Looking for a Linux-friendly groupware suite that can take the place of Microsoft Exchange in your organization? You'll find a wide range of alternatives for Linux that offer most (if not all) of Exchange's functionality.

Songbird has left the Linux flock and gone on to perceived greener open source pastures. But what are the Linux faithful to use to replace this one time music player gem that was heralded as the alternative to iTunes?

And I don't just mean for geeks. I mean a real, viable alternative to Windows for many users despite the apparent quality of both Windows 7 and Server 2008.

Although many graphics professionals turn to Windows or Mac OS to execute their designs, Linux is far from helpless in this area. While it helps that Adobe Photoshop, the undisputed gold-standard program that most professionals use for raster graphics, runs on Linux through Wine, there are several native Linux programs that offer some of the same functionality.

Osalt is aimed at helping end users to find open source alternatives to well-known proprietary products like Photoshop, Dreamweaver or enterprise products like Bea Weblogic or HP OpenView

How do you replace Microsoft Outlook? Do you go for Evolution or Kontact? Can a combination of Mozilla Thunderbird and Lighting do the trick? Do you split the features and are there any compromises to be made?

Not every proprietary program can drive a person crazy, right? Some, like Norton Ghost, are superb tools for anyone to use. But, the fact that these tools are proprietary can drive open source fanatics up a wall. It’s not the price of the software that makes the real difference (although it’s a reason to migrate from one software to another for many people); it’s the idea that proprietary software comes with boundaries that keeps the user experience confined to…well, being the user. That’s enough to drive any developer crazy.

Adobe Acrobat is expensive, but that doesn’t mean you have to live a life without portable documents. What many people don’t realize is that PDF is a Federal Information Processing Standard, which means the specifications behind the format are widely published.