Every once in a while I clarify to clients that the Open Source community has provided excellent tools and components to accomplish work in the Windows Enterprise.

Big name companies and their projects earn a lot of the business press, like Sun with Open Solaris and Novell with SuSE. However, you can download Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and install powerful and free Open Source software and still get the job done in working together with Windows while retaining your presense (and preference) for Linux.

These are resources I often suggest to our clients. Please try them out. They’re open source, high quality code and completely free.

Linux distros

Any quality GNOME Desktop distribution of Linux

• view popular Linux distros here

Web Browser

• Firefox
• view Mozilla’s statement of direction

eMail Client – Microsoft Exchange capable

• Evolution
  
• view Evolution manual and FAQ
• Evolution provides integrated mail, addressbook and calendaring functionality to users of the GNOME desktop

Terminal Services Remote Desktop Protocol Client

• rdesktop
• view info at SourceForge about the rdesktop project

Office Suite

• OpenOffice
• OpenOffice.org’s Mission Statement is…
  To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format