Slashdot Mirror
Best Free Open Source Software For Windows
snydeq writes "InfoWorld surveys the FOSS-on-Windows landscape, detailing the 10 free open source solutions most likely to unseat proprietary offerings. 'Some, like TrueCrypt and VirtualBox, are real diamonds in the rough: enterprise-grade solutions that deliver many of the same bells and whistles of their commercial brethren, but for free. Others, like Firefox and OpenOffice.org, are already legendary, and their strong followings ensure their continued development and support at levels that rival the best proprietary solutions.'" Rather than click through 10 different pages, the slideshow presentation at least lets you hover over each page's link to preview the author's top picks.
Cowboy Neal
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
You could just list them in the summary - in less space than it takes to explain the "hover" trick
No sig today...
Print version
Not going to be the next firefox in terms of popularity... but lisp in a box is just nice for getting into lisp/emacs on any platform. Used to be a big learning curve how to set slime, etc. up and all that.
http://common-lisp.net/project/lispbox/
Is the reason I actually stuck with Windows 2008 Server when evaluating my choices for a home NAS solution with easy-to-use partition encryption that doesn't get in my way and yes, I had tried out different Linux and *BSD-based solutions, but in the end, Win2008+Truecrypt was simply too powerful and too convenient to not pick as the clear winner. I might look at FreeBSD and OpenSolaris again when ZFS crypto finally gets implemented to see how it fares on the usability side of things.
Hmm, seems they left out Wubi.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Not reading the article, I assume your considering VMWare Workstation its commercial brethren? VirtualBox doesn't include USB support in the Open Source version, which for my needs makes it a non-starter.
Their proprietary version (free for personal use - even in a commercial environment) is a pretty good alternative.
AKA No Slideshow version
http://www.infoworld.com/print/84903
Seriously though, if you include Cooperative Linux then you get to include most of the Posix/Unix/Linux free-software universe.
:P ;)
But still, I say Wubi is the #1 piece of free software to be had on Windows -- har har har.
jdb2
Or if you want pictures browse to the print view of the article.
The Open Source For Windows project
http://osswin.sourceforge.net/
And while the Open Source CD project is dead, it looks like there's an alternative.
http://www.ttcsweb.org/osswin-cd/
Now if only Windows had Debian style repositories.
--
BMO
THEN Ubuntu.
Never heard of the application. Summary say it is extremely limited. Is there a reason, other than complexity of interface, that one might choose it over gimp. I suppose gimp does not have all the shapes of a drawing program, but it does paint, with colors.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Thanks.
I couldn't make it to page 4 before it got /.-ed.
Cygwin!
I know many people who have used OpenOffice and not one of them thinks it holds its own against MS Office.
Me. Now you know one. Will that stop you from posting trollbait like this?
Just callin' it like I see it.
PDFCreator!? I just downloaded and installed it yesterday on a Vista machine at work. I got a Yahoo search toolbar installed after specifically telling the installer app not to do so, and then I also got a 404 redirector installed too!
This was from the installer I downloaded from sourceforge...
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
How many people do you really know who use Outlook outside of the corporate environment?
For what OO does offer Outlook was the last thing it needed. Maybe now would be a good time to include it but overall it seems that most home users are using web mail.
Hell, I have Outlook on my machines and I still don't use it.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Wireshark
How about a list of more apps?
Anyone else have any good recommendations?
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
I truly pity anyone who really thinks FileZilla is the best FTP client out there. Why don't more people worship The Perfection That Is WinSCP? :(
I really like my cygwin. I would probably move to linux if I didn't have it.
I recently came across InfraRecorder and was impressed.
http://infrarecorder.org/
Yeah, I had that happen when I recently installed it. It's pretty slimy and left me with a bad impression of PDFCreator.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
FileZilla
Didn't work when I tried it for a simple FTP transfer because of default settings I couldn't figure out how to undo.
VirtualBox
Never tried it
OpenOffice.Org
Besides the fact that it is implementing an Office 2007 style ribbon who outside of business users really needs a full office suite anymore?
Firefox
Maybe if Opera open sources their browser they can be on this list, not sure if Chrome is really open.
Paint.Net
What about the GIMP, or is it because this is dead simple to use?
Media Player Classic
My vote goes to VLC here, hands-down.
TrueCrypt
Never used it.
PDFCreator
I only view PDFs so I have never needed creation software, and when I view them I use Sumatra.
7-Zip
I've heard better things about PeaZip, but I have not used either too much.
ClamWin
I thought this wasn't even under development any more? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I suppose it has a few pluses:
--It isn't a memory hog like VMWare.
--Guest tool installation is noticeably easier for non-MS guests.
But I still have issues:
--Installing guest tools completely breaks my OpenSolaris guest display.
--My shiny 1 GB graphics card becomes a 128 MB POS in the guests.
--No USB support in the Open version.
--Running my OpenSolaris guest in NAT mode totally gimps the connection.
VirtualBox isn't bad, but I can't see it being a VMWare killer anytime soon.
Surely VLC should have made this list? While it isn't exactly pretty it is very much FOSS, cross platform, and removes the need to download endless quantities of random codecs. Definitely better that Media Player classic in my book.
One here, for starters. I'm a non-corporate guy who needs a nice integrated contacts/calendar/tasklist app that works offline as well as online. Basically something like Outlook but not Outlook. Any suggestions? Thanx
I was going to suggest CutePDF, but it's freeware, not FLOSS.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Unfortunately, Paint.NET is no longer open source.
That's interesting.
I did a recent verbal survey in a literature class at the community college I am attending and 45% of the class was using it exclusively(other then the forced use of MS Office at the college labs).
I did it again at the end of the semester and that number had changed to 60%. It is possible that my first survey prompted the increase, but I also asked if the newer users preferred it over MS's product. ALL of them said they did. I then asked WHY.
The most common answer was that it was completely cross-compatible as far as opening MS created files...and it was free. The students could create files on the school MS system, then go home and open it in Open Office. And that it was free. Another reason they gave was that it was free.
I understand that there are some issues with bouncing back and forth between MS Office and Open Office, but most students choose one or the other. And its free.
As you might expect, students are not keen on spending upwards of $200 on MS Office when they can get Open Office for...free.
Did I mention that it is free?
Here i was thinking it would introduce me to NEW stuff, pretty much the only piece i don't have hours and hours of experience with is virtualbox. I guess that slashdot eats up these pat-on-the-back articles endorsing software that they've been using for YEARS.
Thanks for the info. Enough reason to delete it from my download folder.
I believe you've never heard of Evolution then.
as well as numerous individuals and businesses that I know.
How many do you know? Two?
They don't call it Microsoft LookOut! for a reason. Your looking for an organizer that does email. There are lots of solutions that don't require a Windows + Office and per computer license(s). If you send me $50 USD I will send you 5 different PIM/Email programs for you to keep. Of course, if you weren't a such dumb-ass, you would just Google a solution yourself.
Enjoy.
Open Office + Thunderbird?
Works for me, and has for quite some time. It really isn't that hard to Control-c and Control-v.
