That's Mr. Project to You Replacing Microsoft Project on Linux

by Eric Foster-Johnson

July 17, 2002 —

Despite all the debates in the press, Linux provides an adequate desktop
environment for most Windows users. The main issues lie in providing
alternatives or replacements for all the Windows software currently in
use at your site.

In previous columns, I've covered email clients, word processors, and
productivity suites that can replace Microsoft Office and other Linux
alternatives. In addition to office suites, another major type of
application is project-management software. And here, as with the
Windows operating system and the Office productivity suite, Microsoft's
Project package dominates the market.

Why Microsoft dominates this market with Project baffles me. Having
struggled mightily with Project over the years, I'm firmly convinced the
software is possessed. Even so, many organizations use Microsoft
Project, including just about every software firm. Switching to Linux
means finding a replacement to fill the project management void; a prime
candidate is MrProject.

MrProject (http://mrproject.codefactory.se) isn't a drop-in replacement
for Microsoft Project but it is a highly regarded project management
tool that includes many of the features you need for managing projects.
MrProject is nowhere near as feature-rich as Microsoft Project, but it
does support Gannt charts and calendars showing project tasks. One of
the main differences between MrProject and Microsoft Project is that, on
Windows, you can access the project files with a database interface.
Hence, you can acquire project data for use in other programs. MrProject
does not support this feature, but plans call for using libgda, a
data-access library that supports MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, and other
databases.

MrProject, released under the GNU General Public License and using the
GNOME desktop libraries, can be downloaded with special packages for
Debian or Red Hat Linux, along with the source code for other platforms,
at http://mrproject.codefactory.se/download.php. MrProject is catching
on as a standard application for Linux distributions though, so a
download may not be necessary for much longer. Red Hat Linux, for
example, includes MrProject starting with version 7.3.

ITworld