Open Source Software

I fell into the hands of open source software (OSS) a few years ago by more or less unlucky coincidence, which OSS helped me to withstand without any problems. Since then I am relatively lucky user of a GNU/Linux distribution openSUSE. Recently I have started to use also Debian GNU/Linux, which I use in my work. One of main advantages of the open source software is the possibility of using it as well on Linux distributions as on Windows. These are the reasons why I would like to make a little promotion to a few very useful pieces of software, which may help every technician.

LibreOffice

The LibreOffice is a successor of formerly well known project StarOffice/OpenOffice.org. This package provides a standard set of office programs - Writer (similar to MS Word), Calc (~Excel) and Impress (~PowerPoint), which is supplied by LibreOffice's own database tool Base and especially module Draw, which is a relatively simple editor for creation of vector graphics. In contrast to Microsoft Office, the LibreOffice ordinarily do not have backward compatibility issues and they do not have problems with viewing documents with a lot of equations and graphic elements. Furthermore they have a more transparent positioning of graphics in the text, which saves a lot of time and nerves.

On this website you may also find repositories of LibreOffice for deb-based and rpm-based Linux distributions, which you may add to your package management systems. These repositories are regularly updated and contain packages directly from The Document Foundation, which are not changed in any way, just sorted into form of repositories. These repositories contain packages for x86 and x86_64 architectures, and include British, Czech and Slovak language packs. A guide for addition of my repositories into your package managers is placed on my blog at ABCLinuxu.cz (Czech only).

GIMP

The LibreOffice offers a reasonable implementation of vector graphics editor, but the do not have a bitmap editing tool. As one of best of open source bitmap editors the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), which is according to some users comparable to well known Photoshop. The gimp always made new users disappointed by its multiple-window graphical user interface, but since version 2.8 the GUI may be switched into single-window mode, which is a very pleasant change. By the way - the graphic of this web has been created in GIMP.

QCAD, LibreCAD

One thing are pictures, another thing are real technical drawings. For creation of technical drawings I can recommend program LibreCAD (open source fork of QCAD 2.0.5 Community Edition). It is a very simple 2D CAD program comparable to former AutoCAD LT. It offers everything you may desire from a 2D CAD - it handles different line types, layers, hatches, entity edits, measurement exports etc. A very useful feature is correct editing of the DXF file format, which is very advantageous in cooperation with FEMM.

A build of QCAD 2.0.5 Community Edition for OS Windows may be found in Downloads section. This build does not require installation - just unzip it and run qcad.exe.

GNU/Octave

One of most useful pieces of open source software is unambiguously the GNU/Octave - a mathematical program with a great compatibility with well known Matlab. The syntax of both languages is nearly the same and both offer the same operations with matrices and imaginary numbers as well as advanced functions as FFT etc. A very nice feature is the export of plots into the EMF file (a vector drawing file format), which, embedded into text, looks perfect in print.

FEMM

As I said before, my main field is solution of electromagnetic field. Even for this specific field some open source tools exist. Among others the FEMM should be mentioned, which is extraordinary by its intuitive usage and a lot of small features oriented on electric engineering - e. g. it is possible to consider composition of conductors from separate strands, consider lamination of steel including insulation, it features fast copy functions (linear/circular) during which it may change the orientation of permanent magnet magnetization etc. Furthermore the FEMM includes the Lua script engine, which allows some edits of geometry and solution of more complicated tasks...

Considering fluctuating quality of FEMM builds you may find a tested and stable build of FEMM in section Downloads. For proper work choose "Install without Mathematica support", if you don't have Mathematica installed.

As a more complex competitor of FEMM the University of West Bohemia develops a program called Agros2D on Department of Theoretical Electrotechnics, which solves much more than electromagnetic, electric and thermal fields.

FreeCAD

Another interesting CAD program is the FreeCAD. Currently this program is under intense development, but it features viewing and measurement of imported geometry in some proprietary file formats. Currently it is the only usable 3D CAD model viewer and editor.

TrueCrypt

What to say more ... everyone needs sometime to have some data encrypted. It does not matter if the reason is paranoia or confidence of these data. The open source offers a program TrueCrypt for this application - a simple, small and mainly multiplatform tool, which allows you to encrypt files, partitions or whole disks including boot partitions. One of advantages is, that TrueCrypt does not write any header to encrypted disk or file, hence no one is able to recognise, that such a partition is encrypted and that it is encrypted by TrueCrypt. It looks as random mixture of ones and zeros, therefore no one can guess encrypt algorithm nor your password.

Please note that in some countries the law restricts usage of such encrypting tools.