Turns out, TFA has a part 2. I'll just give the programs listed in that part.
vlc (the only player you will (most likely) ever need)*
cygwin (unix like environment)
kde for windows (desktop environment for windows, cool)
wubi (ubuntu installer for windows)
pidgin (IM/IRC)*
tremulous (3d aliens vs humans game)
latex (document preparing)*
python (language)* :P
vim (editor)*
emacs (editor)* (yes I'm evil, don't state the obvious)
* you left this out? really?
There are many more that deserve to be mentioned but I just don't have the will. have fun.
Hmmm, I fought with MS Office 2007 today and lost the battle. I had to complete the task with OpenOffice. The document reached a size where things started to screw up at random: Paragraph numbers disappear, the table of contents screws up, the bullets menu becomes greyed out so I cannot apply bullets to a list (but doing them one at a time by typing an asterisk worked). Gawddammit.
So people who keep saying that MS Office is better than OpenOffice are probably only working on one page memos. In my experience MS Office 2007 is a bug ridden POS and OOo is quite a bit better - not perfect either, but much better - especially with large documents.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
1. FileZilla
FileZilla may be among the best FTP clients Open Source has to offer, but it doesn't even count as competition to closed source FTP clients like SmartFTP. That said, I still prefer it for its license.
VirtualBox
VirtualBox is clearly in the early stages of becoming a very useful program, but so far it lacks everything that could make it an "enterprise level" application. Let's revisit that classification when it does branched snapshots and virtual machine migration (preferably live).
OpenOffice.org
Good stuff, but this is the one area where not being the "standard" is a huge flaw.
Firefox
Mozilla should stop turning Firefox into an extension of Google services. Apart from that, Firefox rocks. Enterprises would probably like some more central management features and longer maintenance for old versions.
Paint.Net
There is only Photoshop. I don't like that it is this way, but the competition is too far behind to be considered competition in professional environments.
Media Player Classic
A small media player which does what it's supposed to do with the least amount of fuss. Thumbs up.
TrueCrypt
Is there even commercial competition for TrueCrypt?
PDFCreator
Don't know, don't care. I create my PDFs with OpenOffice.
7-Zip
One of many free zip tools which basically all do the same.
ClamWin
No.
Why does a document suite need a mail program? It's not like there's not forty zillion perfectly good mail programs out there, so why should they waste resources creating another one?
You might as well complain that it doesn't include a flight simulator.
CD Burner XP: Partly open source (see the link), free, and better than Roxio and Nero, in my opinion.
1. Ubuntu ...
2. Debian
3. Fedora
4. Gentoo
So people who keep saying that OpenOffice is better than Microsoft Office are probably only working on documents. In my experience OpenOffice Base is a bug ridden POS and MSO is quite a bit better - not perfect either, but much better - especially with databases and spreadsheets.
Your commentary is almost entirely without value.
Let's see, you diss Firefox, then make a lame, go-nowhere comment about Chrome.
4 of the applications you've either never tried or use so little you have nothing useful to say.
GIMP is simply way too much application for 90% of the users out there. Great app., but it's got a steep learning curve, just as PhotoShop and CorelDraw do.
Oh, and I love the comment about OpenOffice: "...who outside of business users really needs a full office suite anymore...". Oh, well then, that solves it. Business users don't matter so we can ignore them completely.
you might as well install Linux
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Not to mention that if you're using OpenOffice (like this article suggests you do) then you don't need a separate PDF app. OO.o generates PDFs just fine.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
It's really bizarre that the article author included Paint.Net in a list of "best free open source software for Windows", because the source code - as the author himself even admits - is *not* available for free download for any of the recent versions of Paint.Net.
If that wasn't enough, there's been no new release of Paint.net for almost a year and I'd have thought GIMP (or GIMPShop) was a clearly superior (and fully open source) graphics package on Windows anyway.
No mention of WinSCP? That's criminal!
I know many people who have used OpenOffice and not one of them thinks it holds its own against MS Office. Including myself.
OO.o will:
* Export to PDF
* Import a plethora of formats that MS Office can't open.
* Export to Open Document Format (MS Office 2007 with SP2 will do this, but previous versions can't)
* Allow me to easily install and manage extensions
* Run natively on Mac, Linux and Windows
* Doesn't cost a penny.
We pay $400 a pop for MS Office licenses here at work. Novell's Go-oo fork implements better macro support and such which is one of the few complaints I get about vanilla OO.o. So, a free product that implements 99% of the paid product's features, including every feature I've ever needed over the past 20 years, and then does several things that MS Offiice can't do, can't hold its own?
What is your definition of hold its own?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Outlook needs to be replaced with a full, proper PIM solution. Evolution, Kontact, Thunderbird/Sunbird, etc. all do the chore. OpenOffice can play nice with those apps.
And again, if most users at home will never use it, why does OOo need it?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Paint.net instead of the GIMP?
Epic fail.
Celestia - astronomy program, lets you travel around the universe
Wireshark (as another poster already recommended) - lets you capture network traffic
FileZilla Server - FTP server
Cygwin - gives you Linux-like environment
Marble - 3D globe
ClamWin? ClamWin recently false-positived on userinit.exe in the system32 directory. The vetting on this program isn't nearly solid enough for it to be recommended for use on a windows machine, free/Free or not.
The only place I use ClamAV in is passing over emails on my linux machine.
If we're discussing enterprise ready winners, why not talk about Zimbra and Alfresco?
The main reason suits don't want to talk about leaving Microsoft or considering FOSS on their desktop is because they are very much tied to Outlook. And right now Sharepoint is Microsoft's new big gun.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
With AviSynth, you can write scripts for complex video editing tasks. AviSynth with do mixing on the fly in your video player when you run the script. Very nice; it moves complex video editing from the world of point-and-click GUIs to coding!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I have plenty more:
http://user.interface.org.nz/~gringer/iopencd/browser/home.html
Ask me about repetitive DNA
What an idiotic post. Outlook is a giant turd of a program, and the only reason I use it is because my stupid employers always require it. For my own email, I use gmail, like millions of other people, and Gmail has a calendar too which works great. As a bonus, it's faster to read email using Gmail (with its servers located who-knows-where), than it is for me to read email using Outlook which is located on my own machine. How'd MS manage to accomplish that?
I believe you've never heard of Evolution [wikipedia.org] then.
We try to use Evolution at work to replace Outlook. It is a miserable piece of buggy crap. I am very sorry, but Evolution's Exchange support is not even beta quality.
I would caution anyone who tries to use it.
Does winscp have a linux version? Serious question (and yes I know this article is about windows, not linux). I liked winscp, but as soon as I started using both ubuntu and winxp/vista machines daily, having a uniform ftp environment was worth more than switching between the two.... I must admit, I didn't find a "winscp" linux version searching through google, and filezilla was there all nice and packaged for both environments. that alone would have given the nod to filezilla...
BonkEnc is way better than CDex. CDex has this little problem where it will randomly crash itself on certain files when transcoding and it won't directly transcode OGG or FLAC.
That's rather impressive given the fact MS Office is pirated up the wazoo. People at my uni would much prefer pirating MS Office instead of having to spend the time learning OpenOffice. It's free either way.
Agreed.
