Useful Free Programs - Open-source and Freeware alternatives

Why buy something, when you can get something equivalent for free? And no, I do not mean pirated software, I mean open-source and other freeware alternatives to commercial software.

Whenever I come across handy pieces of free software that can do the job of a commercial program, I'll post in links. Feel free to do the same. But please, only post links to software that is legal, free from spyware and adware, and that you've personally tested and found suitable for the purpose it was made for. Please follow the format I've used in my posts.

[ Post #5555 ]

7-ZIP

7-Zip is a file archiver with the highest compression ratio. The program supports 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB formats. Compression ratio in the new 7z format is 30-50% better than ratio in ZIP format.

This open-source product serves as a replacement for WinRar, WinZip, WinAce and other such zip-unzip utilities. For Windows-environment.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/

OpenOffice

OpenOffice.org 1.1 is an open, feature-rich multi-platform office productivity suite. The user interface and the functionality is very similar to other products in the market like Microsoft Office or Lotus SmartSuite, but compared to these commercial products OpenOffice.org is absolutely free.

OpenOffice.org is able to read and write Microsoft Office files. This allows users to open and save Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on their preferred platform incl. Windows, Linux and Solaris.

http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/1.1/

GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

While not the easiest program to use, its features are extensive. It is a rival of Photoshop and PaintShop Pro, a useful program for all varieties of image editing. If you need to resize an image, then this is probably not your program of choice, but if you need to go deeper into editing images, chances are you'll find GIMP very useful.

http://www.gimp.org/windows/

Kerio Personal Firewall

Kerio Personal Firewall (KPF) protects connected PCs from Internet threats. KPF inspects both incoming and outgoing connections ensuring that only legitimate traffic is allowed. MD5 signatures are assigned to all applications to prevent Trojan horses from posing as a trusted application. Kernel monitoring prohibits installation of potentially dangerous kernel drivers that may bypass the firewall inspection. KPF offers a remote administration, logging of suspicious activities, open connections overview and automated update checker.

For home users, Kerio Personal Firewall 4 is available in two flavors - the full edition and the limited free edition. After installation, KPF works as the full edition for 30 days, after which it becomes the limited free edition. In comparison to Sygate Personal Firewall, also a good free choice, Kerio is a bit less resource-consuming, and therefore my personal choice. Replaces the commercial firewalls of Norton, McAfee and so forth. If you are running Windows XP, it is a good idea to replace the built-in firewall with this for improved security.

http://www.kerio.com/kpf_home.html

Mozilla FireFox

Firefox is a free, open-source web browser for Windows, Linux and MacOS X and is based on the Mozilla codebase. It is small, fast and easy to use, and offers many advantages over Internet Explorer, such as the ability to block pop-up windows. Other useful features are tab-based browsing, built-in search bar and highly customizable features through extensions you may add with the click of a button. Supports various themes for those concerned with the aesthetics of browsing.

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

Mozilla Thunderbird

A secure and easy-to-use replacement for Outlook Express and various commercial e-mail clients. Smart self-training spam filter which will, in my case at least, learn to bust up to 95% of the incoming spam, filing it aside and leaving you with the mail you expected. Possibility to block remotely loading images and other security hazards. As with FireFox, themes and extensions may be easily added in.

http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/

AntiVir Personal Edition

AntiVir Personal Edition offers the effective protection against computer viruses for the individual and private use on a single PC-workstation. In order to make possible an easy operation, the AntiVir Personal Edition is developed to the essential points.

The reliability of AntiVir is demonstrated in numerous comparison test and references featured in independent trade journals. Free for private and individual use.

http://www.free-av.com/

VirtualDub

VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility. It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video, such as clipping out parts or joining clips together. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters.

VirtualDub is an excellent tool for video pre- and post-processing. For example, if you have a video with audio you'd like to clear up, then VirtualDub is your tool of choice, as you can extract the audio from the file, clean it up with an external application, and rejoin it with the original video with a couple of clicks.

VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images. There is also a MPEG-2 compatible, modified version available from here.

http://www.virtualdub.org/

SmartFTP

SmartFTP allows you to transfer files across the Internet. It features an Explorer-like interface that is fully customizable and supports drag-and-drop functions. Multiple FTP connections can be opened at the same time, and you can copy files from one remote host to another. Remote host directory information is cached for future viewing, FTP URLs are supported, and you can even view HTML pages within the client. SmartFTP also includes an interface for FTP-specific search engines such as FTPSearch and Filez.com.

Other features include a Favorites list similar to that of Internet Explorer; the ability to resume broken downloads; a global history; background transfers; proxy support; a passive transfer mode; and the ability to perform recursive downloads, uploads, and deletes.

http://www.smartftp.com/

BSPlayer

BSplayer plays back all kinds of media files (avi, mpg, asf, wmv, wav, mp3) and specializes in video (MicroDVD, Subviewer, SubRip) and DivX playback. The program is fully skinnable. Command line supported. Bsplayer also features: pan-scan and custom pan-scan option; custom aspect ratios; playlist support; resolution change; AVI files with more than 2 audio streams (multilanguage) and OGM files, including more then 2 audio/video tracks support; embedded subtitles/chapters support; external audio file support; S/PDIF output for AC3 files (with Intervideo audio decoder); INI files; remote control support; simple equalizer.

In short: An excellent alternative for the rather bloated Windows Media Player.

http://www.bsplayer.org/

Windows Movie Maker 2

Surprisingly, a free and very useful program from Microsoft. The program offers a number of useful transitions and effects that can be applied to the video clips, and an easy-to-use drag and drop timeline on which you can compile your video. Processing some of the effects is a bit sluggish and is best accomplished with VirtualDub, but for compiling video and adding transitions, this is an excellent tool.

