-Linux distro (looking at Red Hat 9)
SuSE 9.0
-E-mail
Evolution, Kontact, KMail, Sylpheed...
-Internet (preferably fast, tabbed)
Konqueror, Mozilla, Opera, Galeon
-PDF Creation
All Linux-applications (using kprinter as printerfrontend)
OpenOffice
ps2pdf command (every application can print to a ps file, use this command to convert it to pdf
-Office suite similar to M$ Office (OpenOffice.org 1.1?)
OpenOffice.org
-FTP Program
KBear, GFTP, Konqueror, etc..
-HTML/PHP Editor
Quanta, Bluefish, VNU, OpenOffice, Mozilla Composer
-Anti-Spyware/Adware
Not neccessary
-Advanced multichannel audio mixing/editing (currently Adobe Audition 1.0)
Rosegarden (?)
-PDF Reader
KWord (also editing) , Acrobat Reader, KGhostview Kpdf
-CD Burning and CDRW Packet Writing (should support VCD, images, etc.) (currently Nero 5.5)
K3b is very good for burning CD/DVD, please look at
http://packet-cd.sourceforge.net/instructions.php3 for more details about packet writing
-AOL IM
-MSN IM (is this possible?)
(yes)
Kopete, Gaim, etc.
-Cursor/Icon Creation
Gimp, kiconedit.
-Screen Saver Creation
probably possible, no idea with wich application.
-Color Grabber (gets hex codes for colors displayed on the screen-use an eyedropper to select a color anywhere on the screen.)
kcoloredit, kcolorchooser
(both default present in KDE as tool and applet)
-Video Editing (preferably advanced)
MainActor (same as Windows-version)
-RSS Feed Reader
knewticker (default in KDE)
-Spam Filter
SpamAssasin
(easy to use with filters in kmail)
-Image Mapper (HTML)
Konqueror
-Multimedia player (WMA, Windows-compatible media files, MP3, DVD, etc.)
Xine, MPlayer (and lots of frontends for both players, like kmplayer, kplayer, kaffeine, etc..)
-C/C++ Development and Setup Creator
KDEvelop, QT Designer, etc..
-Multimedia Presentations
-Disk Defragmenter
Not neccessary, linux file systems only fragmentate when there is less then 10% disk space left.
-Desktop Notes (Like Post-it Notes)
knotes (default in kde)
-Macromedia Shockwave/Flash Player
The flas-pugin is available for netscape, all other browsers use netscape plugins. shockwave director is not available for linux.
-VNC
available (default in kde)
Also Windows RPC protocol is available (in kde 3.2)
-Screen Capture to SWF, AVI, GIF, still images
Gimp, ksnapshot (default in kde)
-Grep
grep
-Zip/File Compressor/Decompressor
from the commandline: zip, bzip2, tar, gzip, etc. etc. etc.
Using GUI: Karchiver, Ark (default in KDE)
-Firewall
iptables (default in Linux)
There are lots of frontends to configure iptables, like guarddog (
www.simonzone.com)
And, do they have Linux drivers for these devices:
-Palm handheld (USB)
-Creative "PC-DVD" Remote Control (Serial)
-External DVD Drive (USB)
-Logitech QuickCam (Old Version) (USB)
-Creative Nomad IIc MP3/WMA Player (USB)
-Pinnacle Deluxe Video Capture Device (USB)
-PNY SmartMedia Card Reader (USB)
I think they all should work, please check out the hardware support database of your favorite distro.
Possibly, surround sound driver!
afaik it is present.
I'd prefer open-source or free solutions as well.
Except for mainactor and acrobat reader, all solutions I presented are opensource.
AFAIK everything in my list is available on the installation disks of RedHat (except for mainactor, which is part of SuSE 9.0, or available for approx $ 250,00)