The Most Desired Linux Ports

zenboomerang writes "It looks like Novell is trying to hit the hammer on the top of software developers heads and try and get them to port their applications directly to Linux. With help from the public they will try to pursuade the management of the most popular programs picked to get into the 21st Century and do some Linux testing. It seems to me to be a good idea and all it needs is a little help from the community."

Automatic slashdotting

[slavemowgli]

Hmm, seems that the article redirects to itself when you block cookies, essentially causing the page to reload forever and ever. Can you say "automatic slashdotting"? :)

Re:Only one I really need

[pilot1]

can't gnomemeeting communicate with netmeeting clients?

Thinking to buy out CodeWeavers?

[Cycon]

I can't find the link on their site, but CodeWeaver's Crossover Office lists almost verbatim the apps from the dropdown in the survey [novell.com] among their "supported" apps when you're installing new software.

Ximian was a small outfit and Novell bought them out, maybe they're considering a similar move with CodeWeavers?

In any case, for comparison here's a list [codeweavers.com] of top most wanted apps for Crossover to support next.

Re:Of that List...

[bobrog]

IBM is rolling out GTK based Linux Notes client called the "Notes Plugin" which will be a part of their Lotus Workplace product. This article [techtarget.com] says the Linux Notes Plugin will be available later this year and this blog [edbrill.com] discusses its demo taking place at Lotusphere 2006 this week.

Visio

[NullProg]

Isn't going to happen until Microsoft starts being a platform neutral software company again. I have an older pre-Microsoft version and it rocked. Too bad Microsoft killed (oops, integrated) it with Office.

Dia http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/ [gnome.org] as replacement works for me. Windows port available.

Hey Microsoft /. patrollers, ask upper management if its worth selling me nothing or selling me a $40-$100 standalone version of Visio for Linux? I'm not a thief and I won't upload my copy.

Enjoy,

Re:Port photoshop

[nxtw]

FWIW, with Windows you don't really need those "point upgrades" until 5+ years until after they're released. Most new software still works with Windows 2000 (with the last free updates, of course). Sure, there are missing features and such, but the majority of the hardware out there supported in XP is still supported in 2000. The latest .NET Framework, .NET Framework 2.0, still runs on Windows 98 and Me as well as 2000/XP/2003. The latest version of Photoshop still runs on Windows 2000 as well as XP, as does most software I've seen.

I'm sure things are getting better, but the latest version of Photoshop only runs in Mac OS X 10.2 (2002) or later, and is "recommended" for use on 10.3 (2003) or 10.4 (2005) only. I've seen a lot of "System Requirements" for Mac software that explicitly require later versions of the OS. I suspect the APIs have stabilizied greatly across the past few versions.

Re:Port photoshop

[Lord Kano]

Many graphic houses are designed to run photoshop. Their equipment is calibrated for Photoshop's color separations. Their processes are centered around Photoshop.

The GIMP is cool, don't get me wrong but Photoshop based houses will only run Photoshop.

The day that it is ported to Linux is the day that these houses will start looking at Linux on the desktop.

LK

For Chemists...

[cab15625]

Three things that would be nice are

1) Chemdraw

2) SciFinder

3) Endnote ported to work for OpenOffice,ODF under Linux

SciFinder can be tortured into working under wine, but it would be nice if it would work natively. Especially since a lot of the people who use it are physicists/physical chemists who do use *nix.

LaTeX or RevTeX (with BibTeX) are pretty sweet and most journals will accept one or the other, until you need to colaborate with someone on a paper and then a plain text file with backslashes and braces everywhere suddenly becomes extreamly confusing, (try to explain that \begin{equation} \exp(x)=e^x \end{equation} will look just fine once it's been processed to someone who doesn't realize that there are alternatives to wysiwyg) so some way to interoperate with the MS addicts and still conveniently insert references would be nice.

Finally, the FOSS offerings for drawing chemical structures are pretty pathetic compared to ChemDraw. Cactvs and XDrawchem are a nice start, but that's all they are ... a start. For crying out loud, they have an OSX version ... so they're about 75% of the way there already.

So, from my particular niche, that's what I'd like. Another option would be to port a useful free equation editor to MS office, then I might almost be tempted to try windows again.