The best part of WinSCP is that you can turn off the retard feature most FTP clients have where they show local files in one pane and remote files in another. Hello, McFly! I don't need a listing of local files, I have WINDOWS EXPLORER OPEN RIGHT NEXT TO THE FTP CLIENT! The retardation of opening your FTP client, then having to navigate to the same window you have open in Explorer just amazes me.
Comment of the year
Instead of installing Cygwin, my former flatmate made a bunch of .bat scripts that mimicked ls, cat, etc. to some extent. In my eyes it was a bit silly, but every time I make a switch between Linux and Windows XP, I want to hug XP's graphical interface. I hate X11's paste buffers and its incessantly overconfigurable window management systems. You can call me "raised in the 1990s", but I just find those grey menus comforting. And the damn fakers at the other side of the pond can never get the pixels right in those XP look-alike themes for Metacity.
Yours faithfully
Take off every 'ZIG' !!
Spend the time learning how to use Open Office? Dude, your in the wrong University then. I'm talking about a Community College here and 60% of the students I surveyed managed.
You do realize the interface is almost the same, the hotkeys are the same, the layout is the same....etc, etc., right?
With about 5 minutes of reconfiguring, it looks and feels exactly the same as MS Office. Hell, I'm pretty sure you can create MS Office template clones.
Another thing I forgot to mention in my first post. Of the people I asked in my survey, three of them had a point I had not considered. In many of my classes, students have had to do presentations and MANY used PowerPoint to do so. They also had presentations fail completely because of some stupid problem actually pulling up the presentation IN CLASS, with everyone there and waiting. Those three I mentioned said they have not had a SINGLE experience such as that since they started using the Open Office equivalent of PowerPoint. I think the reason they mentioned it is because they specifically remember the embarrassment of having shit fail in front of a class and instructor while using MS Office and that, so far, Open Office hasn't put them on the spot like that.
So, it's not just documents these people are using. One of them also mentioned his preference for the spreadsheet app included with OpenOffice, although I personally haven't used it.
scp support is built into many Linux distributions, including
Ubuntu. No installation or searching required.
From the command line:
$scp from to
ex:
$scp file john@a.place.com:~
copies file into the home directory of user john
on host a in the place.com domain.
yup, it works great too ;)
But I generally use filezilla when transfering files over since it gives me the option on how it handles conflicts....though scp might a command line for that as well! I was more looking for a standalone product with a nice gui interface heh
try fish:// for konquor
Whoops, responded to wrong post.
Intended to respond to GF678 (1453005).
Sorry.
OK, now I'm confusilated.
Anyone else having /. scrambling the order of posts like I just had it do?
Or through the gui on Ubuntu...
* Select places menu at the top of the screen
* Select connect to server
* Select the 'ssh' service type
* Type in your details and connect
You'll get a window where files can be manipulated as you would with your own machine. Locations can be bookmarked/categorised with credentials save as you like (although you should probably be using password protected certificates to authenticate yourself - which Ubuntu will also take care of). WebDav, FTP, Windows shares work the same, out of the box.
Although to answer his question, WinSCP seems to work great after you install Wine. You might want to try the native SecPanel application which seems similar though. Both can be installed in five clicks, and will be updated as necessary.
Yet you even suggest that the popular Linux distros are more user friendly in some areas than Windows, and I get looked at like a moron!
Media Player Classic is such a lifesaver. It ranks up with Firefox as "immediate install on every machine I touch", just in order to make the pc bearable. Most mediaplayers, commerical (MS & Apple, for instance) or free, have unbearable interfaces. Absolutely unbearable, with irregular window borders, pretend mechanical knobs, bizarre menus structures...
Thank you, heartfelt, to the team behind MPC.
Which is useful if you only create PDFs from OpenOffice and no other program. PDFCreator installs a PDF printer driver. Once installed, any program that can print can make a PDF. That's much more useful.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
Speaking of "gem in the rough", dcraw is an extremely good RAW images to tiff converter. Command line, but there are plenty graphic wrappers for it.
I downloaded PDFCreator to give it a spin, but after learning about the toolbar and reading your post I've deleted it without completing the installation.
Wikipedia has further [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDFCreator]details[/url]:
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
They say that, but check back next year to see how many of them have even taken a look at the source code.
Maybe it's a rendering bug. I'm seeing your message as having responded to GF678 (1453005) as expected.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
Your own inability to use the program does not imply that it is a horrible program. I am sure that there are many people here that would extol the virtues of vi or emacs, not because either is easy to use, but because they are powerful. Furthermore, complaining that one product sucks, but failing to provide a better alternative is not constructive. It may be true, but it is not helpful. If FileZilla is so horrible, why not provide an example of something that is better?
Then you are not really qualified to speak about whether or not this product has competition, are you? Perhaps you should have left it out of your reply.
Let us, for a moment, accept that only business users need an office suite. Why should they be ignored? They do make up a rather large number of computer users. That being said, you are ignoring a large number of people. Lots of high school and college students use office suites, as do their instructors. Many researchers also use office suites, especially in the social sciences. Authors of all stripes might use office suites. Even grandmothers writing letters to their grandchildren might use an office suite. One might argue that none of these people need to use an office suite, but that doesn't change the fact that they do use an office suite. Thus, you are just plain wrong here.
Opera isn't open, and neither it nor Chrome have the mindshare that Firefox does. As pointed out by the article, Firefox is one of the most visible and most widely adopted pieces of open software in the world, especially when considering the ecosystem of Windows software. This alone seems like a good reason to discuss it in a list of top open source programs on Windows.
Bingo. GIMP is a replacement for PhotoShop, whereas Paint.net occupies a niche somewhere between Paint and PhotoShop. It is easier to use than PhotoShop or GIMP, but is still powerful enough to fill most non-professionals' needs. Given that FileZilla was included in the list, it might have made sense to include GIMP as well, but one can also understand why Paint.net was included and GIMP was not.
As I have not used MPC (though I have used VLC), I can't really comment on this. If you have used both, why not give a reason to use VLC over MPC, rather than just throwing something else out there? The article seems to suggest that MPC was included because of the UI similarities between it and a program that might be familiar to more users who are not used to open source software. Perhaps that is the reason it was included over VLC?
Then it is good you didn't comment on it, I suppose.
You've never needed, so there must not be a need for it. H
Rhapsody in Numbers
On Windows, Ghostscript and RedMon does the job too. Just a bit more work.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Your forgot CrapCleaner (http://www.ccleaner.com) for cleaning the crap out of your computer. Man, I cleaned 200MB worth of crap, that stinked.
Last.fm is pretty useless for pretty much everyone on this world.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
scp is standard issue on must unix / linux systems.
This the kind of thing that makes me question... why? Sure MSOffice is great, has nifty features and comes with most business computers; OO.o comes with a substantial number of the features of MSOffice as well as a few of its own, cost effectively. OO.o is great for fixing MSOffice faults, true. But if you are know you doing a document that is larger than a quick semi-informal letter, why the hell are *s/geeks/nerds/technocrats* not using latex, or even just Lyx Kile or whatever? Y'know it puts out professional documents, why don't you use it?
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
At the risk of cross-pollinating Slashdot with Fark memes... THIS!!!
