep track of income and expenses and it is also used to manage bank accounts, and stock portfolios. For more details, see http://www.gnucash.org/.
Planner is a project management tool for the GNOME desktop aiming to provide functionality similar to the project management tools used under Windows. Amongst its features are Gantt charting and different display types for tasks and resources. For more details see http://www.imendio.com/projects/planner/.
Taskjuggler is a project management tool that enables the user to control projects using Gantt charting features. It can also be used to generate reports in different formats (XML, HTML or CSV). Taskjuggler can be controlled from the command line but also offers a graphical front-end. For more details see http://www.taskjuggler.net.
FreeMind is a mind-mapping like tool for structuring ideas, thoughts and concepts. It can copy nodes (or the style of nodes) and paste texts from sources such as HTML, RTF, and mails. The mind maps can be exported into various formats, such as HTML and XML. For more details, see http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page.
VYM (View Your Mind) is a mind-mapping like tool for structuring ideas, thoughts and concepts. VYM mind maps are created in XML which can be exported to HTML. For more details see http://insilmaril.de/vym.
Semantik (previously KDissert) is a mindmapping-like tool for structuring idea. Users can generate various outputs from the mind map, such as PDF files, text documents and HTML files. For more details see http://freehackers.org/~tnagy/kdissert/.