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Geek me, please?

RebeccaC

New Blood
R
Joined
Jul 25, 2005
Messages
14
I'm not very computer literate. I use computers a lot for work, and I like to get on the internet at home, and I use it for the volunteer work that I do, but all these different computers are basic vanilla systems, PC's with windows and IE on them, nothing unusual.

Recently a friend of mine, an ex-boyfriend to be exact, came over and installed firefox on my home 'puter. I'd never used anything but IE before, but after playing with firefox for a few weeks, I decided I like it.

That got me thinking. What else is available, inexpensively or for free, that I might like as much? What else is there that I don't know about?
 
I take the attitude that anything can be done with my computer.

Most of that can be done for free. For example;

GIMP if you're into photo editing

Picasa If you want a computerised photo album

Open Office If you don't want to pay huge amounts for microsoft office.

...whatever you want.

If you like firefox, and currently use Outlook for email, you could try Thunderbird
 
I'm sorry to make a post as stupid as this.. but... well.. I can't help myself.


There is a lot, depending on what you want and what you need. You can go all the way like me, and use Linux.

Back when i was a kid in college i used a lot of pirated software. I no longer do that. Hell, i have 3-4 windows licenses lying around, am i using any of them, nope.

There is simply NO program that i use, that i can't get a GPL version of. Not a one.


As for programs, that is a bit harder. As i said, i use linux. Some programs also exist for windows, but not all, not by a long shot.

Some may propose OpenOffice to you. Personally i still feel MS office is better, but my needs are meet by OpenOffice. Actually, OpenOffice is too bloated for me.

Mail i use kmail(linux only).
IM i use something called bitlbee(also for windows, but GAIM is probably more you).
Both bitlbee and gaim support multiple IM protocols.
Browser, Firefox. Though in some respects the closed source Opera is better.

As i said, not really a good post. The reason i'm posting this, is not to help you get more programs that you can use. I posted this to show you where you can end up.

I now take pride in the fact that i don't use pirated programs. And i take pride in the fact that i use free programs, created by people because they want to. And i take pride in the fact that i can give back. And i do give back, as much as i can.

It has been a long road from the (running 20+ pirated programs) of 7-10 years ago. But now that i'm here, i'm glad.

If any of these ideals are compatible with yours, then you can see this as a goal down the road. If they aren't, well, then you can see it in any other way you please :)

Sorry i couldn't hint at more programs.

Sincerely
Tobias
 
Come over to the dark side. FreeBSD 6.0 was just released. Also, for both you can always set up Wine and run most windows applications. I keep one windows box around for gaming. Other than that I live and work in a "microsoft-free zone".



TobiasTheCommie said:
I'm sorry to make a post as stupid as this.. but...

There is a lot, depending on what you want and what you need. You can go all the way like me, and use Linux.
Click to expand...
 
sami_sdata said:
Come over to the dark side. FreeBSD 6.0 was just released. Also, for both you can always set up Wine and run most windows applications. I keep one windows box around for gaming. Other than that I live and work in a "microsoft-free zone".
Click to expand...
Tried and failed.

I want to do FBSD, but till i can convert my ext3 partitions directly(no reformat), or FBSD can properly NFS share an ext3 volume, it just isn't a viable alternative for me.

Don't run wine, don't have the need to use windows applications, which i thought i made pretty clear :).

Gaming? sorry, don't know the beast. Honestly, haven't really played any games for years.

Except for some Monkey Island at a friends house some 9 months ago.

Sincerely
Tobias
 
TobiasTheCommie said:
Tried and failed.

I want to do FBSD, but till i can convert my ext3 partitions directly(no reformat), or FBSD can properly NFS share an ext3 volume, it just isn't a viable alternative for me.

Don't run wine, don't have the need to use windows applications, which i thought i made pretty clear :).

Gaming? sorry, don't know the beast. Honestly, haven't really played any games for years.

Except for some Monkey Island at a friends house some 9 months ago.

Sincerely
Tobias
Click to expand...


