GEOFF PALMER
Online postings can be destructive for kids
Inside Kim Dotcom’s life of bizarre luxury
Shooting the clouds
Lawyers called in Facebook fallout
Megaupload accused bailed
InternetNZ impressed by Megaupload’s legitimate plans
Apple revenue surges in monster quarter
Yahoo still losing online ad battle
RIM’s new leader raises investor doubts
No assistance for most when TV goes digital
The commercial software industry will tell you that free software is riddled with spyware, adware and viruses. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? But the fact is, there are no guarantees. You’ll discover this if you ever read the EULAs (does anybody, ever?), those lengthy, legalistic end user licence agreements you must agree to before installation.
One of the most notorious infections of recent times came from the Sony BMG rootkit of 2005 that secretly installed a backdoor on Windows computers when users tried to play the company’s CDs.
Standards in the commercial industry are generally higher, but there are thousands of fully featured, highly reputable free applications out there too.
Here is a handful of the choicest, many as good or better than their commercial counterparts. With the exception of games, you may never need to buy another program.
* Ad-Aware Free (lavasoft.com), Avast! (avast.com), AntiVir (avira.com), Panda Cloud (cloudantivirus.com) are free antivirus software, but some occasionally nag you to buy a fancier version.
* Malwarebytes (malwarebytes.org) finds and removes adware, spyware and other malicious software.
* VLC Media Player (videolan.org) plays everything from DVD movies to obscure music track formats. I have yet to find anything that VLC can’t handle – and without having to play find- the-codec.
* LibreOffice (libreoffice.org) is a fully featured office suite – word processor, spreadsheet, multimedia presentation maker, drawing package and database – that can open and save documents in many proprietary formats, including Microsoft’s .doc and .docx.
* Thunderbird (mozilla.org/thunderbird) is an email and news client with junk-mail filtering and full web standards compliance. To add a personal information manager, visit mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning.
* Firefox (firefox.com), Chromium (chromium.org) and Opera (opera.com) are fast, secure, multi-platform web browsers with lots of add-ons.
* Gimp (gimp.org) is a stunning drawing and image manipulation program. Think of it as Photoshop for free.
* Blender (blender.org) is 3-D animation software for making films and creating 3-D visual effects. Each year, the Blender Foundation releases a short animated movie made with its software. Check them out on the site.
* Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net) is digital audio recording and editing software.
* Avidemux (avidemux.org) is for editing videos, applying visual effects and converting between different video formats.
* KeePass (keepass.info) is a highly secure password management utility.
* Eclipse (eclipse.org) is an integrated development environment for coding, debugging and testing a variety of computer programming languages.
* XAMPP (apachefriends.org) is a DIY web server in a single download. Seriously.
There’s another advantage to a lot of the free software. Much of it is multi-platform, meaning there are versions for Windows, Mac and Linux. That means you can run the same software on any machine, wherever you are.
But why just stop at applications? Why not do everything for free?
* Geoff Palmer is a computer consultant, freelance technical writer and novelist.
– © Fairfax NZ News
Sponsored links
@opensaucey (#4)
Nothing is in the same league as Photoshop, but the GIMP comes far closer than anything else.
Oh, the interface is a little disconcerting to someone familiar with PS, but the functionality is there for a good 90% of most people’s needs.
Matt
#6
via mobile
09:52 pm Jan 29 2012
Great choices. Will try the 3d animator tomorrow
Me too, and I know other people that could use some! I love using Gimp – after paying for photoshop that does way more than I need!
Really appreciate this… BTW isn’t LINUX OS free? I’ve never been brave enough to try it…
* Gimp (gimp.org) is a stunning drawing and image manipulation program. Think of it as Photoshop for free.
Yeah nah. Think of it more as MS Paint for free. It isn’t even in the same league as Photoshop.
I find it quite disgusting that the government, particularly our educational institutions,proudly wave their Microsoft and Apple banners without the least bit of shame, when they should be the champions of open source.
It’s hard to make sense of this article, since it confuses freeware with Free Software. Some of the software recommended by the article is freeware (proprietary) and comes with no source and abusive EULAs – just the same as any other piece of proprietary software. Other software mentioned is genuine Free Software (non-proprietary), with freely available source and user-friendly EULAs. Either way, both freeware and Free Software can be commercial. The article mixes freeware and Free Software together as if they’re the same thing. They are totally different. Compare the freeware and Free Software articles on Wikipedia.
* FastStone Image Viewer (faststone.org) is my favourite program for everyday image browsing, a great improvement over the standard Windows Photo Viewer.
Nice list, thanks for the article, I’m busy checking out some of those gems now…
Article source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/6332091/Digital-culture-free-to-all
View full post on National Cyber Security » Spyware/ Cyber Snooping