Though Base is a heck of a lot more usable now than it was in OO.org 2, it still has a long way to go to match Access 2000, much less anything more recent. No ODBC connections to multiple outside databases (at least that I could find), the form builder is still explicitly designed to create the worst-looking forms imaginable, importing into Base databases, especially with larger data sets, is ssssllllloooooowwwww (we're talking 15-30 minutes to import a 60,000 row Excel sheet, something which Access pulls off in well under 5), no multiuser support unless you're willing to host your own SQL server... yeah. It's better than it used to be, mind you - at least it's now obvious that you can actually code macro events against state changes on your forms. That wasn't true in 2.
Calc is better than it used to be - seriously, Sun went out of their way to clean up the worst of the problems in the upgrade to 3, which I'm very appreciative for. That said, it's still a little flaky on larger data sets that Excel seems to handle a little better. No personal anecdotes of pain on Calc 3, though, which is far more than could be said for Calc 2, so no real complaints.
Audacity is one of the best free audio editors. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
This deceptive install must be fairly recent. the version I have installed on my work machine just works. can't remember the version. maybe mention it to the developers?
For me it is getting excel to link to external data from web pages. That is one of the 1% of features oocalc doesn't support.
Is free and open source software only to be used in the home then? Why should it not be used in the office as well?
how about putty :)
No kidding. You can't even easily run guests without being logged in, which makes it next-to-useless for headless vm hosts. It's damned good for desktop virtualization, but if they want me to move over to it, it needs to run guests from a Windows service.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In fairness, Office 2007 will...
* Export to PDF and XPS (Beginning in SP2). Also, using beerfree programs like CutePDF and the like, you can simulate OO.org's PDF exporting abilities in any Windows program.
* Import a plethora of formats that OO.org can't open. Go ahead - import a Microsoft Works file. I dare you.
* Export to ODF if you install the Sun ODF Plugin. There was an article here fairly recently about MS' native ODF plugin being extremely incompatible with OO.org's implementation of the standard, so I'd avoid that.
* Also allows you to easily install and manage extensions. In fact, Office made it so easy, it became a rather serious security breach. Office 2007 now requires you to assign a level of trust to your macros and plugins before you install them.
* Runs natively on... erm... Windows.
* Doesn't cost a penny if you don't mind violating numerous copyright and trademark laws.
On the other hand, once you look past Word and Excel and start looking at the rest of the office suite, you quickly find that Draw is a really poor substitute for Visio or Publisher, Base could diplomatically be thought of as a severely watered down version of Access, and what does OO.org use for e-mail? Oh right - it doesn't, which means there's no clean way to apply OO.org macros to e-mail documents.
Look, OO.org is a nice product. I use it for most things without complaint. For a lot of people, it matches up well enough. That said, don't fool yourself - OO.org isn't a drop in or feature-matched replacement for Office 2000, much less any version after that, unless you're just using the Home & Student version.
Beats the pants off of Microsoft Works, though. If there's one thing we can be thankful for, it's the OO.org may have single-handedly nuked that abomination from orbit.
That one times 1000000! So refreshing to find a media player that just *works* without endless pissing around.
Didn't MS Office drop Works support?
Go-oo (which must Linux distros use, and I also use on my Windows boxes) has Works support.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Out of curiosity, have you tried filing a feature request for it?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Well, I did suggest Evolution, Kontact and Thunderbird/Sunbird.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
If you actually read the installer, it gives you instructions so as to not install the toolbar. There is one tickbox on the page with the picture, and one on the next. It's not really "slimy" it's just making sure you know how to read.
andLinux is quite nice as an alternative/addition to cygwin. It's a full Linux distro within Windows. It uses cooperative Linux, which is basically a windows port of the Linux kernel. Unfortunately, it's currently not usable on 64-bit systems, due to driver signing and the fact that 64-bit Linux and Windows don't agree on the size of a long.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I have to say that this is a good topic. What are the best open source projects on Windows, well with out a shadow of doubt Open Office would take the cake. My reasons for voting Open Office (OO) as the best.
OO brings a better office suite into computing, instead of focusing on fancy hidden menu's and limited file type support, OO bring a high, very high quality office bundle. I know many people will disagree with me and I'm ready to hear it but personally I haven't used Microsoft Office in years. Even at school the first thing I do each year is put on Open Office and remove Microsoft Office from my computer. I'm not going to list the inside details on why OO is better because really that will just spark issues, but if I have to stand back and pick the award goes to OO being the better office solution.
Other amazing Open Source software packages for Windows, well Cygwin. It's a great way to use a real tool chain on Windows with out the over head of Visual Studio. Allowing a user to access the GNU tool chain on a closed source OS is awesome. In fact I have cygwin replace the normal "shell" on windows, although I don't consider command.com a shell.
Octave a math program which is great when you just don't need Matlab. I'm not saying Matlab sucks, don't get me wrong, it has a place and a use. But when you at home and just want to quickly write a math script Octave is the way to go.
Apart from that there is no need to mention firefox and truecrypt. These programs speak for them selfs. Thanks
Murdoch5
If I am required to send a file to someone for some work (I have actually done this in the last year, so I'm not even making it up), if there is an issue, I can get away with saying "It must be something with Word", I can't get away with saying "It must be something with the program I am using to edit the file."
I wish I could, but no, not yet.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I use ghostscript and openoffice.org for all PDF creation tasks. And I think most (if not all) free PDF creation software are based on ghostscript??
Ghostscript can read Postscript and convert to a huge number of different image formats and printers formats (well, not really needed on windows)
And some other nominations:
The GIMP
cygwin
Einstein (http://games.flowix.com)
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3740
It looks like there are several bugs filed for this. They thought they had a working implementation for this for 3.1, but there were still issues.
This feature should working correctly in 3.2, which ship at the end of November. However, you can likely find development builds before then built from the 3.2 trunk.
If you're a Linux user, you should find 3.2 SVN builds here starting mid to late August after 3.1.1 ships.
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/OpenOffice.org:/UNSTABLE/openSUSE_11.1/
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
What a shitty list, I'd much rather use VLC than Media Player Classic, and Inkscape and The Gimp run on a lot more platforms and are a lot more useful than Paint.Net.
How do you figure that? It's released under the MIT license, which is considered free by both the FSF and OSI.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
If you actually read the installer, it gives you instructions so as to not install the toolbar. There is one tickbox on the page with the picture, and one on the next. It's not really "slimy" it's just making sure you know how to read.
No, it's really slimy. Malware is malware, regardless of whether or not you agree to it. Fscking with your browser is a behavior of malware. Period.
If I wanted a browser "helper" I would have Googled for one.
John
Forgot to say that CD Burner XP records CDs and DVDs.
Word doesn't render exactly the same way all the time, which is precisely why there are programs like Acrobat and In Design.
Furthermore, people sending Word 2007 documents to Word 2003 users is problematic.
OO.o doesn't open Word 2007 documents perfectly, but it beats not opening them at all. And I've yet to come across any problems going back and forth with MS Office 2003 and OO.o, which I do daily.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Missing Professional Web hosting and Enterprise Solution, that kicks MS rear.
Netbeans: Best, Most Productive, Easiest to use IDE.
