Let this be the beginning of a series of posts I'll be making every now and then to sing the praises of the many great open-source programs I use almost daily to do my job.

To start with, for no reason in particular other than it being the program I was using at the time I got this idea, I'll focus on Inkscape, a vector-image drawing program. Inkscape is similar to Adobe Illustrator.

Inkscape is something I've only been using for a few months now, and I am still learning it. I personally use it mostly for creating website design mock-ups, and various background images for DIV boxes such as those with rounded-corners. It can also be used for creating nice, fancy heading text, but I have not quite reached that level of mastery.

That's about all I can say about it really. If you use linux, chances are your distro of choice has it available in its package manager, so look for it there, or go check out their download page where you'll find compiled packages for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, as well as source code.