A small business consultant’s must-have Linux apps

As a consultant to small businesses and non-profit organizations that are too small to have any IT staff of their own, I need to be able to support a diverse array of desktops and servers, platforms and file formats. I’ve been able to do it exclusively with Linux since 1998. Here are my must-have Linux desktop applications.

The four applications that open automatically when my IceWM session starts up are Jpilot for my Palm PDA, Sylpheed for email, Firefox for the Web, and a terminal window. These are all “connector” apps for me — Jpilot keeps me aware of my appointments and to-dos; Sylpheed and Firefox keep me connected to people and information in the human world; the terminal connects me to the servers I manage remotely. Other must-have applications include OpenOffice.org.

Jpilot works flawlessly to synchronize Palm OS PDAs with my Linux desktop. All the basic functions are there: calendar, contacts, memos, and to-dos. In addition, it has the Keyring plug-in that keeps all my client and personal login information (account, user name, password) synchronized on PDA and desktop, and Synctime, which keeps the clock on my PDA synced to my NTP servers. The combination of a Palm OS PDA and Jpilot gives me rapid access to all my working information, whether I’m in the office or on site, and I can back up the entire PDA to my desktop with the click of a button. It also supports the note tags of DateBk5 from Pimlico Software, so my special appointment types are displayed correctly.

Sylpheed is a fast and configurable email client that incorporates some nifty features, the best of which is integration with Jpilot! Sylpheed can pull email addresses from the Jpilot address database. For me, this means I can store all my contact information in just one place — my PDA. When I enter a new contact, in either the PDA or Jpilot, without any re-keying that information is everywhere I need it — my PDA, my PC, and my email address book.

Sylpheed has all the usual features of a modern email client, including multiple account management, POP and IMAP support, filtering, pre- and post-processing, and configurable menus. Right-click on an attachment and I can run any command on it. Sylpheed handles large message folders quickly, which makes finding that message a client sent a year ago (or was it two?) a snap. I do wish it could search through all folders and sub-folders at once; at present it is limited to searching one folder at a time. Since my messages are sorted into folders by client, that’s not a huge problem for me.

Most of my small business clients haven’t moved to Linux (yet!). OpenOffice.org provides the file format compatibility I need to interact with them. OOo opens and saves non-native file formats with aplomb. The basic office documents and spreadsheets that small businesses use daily are no problem for OOo’s filters. In more than six years of exchanging documents with clients, not one has ever even known I wasn’t using the same office suite as they, unless I told them!

Yards of copy have been written about Firefox since its 1.0 release. Let me add my voice to the many — it performs! I need nothing this browser can’t give me. Tabbed windows, ad blocking, and find-as-you-type page searching bring my productivity to its peak when doing Web research.

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