Glassfish: High Performance Next Gen Web Server
J2EE5 and soon 6: Now EASY to LEARN High Performance Enterprise Solution,
with these features Out Of The Box:
- Enterprise JavaBeans
- Java Persistence API
- Server Side Components
- Distributed Objects
- Asynchronous Messaging
- Web Services
- Persistence: Object Relational Mapping with Oracle, MySql and Postgres, among others.
- Security
- Resource Pooling
- Concurrency
- Transactional Integrity
...Microsoft Office 2007 (and 2010) create PDF files just fine too.
So does Corel's WordPerfect product.
(and yes, I do have OpenOffice installed on this machine...I'm just sayin')
-B-
Thunderbird with Lighting extension? It isn't pretty, but it is effective, for me at least. And I do work in a corporate environment exclusively Outlook/Exchange. (there might needs be a calendar/task_manager extension, it's been a while since I set it up.)
Here is the portable version that I use.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Try cutePdf. it's identical to the pdf creator in features, and doesn't come with any BS.
May I suggest that you pick the 0.9.7 (or earlier) release - still had the option to add the toolbar, but deselecting it during the install actually worked. Never had any setting changed, toolbars installed, etc.
pdfCreator is one of the most useful utilities I have ever found. It can print to pdfs (duh) and several image file formats. You can also do document assembly, a feature that OpenOffice.org pdf export can't handle.
Hope they get the malware issue sorted - won't upgrade until they do. But seriously, give it a try - very much doubt you will delete it.
its developers were forced to scale back to a more restrictive Creative Commons License (still freely available, but without source code) after unscrupulous parties decided to rename the original and try to resell it for profit.
As currently constituted, Paint.net qualifies for only the âoefreeâ part of the FOSS acronym
And thus the article loses all credibility.
Property is theft.
How about ImageJ ? It's a light weight, free, fairly powerful, extensible java-based image editor. I don't know exactly how well it compares to Paint.net in terms of usability and features, but it's worth checking out.
Paint.net versus GIMP? WTF?!?!?
Sorry, I don't hate Paint.net - but it took me no time at all to go back to Gimp.
I would recommend SMplayer as a media player as well.
The other choice seem prettt reasonable though - I never had a problem downchecking the pdf toolbar (I used it - it's actually not bad, I just didn't need it)
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
I just installed it and it is fine. No toolbar if you deselect it during install. What is your alternative? Adobe acrobat? That thing is 10 times worse.
To be fair, Windows handles WebDav (Http or Https) and FTP shares right through Windows Explorer in just about the same way (Select "Add Network Location" instead of "Places).
Although it is pretty lame that a fresh install of Windows Vista or 7 has zero support for SSH or sFTP. Previous version had Hyperterminal which (I believe) could connect with SSH. I can't remember though, I've used PuTTY for such things for a while now.
Quite a few pieces of malicious software I have seen lately hijacked the userinit.exe file. Not that this excuses a false positive on an uninfected userinit.exe but I think it makes it more understandable. It isn't just randomly detecting things as a virus/malware.
Personally I have always used Free OTFE rather than Truecrypt.
If they don't need to edit the file, use OO.org, save it as a pdf, and *bam*, problem solved.
It's SOP at my company to always send it as a PDF if they don't need to modify it.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
There's a checkbox labeled "Set Yahoo! as my default search engine and notify me of changes." Directly below that, in BOLD, it says "IMPORTANT: If you don't want to install the PDFCreator Browser Add On, then please unselect it on the next screen."
Nobody bothers to read, though, so they uncheck the first box for the search engine change, leave the toolbar enabled, and then bitch and whine about how PDFCreator bundles spyware. I've been using PDFCreator for 5 years now, have installed it on a few dozen computers, and I've never seen it install the toolbar when you opt-out.
I think we can all agree it sucks that it's even included, optional or not, but that's another issue.
I know it's just a troll, but still.....one word - Thunderbird. Amazing email app and it's very customizable.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
So, here's the list from the article:
FileZilla
VirtualBox
OpenOffice.org
Firefox
Paint.NET
Media Player Classic
TrueCrypt
PDFCreator
7zip
ClamWin
Now, I won't quibble on the details of whether these applications have value (and they do - I use most of them). But "enterprise grade"? Not even close!
Enterprise grade needs a handful of things which (as far as I know) none of these packages support:
* Easy roll-out and maintenance over Active Directory
* Remote management and configuration tools
* Any coherent argument association with "enterprise" activities.
Granted, this is a Windows system we're talking about, but realistically, I'd expect a bit more. Yes, it's all good software. But there are a lot of reasons to not use Firefox (update management control), OpenOffice (compatibility, manageability, update control), ClamWin (no console), and so on in a 'corporate' environment.
Yes, it's doable, but for all intents and purposes, most of these programs offer a very small subset of their 'enterprise competitors' - albeit, a very strong subset at that.
And as far as the paint.net vs. GIMP, I say paint.net wins hands down (and I haven't "used" a Windows machine for years) for common web graphics and photo manipulation. GIMP is just a pain - even worse than the awkward Photoshop UI (to those who haven't gone to school to learn it).
Bullshit and the people who modded you up are utter trolls.
You've already been put in your place by another poster as a bullshit artist. But to top it off you're also a completely nitwit if you're paying 400 for an Office license and not getting at least the Professional Plus version of the software. If you are than you're paying for software that OO can not duplicate under any circumstances. Namely InfoPath and Communicator. If you're not using this software than you're paying twice what you need to pay for Office and it proves yet again you're a moron.
So either you're lying straight out, you're an idiot paying too much for software or you're using software that OO has not substitute for. Which is it?
Any of the three you admit to is going to make you look like an ass. Well, at least if people here were honest and not a bunch of zealots. But that's to be expected among a bunch of lemmings who can't understand that if an OS doesn't run my apps it's worthless to me and that if my apps don't support the functionality I need that it's nothing but worthless hard drive filler.
I've used both of these products and MSO is the hands down winner. OO is fine for mom and pop usage but it doesn't stand up to the big boys.
Stop acting like the kinds of assholes around here who think that MySQL is the same as DB2 or that GIMP is just as good as Photoshop.
This program is great! It is listed as still being alpha, but it works so much better than the craptastic narrator that comes with Windows. It is fast, light-weight, and customizable.
GIMP 2.0, and another vote for VLC
VLC media player
InfoWorld is based in California. VLC media player includes patented codecs not licensed for distribution in California or elsewhere in the United States.
OpenPandora to put Pandora on your desktop and scrobble to Last.fm
Too easy to confuse with a forthcoming Linux PDA.
Unlike CD Burner XP, InfraRecorder is GPL.
As I explained in my post, I unticked the 'install toolbar' option, yet I still got a toolbar. Slimy.
On top of that, I got a URL re-director that was *not* mentioned in the install, and didn't go away once I uninstalled the toolbar plug-in in firefox. I had to uninstall the whole application to get rid of the re-director. That is slime on top of slime.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
how does it feel to be proven wrong?
OK, that's fine; I'll take your word for it. I read it too fast and 'chose' to install the toolbar.
What's more worrysome is the URL re-director that was installed, that was not mentioned in the installer, and did not go away when I disabled the toolbar plug-in in Firefox. I had to uninstall PDFCreator altogether to get rid of the stealth re-director.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
It's GPL. Guess it's time to fork.
