One of the things I love the most about Open Source and the Internet in general is that there is always new and amazing stuff to discover. I recently discovered two new software projects that, I think are really awesome.

In the spirit of this I decided to take a moment to put together a list of my (current) five favorite Open Source projects. These are not listed in any order of importance.

DokuWiki

This is a great wiki software package that you can just drop into a web folder and start using. I like because it is so easy to get up and running without dealing with complicated configuration.

http://www.splitbrain.org/projects/dokuwiki

Gparted

This is the best disk partitioning utility I have found. You can just download an ISO and burn it to a CD and then boot from that and manage all kinds of disk maintenance tasks. It has a nice graphical interface and runs completely independent of operating system software (outside of the fact that it is booting a simplified Linux system straight from the CD).

http://gparted.sourceforge.net

OpenOffice.org - NeoOffice

This is one of my old favorites and one the most successful open source projects to date. It is a productivity suite much akin to Microsoft Office. It is better in some ways and not quite as good in others, but on the whole is a great alternative.

NeoOffice is the native version for Mac OSX, however OpenOffice.org is working on a native Mac version (which I think will put NeoOffice out of business).

http://www.openoffice.org
http://www.neooffice.org

Tango Desktop Project

This is a project put sponsored freedesktop.org. It is a project that is trying to take the different distributions of Linux and the different window managers on Linux and get them to use a standard set of look and feel icons so that a person can move between versions of Linux and still get a familiar user experience.

I think this is a very important thing when comes to wider Linux adoption by users. The other part to this is that these icons can be adopted throughout the world and not just on Linux, bringing the whole tech sphere closer together from a user perspective.

http://tango.freedesktop.org

Ubuntu

This is one of my favorite distributions of Linux. It is very well constructed and organized from a geek perspective, but also it seems to install and work very easily for the Linux newbie (on most computers). Although, I have to contribute its geek appeal to the fact that it is Debian based. My user experience with it has just been great; better than I have ever had with any other Linux distributions.

It is also a very progressive and successful in bringing Linux acceptance to a higher level. One of the biggest things it has achieved recently is that it has been picked up by Dell and offered as a cheaper alternative to Windows Vista in the new computers they sell.

http://www.ubuntu.com