IT Learning Programme

Last week we held another successful Skills Toolkit event here in the IT Learning Programme. This is where we give research students the opportunity to try out a collection of tools that they might find useful in their research and studies.

The tools were a mix of open source and commercial. It set me thinking as to what a personal toolbox of open source applications might contain. Here’s my list:

7-zip: for file compression

Audacity: for sound recording and editing

Blender: 3D animation

Chromium: the browser behind Google Chrome

Filezilla: for FTP uploading and downloading

Freemind: for mind-mapping

GIMP: the GNU Image Manipulation Program for image editing

Inkscape: for illustrations

LibreOffice: the office productivity suite that contains Writer (documents), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (diagrams), Base (databases), Math (equations)

Scribus: for desk top publishing, such as posters and leaflets

Texmaker: a LaTeX editor

Thunderbird: for email

All of these are available cross-platform.