Wrong. The reason you got it despite your supposed telling it not to install is because you can't fucking read instructions.
The first page mentioning Yahoo has a checkbox that controls only setting Yahoo as the default search engine. I'm betting that you unchecked that checkbox incorrectly thinking you opted out of the toolbar. Although the page describes the toolbar, unchecking that box does not stop the installing of the toolbar as the installer clearly highlights: IMPORTANT:If you don't want to install the PDFCreator Browser Add On, then please unselect it on the next screen.
On the component selection screen you then need to deselect "PDFCreator Browser Add On for Internet Explorer and Firefox." in order to actually bypass the toolbar.
Your inability to read and follow instructions (like a few others that suffer from the same lack of reading comprehension skills) is not the fault of PDFCreator. Try again.
So, a free product that implements 99% of the paid product's features, including every feature I've ever needed over the past 20 years, and then does several things that MS Offiice can't do, can't hold its own?
Can it run commercial off-the-shelf accounting and inventory management software written in VBA for Access 2003 and 2007? If not, then my employer is one of the 1%.
The Go-oo fork runs Excel VBA macros. I don't know about Access.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
That- that's about it.
"Every Windows user should consider making these utilities part of their standard applications" ... the very first application they list is "Filezilla". Um, what? Why should every Windows user make Filezilla part of their standard applications?
No spyware and bloatware too, and no yahoo toolbars installed
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Yeah, but Open Office is free...I did mention that, didn't I?
For the record, anybody with a .edu email address can get Office 2007 Ultimate for $60 (less than the cost in the MS company store, in fact).
http://theultimatesteal.com/
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Why is WinSCP better than FileZilla?
Borked cache?
I restarted Firefox and it fixed it. Did the latest patch introduce something oozing and nasty?
But Open Office is free...that means it cost $0.
I think that is significantly less then $60.
Funny you mention extensions. With a couple of nice extensions that MS actually links me to directly, Office will
* Export to PDF (originally it was built in, but Adobe threw a hissy-fit over it)
* Import a plethora of formats (seriously, what does OO.o open that MS Office doesn't anyhow?)
* Export (and import/edit/convert) ODF, and I was doing it with the Office 2007 beta, RTM, and SP1
* Allow me to easily install and manage extensions (out of the box)
Admittedly, it doesn't run natively on Linux. Wine will get there soon enough, but you're nonetheless correct.
Students can get a copy of MS Office 2007 Ultimate for $60, which includes a lot of stuff that OO.o doesn't even *try* to copy. http://theultimatesteal.com/ No, I'm not affiliated with the site, but a lot of folks have found it very useful.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I'm a big OO.org fan, but Base is pure crap. I still use MS-Access on occasion for query prototyping (it's query builder is significantly more polished than Base's), or in some cases for running unified queries on multiple, often quite heterogeneous data sets.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"modify your Microsoft Internet Explorer and/or Mozilla Firefox browser settings for the default search engine, address bar search, "DNS error" page, "404 error" page, and new tab page to facilitate more informative responses as determined by The Toolbar"
I love how The Toolbar is anthropomorphized here. "The Toolbar will determine what is best for your computer and for you. The Toolbar is all-knowing. The Toolbar is goodness and light. You love The Toolbar."
AutoHotkey is a necessity. Open Source, free, but unfortunately no Linux version. Automates keystrokes. Very professionally maintained. The programming language is quirky.
AutoIt makes programs that do automatic installations for examples.
Both can imitate keystrokes and mouse movements.
You can turn that off in filezilla.
Also, it makes it handy to automatically jump to a particular folder when connecting to a particular server.
And yes, Filezilla supports drag and drop from explorer.
Yes, but I can not use OO.o for everything. Being able to print from any application to PDF is very useful.
The only thing I would add to that list is redefining the title "The best free open source software for Windows and beyond . To really rate as the best they have to work on multiple platforms, so not just windows but also Linux, Mac etc.
I know it might be stretching it a bit but, if your rating the 'best', multi platform support really does extend the usefulness of the program.
For a tech site, what happened to incorporating at least one software language, Ruby.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
It runs headless guests just fine on Linux using the CLI, wtf would you run VMs on Windows hosts?
I thought the point of VMs was so that you could keep Windows off hardware.
Alas, MS hasn't stopped updating their bag of tricks to keep people using Outlook.
The latest trick seems to be provide external access to Exchange via XMLRPC calls, tunnelled through something called Intelligent Application Gateway, which they bought from an Israeli security company. This is essentially the same way that Outlook Web Access works ; Outlook now uses the same mechanism when outside the office network.
Of course, this kills any incentive for your sysadmins to configure the IMAP server, which makes using most other email clients basically impossible. Our mail service migrated from an IMAP server to this recently and I've reluctantly stopped using Thunderbird, even though the IMAP ports are available inside the office, because it's just too irritating to have to manage two email clients.
IAG clients are only supported on Windows, your options for a rich client are limited to Outlook, on Windows. The only other option outside the office is Outlook Web Access.
Me
I have used it exclusively for years, in an environment where I am constantly working with MS Office files, and I have no complaints.
That works OK at home and in some corporate environments but in a lot it doesn't.
I've been spending the last two weeks trying to migrate a bunch of sales people off Exchange and the reason Outlook/Exchange is so popular and migrating anyone off of either is twofold:
Why is this migration path silly? Simple. For a lot of people that the business really cares about (eg. the sales team - don't dismiss them, without them the company wouldn't be able to pay your wages), email stopped being plain email the day they first used something as sophisticated as Outlook. These people live and die by their contacts list and appointments - they're often more important than old email and without them your sales team may as well pack it all in and go and re-train as plumbers because they sure as hell won't be doing much more selling. Experienced sales people in a particular industry could easily have a few thousand contacts in that address book, and they will make an effort to speak to all of them at least once a year.
These people don't want to migrate their own contacts and address book, they're too busy selling products. And frequently they aren't IT experts so the likelihood of them making an innocent mistake (remember: one mistake at this stage and they've lost that oh-so-important contact list) is moderately high. A smart salesman knows this full well, and isn't about to jeopardise his contact list for anyone. There's no way he'll move it without some serious handholding.
I miss wubi in the list, the thing that let you install ubuntu inside windows.
This is not a retarded feature, this is for those people who aren't so retarded that they open the window in windows explorer first and then start their FTP program.
I've heard of a software called "Linux" or so - it probably is a very large Service Pack or something, as it seems to update, rename and restructure EVERY single file of Windows, and I have heard it solves most all of Windows problems at once!!!11eleven
This must almost be perfect - only bug I noticed is, defragmentation utility seems to be gone. Maybe they'll fix that in the next release. ;-)
Crimson Editor
Good text editors for Windows are hard to find. I was looking for these features:
# White text on black background
# Syntax highlighting
# Tabs
# Spell checker (preferably a smart one which ignores HTML tags, keywords etc)
# Small and fast
# Hard word wrapping
# Preferably open source / free
CE is the only one I have found so far that meets those requirements. I checked JuffEd (no white on black), Metapad (no syntax highlighting), Notepad++ (spell checker is not realtime), Notetab Free, Programmers File Editor (pretty basic), Programmers Notepad (no spell checker). PSPad, RJ TextEd (good but slow), ConTEXT (no spell checker), gEdit (pretty good, a bit large due to being a Unix port, most plug-ins don't work on Windows), jEdit (Java based, need I say more?) and a few more, but none of the met the requirements.
