Office
Here are all the programs to manage your SOHO work under Linux.
Office Suite
OpenOffice.org is a very good office suite to manage text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings and formulas. OpenOffice.org's origin is the German firm StarDivision that was bought by Sun in October of 1999. At that time Sun made the source code public. The community has improved it and given it the name OpenOffice.org, Sun will take the code from OpenOffice.org and release the new StarOffice 6.0 in May 2002. OpenOffice.org has a lot of features that are comparable to MS-Office or even better. I want to list some advantages of OpenOffice.org and at least the (few) disadvantages:
The files of OpenOffice.org are based on XML and are stored as zips, so you has small files and readable file structure. OpenOffice.org can open and save 130 different file types (e.g. PDF and Flash), the compatibility to MS-Office-files has been improved and is very good now. OpenOffice.org runs on all Microsoft operating systems Windows 95 and newer, Linux, Sun Solaris and in the future will also run on Mac OS X. In contrast to MS-Word, OpenOffice.org's word processing-tool Writer is able to manage documents with dozens of pages and keeps the layout.
Nevertheless StarOffice is not MS-Office: You do not have the same interface and you cannot exchange files with MS-Office without some information loss. But that is a bug of MS-Office, not OpenOffice.org: If the file-stucture of MS-Office files would be published, no one would use it anymore. Another issue is that OpenOffice.org requires quite a lot of RAM: It in not useable with less than 64 MB RAM.
You can download OpenOffice.org for free or order CD-ROMs for about five Dollars/ Euro.
OpenOffice.org [en]
Switching Offices [en]
The Office Suite That Lets You See Past Redmond [en]
A First Look at OpenOffice.org 1.0 [en]
advantages of XML [en]
StarOffice [en]
Users beginning to consider StarOffice [en]
interview with StarOffice-Produkt Manager [en]
StarOffice & MS-Office [en]
DISA uses StarOffice [en]
Editor
The most important tool of every Linux-user is the editor since this is the key to the configuration-files. So it must also run on the shell if you have a problem with your XFree86 configuration. Gvim is a frontend for the very old vim, you can find it on every - even old - Unix-sytem. Gvim is easy to use with shortcuts, which one has to learn once with "vimtutor". It supports syntax highlighting that was very useful when writing these pages.
Dictionary
English is the most widely used language on the internet, and German the forth most. Since you cannot know every word, you can use "Ding", a program that knows a lot of English and German words. You can use the copy and paste shortcuts under XFree86: You highlight the word to be translated, then move the mouse cursor to the search field in "Ding" and press the third mouse button to paste the word in place.
PDF-Reader
Evince is a cute and fast viewer for PDF-, Postscript and similar files. It supports links within the document, predefinded bookmarks and thumbnails. You can search for words very elegantly and mark and copy interesting words.
If a PDF file is not displayed properly, you can use the original Adobe Reader. Only this viewer supports forms but on the other hand it is bigger and more complex.
