Free software / apps

Hi, I’m going in to doing a bit of freelance just to pay for the reseller account I have and earn a bit on the side. Because of this I can’t really afford to spend a lot of money on apps and tools to get myself organised so I was thinking if anyone has any ideas to help me out.

FTP:
I’m currently using Filezilla which is very usefull.

Editor:
I’ve been using editplus for ages having brought an old version and Ive recently switched to PSPad Edit which does pretty much the same thing - I haven’t used it for much yet.

Photo editor / vector graphic
I’m currently using Gimp on ubuntu but I cant get the hang of it - might just be that I don’t know enough about it. :confused:

I’m also looking for:
Freelance organizer, time tracker, organiser. Ideally im looking for something that is open source and a web application - something i can install and use on my webserver.
Helpdesk / ticket system - somewhere where clients can post problems and request support - perhaps an account manager for them. Ideally the same as above.

Design or draft creator - something where I can create a rough design of the websites and share it with clients - this can be a desktop app.

Anything else that I need to do freelance - any free advice (see what I did there :D)

Filezilla is definitely tops. As far as an editor, I like textpad, been using it for years when I can’t just use vi on the server.

I’d also recommend open office, which is an MS office replacement - some of your organization stuff can be taken care of using its spreadsheets. Or I’d look into online web-based stuff, I seem to think that Google has some tools that may be useful.

I have open office installed on my ubuntu machine and used it for writing invoices when I’ve done odd jobs for friends and family. I have google account and have used google docs for the spreadsheet use - it never even occurred to me that I could also use it to keep track of my expenses etc. Thinking about it I could also create a shared folder and write up a brief on what ive agreed with the client and share that out with the clients account (if they don’t have one I can create one based on their domain and give them the login details) that way we can use it as a contribution tool and its always available where I can access the net!!

Psyper, hopefully the following may be helpful:

Notepad++ (Very good code editor)
GIMP (Raster Drawing)
Inkscape (Vector Drawing)
OpenOffice (You’ve used this before)
Paint.NET (Basic Drawing)
Dia (Technical Drawings)
Pencil (Wireframing App)
Audacity (Audio Editing)
Scribus (Desktop Publishing)
WinMerge (File comparing - for changes)
7Zip (Archiving stuff)
iFreeBudget (Simple budget app)
FileZilla (FTP - you’ve used)
Color Cop (get’s color codes from stuff onscreen)
FruitfulTime TaskManager (task manager)