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Software

[ Open Source | Freeware I use | J2ME midlets ]

As many I have used MS Windows for years. Then I discovered Linux. It takes a little help to get started, but fortunately that help is available most places in the world today. Just find your local LUG (Linux User Group), and the doors are open to a much safer, reliable and faster operating system.

The downside is that the number of games you can get for Linux is very limited and is that really a downside? Besides you can keep a copy of Windows on your computer while you check out Linux. This feature is called dual boot, but I think most Linux users delete the Windows partition at some point where they have leaned the many powerful tools in Linux and start missing them when they use Windows.

For a long time I used two operating systems this way via dual boot. Now I have temporarely swiched to using only MS Windows XP. I do not want to live with two operating systems or give up my games. I have compromized by keeping many of the programs that I liked in Linux. There is a huge amount of programs that can be used with Linux, and most of them including Linux is free. I recommend that you buy one of the cheap commercial distributions of Linux (which includes many free programs) if you want to check it out. It is complicated to get the hole thing over the net.

If you are hooked on Word and do not want to switch to WordPerfect (which is available for Linux) you can easily switch to OpenOffice (an open source MS office clone), which is free and is almost compatible with MS Office (Microsoft does not even use open standards).

Open Source

In the future when every thing opens up I believe that security will be a much more important issue. Linux can provide that in a better way. The reason is the open source feature (if you think this is a contradiction investigate how encryption works). I do not think Linux really has to fear competition from other operation systems if they keep there source code closed. Big organizations (e.g. governmental) will appreciate that they can fix a security bug them self instead of waiting for a new release from a closed source distributor and I believe there will always be bugs in big programs. They can also limit the number of program code lines (E.g. remove the graphical user interface) and thereby also the number of security bugs. When a company or person has fixed a bug they might publish the fixed version and get good publicity. On the other hand closed source distributions might have problems getting information on bugs in there operating systems since that might involve giving away company secrets. They will need much more information to pinpoint the bug than is revealed from a bug fix in the source of e.g. Linux.

Of course there is also the fear of a back door in closed source distributions. E.g. Microsoft once included a back door in there operating system that revealed which programs that were installed when you contacted them. I think they did it to be better able to help a customer. Today they ask before they get the information but it illustrates that you have no guaranty that there are no back doors in any closed source distribution. There is no way to determine whether the closed source distributer has included a back door in your system.

Some organizations also appreciate that they are able to customize there operating system beyond the possibilities the supplier chooses to include in the compiled system.

PC freeware I use
	Firefox and Thunderbird is your ultimate freeware browser and e-mail software. I suggest dumping Microsoft's Internet Explorer in favior of these. Mozilla is an open source project launched by Netscape in 1998 and thousends of people has been working on it ever since. Today the browser has developed into Firefox and Thunderbird. Some of the nice features it offers is immunity to much of the vira and spyware that your computer is attacked by via. MS IE. You can customize it much better and e.g. use the adblock, popup, and spam protection features.
	Emacs is the ultimate editor in my opinion. I use it primarely for creating these web pages and for LaTeX documents. Emacs can be customized for any text based activity inclucing games (snake, tetris etc.) and browsing webpages.
	LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system, with features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents. Here is nice description of how to install LaTeX, Emacs etc. on your PC.
	Open Office (OOo) is an open source MS Office clone originating from Sun's StarOffice.
	GNU Image Manipulation Program (the GIMP) is the program I use for graphics. Besides this program I use some viewers like ghost view.
	7-Zip is an archiver program for eg. creating smaller multi volume, self extracting, or password protected compressed files. It supports all the compresed file formats I know.
	FileZilla is a nice program that makes your online computer work as a FTP client and server. Run and customize the program and ftp://your.ip.address.number/ works as an ordinary FTP server that can download and/or upload files to selected directories on your computer.
	Visual IRC (ViRC) is a nice IRC chat client.
	GNU Backgammon (GnuBg) is a nice neural net based world class backgammon program. This description says it better than I can. To play online on FIBS (First internet backgammon server) I use C4FIBS.
	GNU Chess is a strong chess program I use. The graphical interface winboard/xboard includes the ability to play online on FICS (Free internet chess server) or against many other chess engines.
	The source of alot of other open source freeware programs.