Well, I get home from work after 3am. I'll work off a little energy on Silent Hunter 2 on the winbox while surfing on the FreeBSD box. You might want to check if 6.0 fixes your filesystem problems. I don't use ext3 on any of my systems so hadn't noticed they had an issue. The linux boxes in the house are running Mandrake and Redhat each with Reiserfs.
I'd love to not have to run windows software at all. Unfortunately I've got some hardware that I need to use that only has windows software available to configure it. I could just run them on the winbox but that's an old laptop with the screen cracked running through a kvm switch to a monitor. The data from that hardware is much to critical to trust to windows under normal conditions. Trusting it to windows on a laptop that's been dropped is definetely out.
Most of the Linuxes are much more user friendly for a desktop I have to admit. I started into BSD using it as a firewall. The firewalling software for BSD was superior to any available in Linux at the time. It also configures very similarly to Cisco routers so it's easier for me to keep the firewall tables up to date. Now that I'm having to work on Juniper routers at work I'm trying to do use BSD as much as possible. Junipers all run FreeBSD so I can get better at my job and give the wife some justification for all the time/money spent on hardware.
 
I'll agree with throwing everything away and installing FreeBSD.
I also would say that I think OpenOffice.org is a *better* product than MS Office, for reasons I've churned out a few times before...

but to get on with the sense of the post, on your windows machine I'd suggest trying things like:

trillian basic or gaim for instant messaging using multiple services at once
inkscape for vector graphics editing
gimp for raster graphics
videolan client media player (aka VLC) for watching movies
thunderbird for email
freedownloadmanager for downloading files by HTTP or FTP
azureus for downloading things over bittorrent
emule for downloading things from ...er... somewhere else
pictureshare.net for managing desktop wallpaper
dvddecrypter and autogk for turning DVDs into movie files
dvdshrink for copying DVD movies
and as far as your firefox installation goes, go ahead and install these extensions:
customizegoogle to get rid of google ads and make things look neater
adblock to get rid of other ads and make things neater (I have a decent blocklist if you want a copy)
flashgot for linking in with a download manager (see above)
grisoft's AVG or clamwin for anti-virussing
cba to link, just google for them if you want. All are free and most are open source.

And a zillion other things :)

HTH
 
I would recommend a site but apparently I can't post the link until I have made 15 posts.
Which should be this one.

google -> nedwolf freeware

it should be the first site.
 
Oh yeah, and IZarc or 7-zip (extremely user unfriendly but freer) for compressed files.
 
Thank you all for the tips, there is a lot in this thread to look at and explore.

To those that suggested open office, I have experianced that before, and it was nice except it isn not compatable with microsoft office, and I need at home the same as I use at work because sometimes I take work home with me.

I am very interested in the alternatives to instant messaging because all I know about now is AIM, and I don't want AOL, and the free version does things to my computer and I can't figure out how to stop it. I will look at trilliam basic and gaim, if anyone has reviews or tips, I would appreciate that.
 
RebeccaC said:
I am very interested in the alternatives to instant messaging because all I know about now is AIM, and I don't want AOL, and the free version does things to my computer and I can't figure out how to stop it. I will look at trilliam basic and gaim, if anyone has reviews or tips, I would appreciate that.
Click to expand...

Take a look at Google Talk. It uses the open source IM server Jabber, which means you can use any Jabber client you want to.

http://talk.google.com/
 
RebeccaC said:
To those that suggested open office, I have experianced that before, and it was nice except it isn not compatable with microsoft office, and I need at home the same as I use at work because sometimes I take work home with me.
Click to expand...
Openoffice is mostly compatible. But i still think it is inferior to MS office.

In my first post i think i suggest GAIM for IM. GAIM supports both google talk and AIM


Sincerely
Tobias
 
RebeccaC said:
I am very interested in the alternatives to instant messaging because all I know about now is AIM, and I don't want AOL, and the free version does things to my computer and I can't figure out how to stop it. I will look at trilliam basic and gaim, if anyone has reviews or tips, I would appreciate that.
Click to expand...

Snapfiles rates its IM tools by their own "star" system and by popularity. Their are other good freeware sites around but I usually find what I need on snapfiles.
 
RebeccaC said:
To those that suggested open office, I have experianced that before, and it was nice except it isn not compatable with microsoft office, and I need at home the same as I use at work because sometimes I take work home with me.
Click to expand...

Recent version? OOo 2.0 is very compatible, and supports more, better formats than MSO. A few esoteric things don't work the same, but that's MS's fault for hiding the format specifications - which will come back to haunt anyone who uses MSO in years to come when they find their documents are no longer supported by MS (just try to open early Word or Wordperfect documents in MSO...)

Open document formats are the present AND the future :)
 
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