Free software!
Paul Mathews, Mathews Malnar and Bailey, Inc.
7:30-9:00AM, 5 March 2010
Lakeland Community College, Room T136

Many of us have reluctantly become the computer and software technical support services for our family and extended family. For example, without spending any money, we often have to find software to meet a specific need or a way to extend the life of a worn out computer. Luckily, there are many free software solutions available. Paul Mathews will describe some of the free software that he has found to be useful and will entertain recommendations and alternatives from the network members. A list of some of the software that he will discuss is presented below.


Office:
   Open Office (Microsoft Office alternative)
      Write (Microsoft Word alternative)
      Calc (Microsoft Excel alternative)
      Impress (Microsoft Powerpoint alternative)
   AbiWord (Microsoft Word alternative)
   Gnumeric (Microsoft Excel alternative)
   Google Docs

Desktop Publishing:
   Scribus
   TeXNicCenter (front end for MikTeX (LaTeX)) 
   Xemacs (LaTeX editor)

Statistics:
   R (open source version of commercial SPlus) and RKWard (IDE)
   Statistics 101 (free version of commercial Resampling Stats)
   Piface (Russ Lenth's free sample size calculator)

Project Management:
   GanttPV

Graphics:
   Paint.NET (supercharged alternative to Microsoft Paint)
   GIMP and GIMPShop (alternative to Adobe Photoshop)
   InkScape (vector graphics editor)
   Google SketchUp
   IrfanView

Photo Management:
   Picasa

PDF and Postscript:
   Adobe Reader
   Foxit Reader (alternative to Adobe Reader, smaller, more functions)
   Adobe Universal Postscript Print Driver (http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/328/328620.html)
   Ghostscript (command line pdf program)
   GhostView (alternative to Adobe Acrobat)
   PDFCreator (create pdf files from any program that can File> Print)
   PrimoPDF (create pdf files from any program that can File> Print)

Software Development:
   Visual Studio Express - Visual Basic
   Eclipse or Geany IDEs for Python, Java, ...
   Notepad++ (supercharged alternative to Notepad)
   Subversion

Database:
   MySQL

Web Page Development
   Nvu
   HTML Kit 292

Antivirus:
   AVG Free
   Avira
   clamav
   Spybot

Web Browsers:
   Firefox (alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer)
   Google Chrome

E-mail:
   Thunderbird (alternative to Microsoft Outlook)

Utilities:
   Process Explorer (supercharged version of the Microsoft Task Manager)
   FileZilla (ftp)
   InfraRecorder (CD/DVD burning)

Operating Systems:
   Ubuntu (Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and FluxBox)
   Linux Mint

Virtualization:
   VMWare
   VirtualBox


Resources:
   http://download.cnet.com/windows/