Miranda IM (instant messaging client)
Hyrdra IRC (IRC client)
Cadsoft EAGLE (schematic and PCB layout)
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Maybe it is better, but who cares? OpenOffice satisfies my humble needs. Why should I throw my money away?
Since it's open source, can't someone just create a fork that isn't slimy?
I've seen people use it here for hours and not even realize they weren't using Excel or word.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Bah - andLinux if you must but really Cygwin.
If I must have Linux on my desktop then VirtualBox.
Audacity - audio editing
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
> Java based, need I say more
Well yes. Which of the requirements did is miss?
I installed it yesterday as well. I didn't have a yahoo toolbar installed though I would point out that opting out of this is a little confusing. Liek the installer says, you have to deselect it on the NEXT screen. It's quite cunning.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Paint.net is not Free, as in the FOSS acronym. It may be free as in beer, but not as in speech. That mistake, and including Paint.net instead of GIMP demonstrates the lack of understanding the author have about the FOSS movement and achievements.
It is because MS Office is the office for many Windows and Mac users. I know of people who are educated enough to know better will go and put down their own hard earned money to buy MS Office, even if they have heard of OpenOffice. I have a colleague who despises the interface of the new MS Office yet uses it every day, absolutely refusing to even consider installing OpenOffice on her laptop.
In short:
The issue is getting people to believe that OpenOffice is worthy of trying. If you know how to accomplish that on a large scale I'm probably not the only person who would love to hear it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
VirtualBox still has a long way to go... Totally unreliable in production or even development environments. It corrupts images on regular bases, crashes without any indication why, and on windows, the drivers are a total mess, bluescreening the entire os on regular bases (yes - also the latest versions). Not to mention the horror a version upgrade is, chances are that you have to uninstall everything again, reboot a few times, manually remove some files and re-install the latest version. WIth some luck, it then works. I gave up on it, and just installed VMWare server - which can be downloaded free of charge to use in the development environment. Is rocksolid and runs without a glitch...
And while it's true that Photoshop has no competition in most area's, Gimp does have a few area's where it can seriously compete with it, after all - most users only use 20% of Photoshop... Too bad Gimp decided to be a Photoshop competitor on "bad user-interface"-level too...
I think they closed the source on the artwork and maybe some of the interface due to people recompiling with added malware then charging $$$ for it. Could be wrong.
Those instructions are clearly designed to mislead and confuse. How are you supposed to realise the "PDFCreater Browser add-on" is in fact a yahoo toolbar and 404 redirector? If I was installing some software called PDF creator that creates PDFs and part of it was called "PDFCreater Browser add-on" i'd assume it was some kind of necessary component to enable the creation of PDF files. Especially since just before you get the option to not install it, there is a nice piece of decoy hand-waving about opting out of some yahoo related bullshit to distract your attention away from the innocuously labelled real malware payload.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
This is just one tactic in the Microsoft toolbox. Pretend to love open source, help developers to port their products to Windows, leaving Linux sitting all alone as users see no reason to go there. As Linux recedes into the distance. Victory for Microsoft. The users will be left paying the Microsoft tax just to user their favourite 'free' software.
This post is just one more PR exercise to help Microsoft achieve that goal.
Free software developers who make Windows their primary development environment aren't free software developers.
I agree with your nomination of The GIMP. I can't believe Paint.NET was included instead. The GIMP is far more functional and easier to use - and it's actually open source.
Good call on cygwin too - the saviour of my sanity at work!
+1 Agree
Mon chien, il n'a pas du nez. Comment scent-il? TrÃs mauvais!
Yeah. FileZilla, why don't you make like a tree and get the hell out of here.
I truly pity anyone who really thinks FileZilla is the best FTP client out there. Why don't more people worship The Perfection That Is WinSCP? :(
People still use FTP and/or SCP?
SSHFS FTW!
No need for anything else, they will be installed by default.
I'm not the GP poster, but I'd like to answer one of your questions.
seriously, what does OO.o open that MS Office doesn't anyhow?
PDF's (after install of an addon). I've found Open Office can import general de-linearized PDF's very well for editing (PDF files that are linearized can be delinearized with pdfedit). But keep this knowledge under your hat so that there's no need for anyone to create an even worse read-only document format ;)
99.999% of the time you're already working on the files you're planning to upload, which means the explorer window is already open. Or, at least, that the files are already available in some other easily-accessed drag&droppable location, like a Visual Studio project window.
Comment of the year
If you really think that the best place for open source is on a closed source operating system then what you probably are looking for is free (as in money) software. You certainly have no idea about freedom.
You might just as well set up The Institute for Freedom and Democracy in an office in Saudi Arabia.
Yes, the difference in interoperability is not the issue, the difference in attitude at the receiving end is the issue (and not worth my time to fight...).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
For VLC, you don't have to download codecs.
He removed the source completely from the download page now, I think you might still be able to ask him for it. But like they said in the forums, for the most part it was a single developer who made the source available.
http://www.getpaint.net/download.html#src
http://paintdotnet.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=30838&p=274324
A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. -Ford Prefect(8777)
Thanks for the heads up. This is the PDF software my work uses, now I reckon we'll be on the hunt for something new.
My top complaints about ooBase.
.CSV files. Seriously. This is 2009, other database applications have had the ability to send data straight to CSV for over 25 years.
- No built-in ability to export to
- As you mentioned, MSAccess is simply so much more powerful when dealing with data from multiple sources.
- The ooBase file format is a compressed ZIP file. I suspect that it breaks horribly once you get over a few hundred MB worth of data together. (Something that MSAccess handles easily.) But since it's so difficult to get data in/out of it, I haven't bothered trying. It can't be used as a read/write ODBC data source.
- We're using an Access database as backend storage for our data collection project written in Java (that doesn't need a full blown database server). Because it's simply easier to check an MDB into our version control system then to deal with a lot of the other tools. We don't need the hassle of a server that we'd have to startup/shutdown (although SQLLite came close). Plus we can open up the MDB in MSAccess and get instant access to the data using a very well designed GUI (which you can't do in SQLLite). Or copy/paste data from other sources (like spreadsheets). Or make quick fixes to the data table layout.
So, it's better, but only if you're looking to do nothing more then track your grocery list.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Can't believe no one has mentioned XBOX media Center. http://xbmc.org/
FOSS media player, with codecs etc. for Mac, Linux, Windows, and, of course, XBOX. In my opinion, far better than VLC or MPC.
MS Office doesn't have built-in Works support, but you can download a beerfree plugin from MS' download page.
I'll have to try Go-oo out; my attempts at importing Works docs using OO.org 3 didn't go anywhere, so I didn't really dig around much further than that.
The article implied that this was also the case with MPC. Is this not true?
