Today, the linux world has a new member. A student with whom I work received a linux laptop today, a great little machine from System 76 [1]. In celebration of the open-source goodness of linux, I list a few of my favorite applications and plugins for linux and open-source software.
- OpenOffice.org 2.0: MUUUUUUUUCH better than OpenOffice 1.0, which drove away an entire generation of physicists it sucked so bad. While we can never replace LaTeX in the scientific community, the drag-and-drop ease of OO.org 2.0 makes rapidly assembling talks very simple. They also look darn good, once you realize that the key to good slide design is STYLES, STYLES, STYLES. Here are a few OO.org 2.0 tips for physicists: to get some simple Feynman diagrams for your slides, download Orhan Cakir’s .doc file with some diagrams embedded in it, which you can use in your own documents: http://science.ankara.edu.tr/~ocakir/PSFDO_v1.tar.gz. When using the equation editor, remember that “%” is just like “\” in LaTeX, so to make a Greek character like “\alpha” use “%alpha”. Need to do an exponent? + and – are operators in the editor, and expect arguments on either side. To do something like 10^{-4}, you need to do one of the following: 10^{{}-4} or 10^{“-“4}.
- Plugins for Firefox: Firefox is great because it can be extended by the user, for free. I recommend the following plugins: AdBlock, for stripping banner ads out of pages; ScribeFire, for remote editing of a blog; Download Statusbar, to get rid of that f&@#ing annoying pop-up download window; Sage, for reading RSS news feeds; and Session Manager, for more intelligent saving of the state of your browser, for easy recovery after a crash.
- Claws Mail: Once called “Sylpheed-Claws”, because it was the cutting edge CVS branch of the stable “Sylpheed” e-mail client, Claws Mail is the mature end result of the “claws” development effort. Using the GNOME-style widget set, it’s super-fast, supports POP, IMAP, and local mail, and has a suite of plugins for syncing with a pocket PC, training a Bayesian Spam Filter, viewing postscript files inline in the e-mail. This is perfect for physicists. In Ubuntu, it’s still called “sylpheed-claws”. I recommend “sylpheed-claws-gtk2” for a better-looking client.
- Trick out your desktop! Find tons of themes for KDE or GNOME at http://www.kde-look.org and http://www.gnome-look.org. Want sweet rendered images? Checkout my old favorite: http://digitalblasphemy.com/freegallery.shtml.
Enjoy these picks, new users everywhere!