Re:Interesting

[rthille]

The funny thing is that Visio is a copy of Diagram. I was friends with some people at Lighthouse Design (makers of Diagram), and they had the order from the people who basically 'ported' Diagram to Windows. The thing is, the cost of marketing on Windows was so high that even though Visio sold way more copies than Diagram, they didn't make any money. Then Sun Microsystems bought Lighthouse for the people and killed all the NeXTStep apps and Omnigroup just rewrote Diagram/Visio as Omnigraffle.

Worked for me

[phorm]

Last time I checked it worked okey for me, though the Netmeeting client needed an extra audio codec installed... and I remember having video issues at various times when using gatekeepers.

Re:Port photoshop

[Saven Marek]

GIMP has had great colour support for many years now, you don't need colour profiles if you're working on real true colour images, so be careful because some desktops are only 16 bit not 24 bit, meaning you will need to use colour profiles, but that's not a fault of the gimp that's a fault of some desktops.

If you want more information then the gimp user [gimp.org] mailing list is the best place for it, and they'll tell you what you want to hear.

Re:Finale

[Theatetus]

Different strokes, I guess. Lilypond's superiority (to me, at least) over Finale and Sibelius was one of the things that pulled me away from the Dark Side. I could never get braces quite right on Finale and they just work with lilypond.

Have you tried denemo? It's a really nice GUI front end to lilypond, with the added benefit that when the morendo isn't stretching out exactly right you can just edit the markup to make it do exactly what you want.

Re:My List of Apps I'd Like to see on Linux...

[SanityInAnarchy]

FileMaker is a BAD IDEA for the same reason Quickbooks is. Look at the other comments. It does work in Wine, though, and has a Linux server.

DreamWeaver? Hire a web designer. There are web development tools for Linux, and there are web-based development tools for anything with a decent browser, but honestly, if what you're doing requires something as complex as DreamWeaver, it really requires a professional web developer comfortable with Linux and Vim.

I have no idea what InDesign is or what it really does, so I'll give you that one.

Timbuktu -- did you TRY to Google? SSH has been around for years, and it'll do X11 forwarding. There's also VNC, which has plenty of decent Windows clients. And there's rdesktop, for connecting to Windows remote desktops. It would take a lot of trickery to show only part of your screen, but is that a big issue for you? Or anyone? I would hide things on another workspace if I didn't want to show the whole desktop.

Netmeeting -- again, are you serious? Ok, there is GnomeMeeting to connect to actual Netmeeting, but there are so many replacements it's ludicrous. Normal IM has webcam support, and there's a program that does this. And let's not forget Skype.

Outlook -- Thunderbird and Sunbird. Yes, you can make this work easily enough in Sunbird, if you know how to run a webserver. Is it stable yet? I've only had one bug, and that's been fixed already... No crashes...

In short, ask Google before you ask Slashdot. Google won't insult you for not knowing something.

Re:Lotus Notes

[O_D_Evans]

Following the guide in the gentoo wiki [gentoo-wiki.com], with a little alteration, I was able to get Google Earth working on Slackware.

Re:Port photoshop

[cuerty]

At many offices the Photoshop guy it's the webmaster and such, they tend to uses things like bash's for with imagemagick to make their job faster and things like that.

They use Linux right now, but it's a pain in the ass to dualboot each time they need something from Photoshop. With CrossOver I've seen many of them use Linux without restart for weeks, but seriusly, a native version it's needed.

Re:Of that List...

[scottme]

Au contraire — Lotus Notes was indeed available in a "Unix" version; this existed up to release 4.5 or so. They dropped the port beginning with R5. No great loss — I recall a company running it on Solaris machines and being fairly unhappy with it; it definitely lagged the Windows and OS/2 versions of that time in usability.

It is possible to get the Windows binaries running under WINE or Crossover; I understand that is how Linux diehards in IBM tend to use it. But as others have posted, the IBM plan is to offer Notes functionality as a plugin to the Eclipse-based IBM Workplace.

And just to set you straight - the Notes client has never been particularly "Java based" — it provides Java APIs but as far as I know it is and always has been largely a C/C++ program.

Nedit

[Chris Tyler]

Nedit is a notepad on steriods. Simple UI, very clean window layout, open source, but with all the toys under the hood: syntax highlighting, rectangular moves, autoindent, macros, the works. (Unfortunately based on Motif/Lesstif, but about the nicest Motif UI I've seen in a long time).

Re:Port AOL

[nukem996]

I thought I remember reading awhile back AOL was experimenting with a Linux version, but then realized that more and more windows people hate AOL. Anyway if you goto aim.com right now you can download an offical AIM client for Linux.