Though WMM2 only saves files into Windows' native file format, .WMA, there is also an option to save the video as lossless Type-1 DV, which in turn can easily be converted to Type-2 DV with a free external application such as Canopus DV File Converter, which in turn can be used in any popular video crunching applications, such as VirtualDub.

http://www.microsoft.com/moviemaker

Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP

While not programs akin to the others mentioned in this thread, the XP PowerToys also deserve mention here, as they are useful little add-ons to Windows XP that will make your life easier and your computing more customizable. Particularly Tweak UI should come in handy: "This PowerToy gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows XP default user interface, including mouse settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings, and more."

One wonders why these tools aren't a part of Windows XP to begin with.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloa...ppowertoys.mspx

Crimson Editor

For those of you who are tired of opening things with Word but feel like Notepad just isn't enough... And for those of us who play around with varieties of code:

Crimson Editor is a professional source editor for Windows. This program is not only fast in loading time, but also small in size (so small that it can be copied in one floppy disk). While it can serve as a good replacement for Notepad, it also offers many powerful features for programming languages such as HTML, C/C++, Perl and Java.

http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

Spybot - Search & Destroy

In searching for free alternatives for commercial software, you will inevitably meet Spyware and Adware, two varieties of undesirable parasites that come bundled with some free programs. This is an excellent program for weeding out all that, run this periodically or after installing new free software.

"Spybot - Search & Destroy can detect and remove a multitude of adware files and modules from your computer. Spybot also can clean program and Web-usage tracks from your system, which is especially useful if you share your computer with other users. Modules chosen for removal can be sent directly to the included file shredder, ensuring complete elimination from your system. For advanced users, it allows you to fix registry inconsistencies related to adware and to malicious program installations. The handy online-update feature ensures that Spybot always has the most current and complete listings of adware, dialers, and other uninvited system residents."

http://www.spybot.info/

Audacity

Audacity is a free audio editor. You can record sounds, play sounds, import and export WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3 files, and more. Use it to edit your sounds using Cut, Copy and Paste (with unlimited Undo), mix tracks together, or apply effects to your recordings. It also has a built-in amplitude envelope editor, a customizable spectrogram mode and a frequency analysis window for audio analysis applications. Built-in effects include Echo, Change Tempo, and Noise Removal, and it also supports VST and LADSPA plug-in effects.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Ximian Evolution

For Linux only, this is a drop in replacement for MS Outlook. Very handy if you have used Outlook, and would miss it in a switch to Linux. If you run Exchange 2000/2003, there is also a GPL ('free') connector that allows you to function just like an Outlook client connecting to the Exchange server (if you use Exchange 5.5 you can't use group address books, calendars & are limited to POP/IMAP for mail retreval).

http://www.novell.com/products/evolution/

Azureus Bittorrent Client

Multi-platform. I've confirmed it on Windows and Linux.

Bittorrent is a peer to peer file distribution method. There are lots of clients out there (and I don't think you have to pay for any), but I've found Azureus to be a 'best of breed' BT client.

BitTorrent (BT) is geared towards the distribution of large files. I won't go into the mechanics, but it is a network efficient way to move large files to users. Many Linux distros (for example) are being distributed via BT. Not a lot of Vaishnava resources on BT, but it would be a great way to move around video clips, etc.

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/

Gallery

Tested on PHP 4.0+, Apache 1.3 & 2.0, OpenBSD & Linux

An easy to use & install web gallery. Great controls for setting up different galleries with various permissions. I think the look and feel needs some work, esp the (non) ability to 'skin' it, which makes all Gallery setups look pretty much the same. However, that doesn't take away from the fact that its a great way to get your pictures organized and out on the web.

There is even a Java app for uploading & simple gallery management that makes putting a lot of photos up very easy.

http://gallery.menalto.com/

I've just downloaded Audacity and that seems to be okay but to do mp3 conversions I've got to download LAME which either doesn't seem to work on my (borrowed) computer running XP home. And it all seems like too much like hard work. I'm not stupid (I've got a degree in maths) but some Open source developers don't make seem to want to make their software easy to use.

Two great apps this time!

Kile and LyX

Linux only (tho Kile can reportedly run on OSX)

Kile is an integrated LaTex environment, making writing documents in LaTex much easier, with autoformating & document templates. There is also some very nice character selection tools. Integrated interactive shell lets you compile documents should you need to. Also includes conversion to DVI & PDF formats, plus (simple) viewers to check output.

LyX is a WYSIWYG editor for LaTex. I have not used it much, but have heard great things from other users. It may be a great introduction to LaTeX for those that are unfamiliar.

If you run Linux & use LaTex (or have wanted to), check these out.

Kile
http://kile.sourceforge.net/

LyX
http://www.lyx.org/

WinSCP

Secure client for using SFTP & SCP on MS Windows. Since windows doesn't integrate SSH commands into Explorer (KDE & GNOME on Linux allow you to use URIs like sftp://), WinSCP fills the gap. Nice little app. Probably only useful if you are connecting to a Linux/Unix host running ssh for connectivity.

http://winscp.net/eng/index.php

Google's Picasa

For Windows

A free piece of software from Google that organizes your pictures & allows you to do some simple editing on them (red eye removal and the like). Experienced Photoshop hacks won't find much of use, but nice for your average user.

The organization properties are pretty cool.

http://www.google.com/picasa/