If you're not using open source software somewhere in your life, your missing out! No this blog is not devoted to saving the world through the utopian idealism of free software and yes I still do use Microsoft and Adobe products. There are great open source software products available. Some are even better than any commercial equivalent and best of all they are free. Here are some of the open source software products I use.
Perhaps the most well known open source product is the Linux operating system. A great piece of software, but the thought of installing an entire operating systems will seem overwhelming to many people. Firefox has made its mark on the Internet. It is now one of the most popular open source products ever.
Open Office is a productivity suite on equal footing with MS Office, MS Works, and Corel Word Perfect. It's complete suite contains a Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation, and Database. It supports .doc, .xls, and .ppt formats commonly used by the other productivity suites. We use it on our laptop computer at home. My students use it in the operating systems classes I teach.
Others I use regularly: CutePDF allows me to print from any software package directly to a PDF file. CDEx (extractor) is a simple and easy to use extraction utility for creating MP3 files from CDs. Audacity allows me to record audio files with the LAME library directly to MP3 for audio podcasting. I use Camstudio to demonstrate "how to" tutorials for my students which are saved as AVI video files. These can be uploaded to YouTube as screen casts for online classes I teach.
I honestly use nearly everyone of these software packages on a weekly basis. They have enriched both my personal enjoyment and professional career. This is great software and you can't beat the price.
I'll try to discuss more open source products in a future blog along with portability for USB storage devices.
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