My new hard drive is going to have as many open source or freeware programs as I can find. It’s not that I don’t mind paying for a good product, but I don’t like paying for upgrades and it seems like I have been hit with a bunch lately.
My first victim was Microsoft Office. I am now using OpenOffice which is a semi open source office suite including Word and Excel compatible programs. It has taken me very little time to get used to OpenOffice and when I opened my existing Excel spreadsheets all formulas and computations worked perfectly. Open Office is a project of Sun Microsystems.
OpenOffice.org the product is a multi-platform office productivity suite. It includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. Sophisticated and flexible, OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office.
I replaced Remote Admin with TightVNC, a desktop remote control application allowing me to control other computers on my network. You can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer.
I have a new image editor too. I replaced Macromedia Fireworks with The Gimp. The Gimp is a photo retouching, image composition and image authoring program that is licensed under the GNU General Public License.
I have replaced a few more programs that I’ll write about soon.
Welcome to johnhesch.com, a blog about my life, projects, and interests. I have been blogging for over 10 years in one form or another.
hopefully you’ve also heard of/used vncon to go with tightVNC? http://vncon.chronetal.co.uk/
it eases greatly your remote tasks when you have many computers to watch. Even with just a few machines the auto switching is a great way to keep an eye on things.
Good luck with the experiment. I tried the same thing some time back and couldn’t stick with it. There were too many little quirks here and there in the open source programs–it drove me back to using commercial software when I really wanted to get things done and not worry about finding workarounds.
Don’t get me wrong–I’m not knocking open source. I use it exclusively on my webserver and there are a few open source desktop apps that I use, but on the whole, it seems to me that most desktop open source apps are still sub-par when compared to their commercial counterparts.
Mark, I haven’t seen vncon but I will check it out. Thanks for the heads up.
Marcus, I’m not trying to stay completely away from commercial programs. If at all possible I want to use open source or freeware but I understand there are going to be programs that I will need to pay for. I have already found that I needed my PartitionMagic. I was unable to find a free hard drive partition utility besides using some sort of command line utility which I am not anywhere near comfortable using.
So far, PQ is the only bump in the road.
I wish Open Office did a better job of importing from a flat database into templates. Word is very slick in this regard and takes all of six minutes to create a multi-page product based on data from a flat file. OpenOffice still requires importing into the spreadsheet, editing out the unwanted fields and pasting the table into the word processor.
Yes, I agree Kim that if you need advanced features MS Office may be needed. So far though, OpenOffice has worked well for me.
EasyOffice, a Free Office Suite
EasyOffice, available in German & English, is a free office suite that features an innovative easy-to-use user interface.