Rhapsody in Numbers
Why don't more people worship The Perfection That Is WinSCP
WinSCP is hardly perfection. I manage a bunch of websites where I am always having to juggle around a lot of jpeg images between different directories on different servers. I absolutely have to have realtime thumbnail views of images on the server I am connecting to. WinSCP absolutely does not do this. Neither does any other free FTP client. Most pay FTP clients don't have this simple feature! CuteFTP (which I pay for) is the only FTP client that I know of that does this.
So although WinSCP is pretty good, it is hardly "perfection."
Scilab numerical algebra system
unxutils native ports of some unix utilities to Win32
speedcrunch calculator
vim better than emacs
Sumatra PDF fast clean pdf viewer
Calibre is awful. It crashes whenever you try to import a large library of books, it creates duplicates of all your files and imposes its own directory structure, and the interface is ugly. It's about two years too early to use a product like this for real e-book collections.
I don't know if you're intentionally trolling, or genuinely ignorant, but if tell the program not to give you the yahoo toolbar, it doesn't give you the toolbar. Machines don't do things you don't tell them to do. Don't be a stupid user.
Anyway, perhaps you are confused on the menu. *uncheck* the box if you don't want the toolbar, check it if you do(it's checked by default, ugh)
I've enjoyed it for accomplishing the same task without requiring 100mb of space, like acrobat.
edit: Oh my god. there's a bunch of replies to you that don't understand the checkbox thing either. I just installed it and installed it a few times. No toolbar. What is wrong with you people?
The freeware but not open source CutePDF meets all of my needs to print documents to PDF from anything (not a PDF editor, but as I don't publish docs I don't care to create a native PDF). That might hold you over if your needs are light.
Paint.Net
What about the GIMP, or is it because this is dead simple to use?
Media Player Classic
My vote goes to VLC here, hands-down.
This!
How the freaking hell did Paint.Net and MPC beat out GIMP and VLC?!
Also, I too recommend CutePDF. It's admittedly not as powerful as PDFCreator, but it gets the job done. I use it for pretty much anything that says "Print this page for your records". Dated, appropriately described PDF goes into my archive folder in case I need it later. Eventually it'll get deleted, and I don't have to waste paper (or go digging through stacks of printouts). One nice thing that PDFCreator can do that CutePDF doesn't is combine documents (print one, tell it to wait, print something(s) else, then select the documents in the print queue and concatenate them before resuming the printing).
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I have MPC, VLC, and SMPlayer Portable installed on a portable hard drive.
Of the three, VLC is my favourite hands-down.
SMPlayer's redeeming quality is that it can be configured to run incredibly fast on old equipment. I need a new computer... AVI movies run like slideshows if they play at all. SMPlayer actually manages to play them without stuttering too much (unfortunately action sequences still tend to cause the picture to halt, sometimes I have to rewind a few seconds or pause it for a moment to let the decoder catch up).
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Paint.Net is not FOSS.
I can't believe no one has mentioned the OpenDisc project, which is the succesor to the OpenCD. It's a project designed to collect the highest quality open source software on a disc. There's even an education version.
I'd suggest you also look at jarnal – a free java-based PDF annotation tool.
It's a bit kludgy, but once you know its two main idiosyncrasies it gets the job done:
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
IMO no list of Windows FOSS would be complete without GnuCash, the accouting software. I first used it on Linux a few years ago to track spending when I started living on my own. Now, as a contract programmer, I use it on Windows to maintain my corporation's books. Not only is it a mature, feature-rich piece of software, but the dev team gives due attention to the Windows-specific issues, rather than treating the Windows port as a hands off "you're on your own" thing like some other projects from the Linux world.
Metapad editor is now open source. All other quick editors are worse, in my experience.
To be honest, I would rather use Paint.net than the GIMP when running Windows myself. I'm just not too crazy about the interface. But given that the list is supposed to be open source software only, and Paint.net no longer is, then yeah... the GIMP probably should have made it in... new versions of Paint.net are pretty much just freeware.
Also as ClamWin as no on-access scanning, I wouldn't recommend it to your average Windows luserrs. I think their was an opensource on-access scanner for Windows which uses clamav-virus-information, but don't remember the name. But the clamav-virus-information isn't as good for desktop-machines as most other offerings. It's however prettty good for mailservers. I'd recommend to any mailserver admin.
New things are always on the horizon
AutoHotkey has its own folding editor: SciTE4AutoHotkey. The file must have an
AutoHotkey's programmer, Chris Mallett, is impressively serious about delivering high-quality code. He is joined by several people who do thorough testing. For example, here is a problem with doing RegEx replacements in Chinese: BUG RegexReplace -- When disposing chinese.
The science of user interface design is still in its infancy. AutoHotkey makes things easier by helping you re-define the interface. For example, Firefox's bookmarking is primitive, so I use Autohotkey to make it more usable for me.
Here are a few simple examples from my AutoHotkey
Metapad is fast for everything, in my experience.
I like Metapad's Edit/ Block/ Unwrap Lines/ command. I like "Hit Escape to quit."
I personally use some Norton Commander clone which has got FTP already inside it. Way faster and more comfortable than Explorer, so I don't understand the GP rant either.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Mozilla Backup, MozBackup is very important free open-source software.
Backup your Firefox settings and add-ons, and restore them to another computer.
I have VLC, also, and it's a good piece of software. Seems to have a little better support for a variety of media.
But I still like MPC's controls a little better. VLC has some weird interface decisions... keys don't do what you'd expect, and so on. Good, but it's still my 'backup' player if MPC doesn't cut it for some reason.
Yahoo and PDFCreator, dying together? Rest in peace, Yahoo.
The reason for an encrypted disk is that somebody may walk off with your computer and want to access your data. Sure, it's more likely that somebody will walk off with a laptop you carry around than a server that's wired in to things, but you never know. Maybe they've got a warrant or a subpoena, maybe they're just thieves, maybe they're competitors trying to scoop your new project. I've had equipment stolen out of big corporate offices before. If it's unnecessary paranoia, fine, it's unnecessary paranoia.
Also, CPU cycles are only expensive if you don't have enough of them. Depending on whether your server is just a file and print server or also a mail server with spam prevention software, you may have cycles to burn or you may not.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I assume you can run paint.net on a Virtual Machine Windows environment - does it also run in Wine, which would be a bit lighter weight interface with the rest of your Linux environment?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I spend a large fraction of my work day with a couple of putty ssh sessions open to various boxes. It's pretty much indispensable.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yah, True dat.
I tried to convince my wife to write her master's thesis using LateX, but she decided that spending a couple weeks learning something new wasn't worth it. She was very sorry at the end of the process when she spent over a month doing nothing but fighting Word's formatting glitches that show up in huge documents.
I didn't press harder in the beginning because I don't have LateX experience either, so I didn't feel confident that I'd be able to find satisfactory answers to questions she might have. Honestly, it seems pretty overwhelming getting started.
Does anyone have a low-learning-curve, take-your-time method for learning LateX?
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
I use FireFTP.
Responding cause, uh, I saw my name...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Lyx has been reasonably nice to me.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
It is interesting that portable Firefox and Thunderbird are not really completely portable. You cannot run two copies installed in two different locations. They still are tied to the Windows way of doing things and the Windows user name.
FreeMind idea mapping software is excellent.