February 2006

As you are no doubt aware, with Open Source software you are able to download the source code and compile the application yourself. In many cases this may not be practical and what you would really like is the application available to you already built and packaged up ready to install on your computer. This is where the various Linux Distributions play an important part as a lot of that work is already done for you. Sometimes though your distribution of choice may not have packaged the application at the level you need or even may not have packaged it at all.

All is not lost however. Chances are that someone, somewhere in the world will have struck the same problem and may have compiled and packaged the application themselves and made the package available on the internet.

Another method of delivering a computing infrastructure that deserves mention is the concept of "thin client" networks. In a Thin Client network you would have one or two fairly powerful servers that would host the applications you required and a number of network attached and less powerful terminal systems (the 'thin' clients). The theory is that because the work is done on the host servers and the client systems are used primarily to drive the screen, keyboard and mouse then they can be built very cheaply. In addition to this, because they don't need to have a hard drive, diskette drive or CD Rom they should be more reliable. This type of setup can result in significant cost and maintenance savings, especially in larger networks where multiple systems of the same type are required, such as School or University computer labs. Because Linux provides robust multi user operation it is an excellent choice for the server operating system.

Integrated Development Environment

Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software.

Embedded Development

SuperWaba is an Open Source integer Java VM and GUI environment developed specifically for small devices like PDAs and cellphones. It has a small footprint, high speed (4x faster than Sun's JIT Java in some tests) and runs across a wide range of platforms including Palm OS, PocketPC, WinCE, Windows XP/2000 and Java. Applications can be developed for it using conventional Java environments like Eclipse and NetBeans.

Can't quite find an Open Source application that does exactly what your current 'must have' application does? or maybe you have but it doesn't run natively on your chosen platform? Perhaps an emulation environment is all you need to solve the problem. Open Source software is available that can provide a unix like runtime environment on Windows platforms as well as a Windows like runtime environment on Linux.

CYGWIN

CYGWIN is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two parts: A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux API emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality and a collection of tools, which provide Linux look and feel. Cygwin is not a way to run native linux apps on Windows. You have to rebuild your application from source if you want it to run on Windows. It is also not a way to magically make native Windows apps aware of UNIX ® functionality,like signals, ptys, etc. Again, you need to build your apps from source if you want to take advantage of Cygwin functionality.

There is a wealth of open source software out there. In all probability, there is already something to do what you want. You might want to look at how others are using open source, in the CaseStudies. And the NZOSS itself has a project to help educational institutions move to open source, the EducationGroup.

Simple things first

If you have a requirement for graphic design tools then some of the following may fit your needs.

Drawing and Graphics

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.