Open Source Software is Awesome

[Ack]

Personally I don't like the latest version of Word all that much either, though I do enjoy Excel and Power Point. I had to work on a project that involved me moving info between Excel and OpenOffice's Calc, which ended up a bit of a pain, and I've never really been comfortable with OpenOffice's Present program...eh, oh well. They still serve their purpose when I need them.

[lordofduct]

Oh yeah, no lie there... Calc and Present leave a lot to desire in comparison. But the Word Processor I think is prime quality.

My thing is, I've never needed a damn "power point" type presentation ever... never really gave a shit about it either. (others probably do though)

And Calc... well if you expect to go back and forth between Excel and Calc, good luck. If you stay in Calc, you'll do just fine. But that's usually not an option again, because damn it... every freakin' accountant out there uses Excel.

But considering the free price tag, damn you get a lot.

[t0yrobo]

And the biggest punch in the stomach in my opinion is how schools offer purchasing plans or deals through the school to buy Macs... but Mac suffers from always being about a year behind in MS format support. How fucking ridiculous is that!?

I go to such a school. Actually they insist that we buy Macs. From what I've heard they gave the school a rather large gift of computers, none of which are in our computer lab, and most of which are running XP.

[Ivo]

It's really crap if schools are not acting out in the best interests of students. They really should accept something like .pdf at the very least (you can prepare it however you want and export or whatever).

Anyway back on topic - I use Firefox as my browser, and VLC is great. I rarely use GIMP as I don't do much graphics, OpenOffice is not as good as the real thing as far as I'm concerned but for the price is much better prize/quality ratio In Linux I used Pidgin but I much prefer (and currently use) aMsn to replace Live Messenger which is Windows only.
There are also loads of very high quality freeware games (not many are open source however, AFAIK).

I like to use CamStudio ocasionally for capturing video right out of the screen, but I'd like to either figure out how to set up to also capture audio or have a better program than it - so I'm not 100% satisfied with it (but hey, it is free).

I'd like to know some nice freeware (doesn't need to be opensource), but stuff that also has a Windows versions, if it is opensource it is bound to have compiled versions for Windows anyway.

0. Anything better than CamStudio to capture right out of the screen? I've managed to use CamStudio for other stuff, but it works rather poorly for capturing playthroughs of games etc.

1. burning DVDs (I think LoD mentioned using some on Linux). I use Discjuggler which limits itself to CD-sized stuff and slowest speeds on the free version, which is mostly what I burn - but when I want to burn something DVD sized or whatever (rarely) it is annoying to use the "built-in" stuff from Windows.

2. Editing videos and/or music (nothing fancy). I needed to cut out segments of long video files and used the time-limited trial of the ULead software. Is there anything free that can just selectively cut out segments (I don't want to "fancify" the video with V FX or anything).

3. This one is for my parents mostly. They watch something on youtube and want to save it. I found out Flashcatch, but the trial/free version is rather limited in size, capturing only videos of up to 10 megs in size (although it is very simple to use, which is relevant for my parents). If there is any other free software or method to "capture" flash videos (even if it is more complicated) I would like to know about it.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions of software
Ivo.

[Niode]

IVO go here:

http://alternativeto.net/

[Ivo]

IVO go here:

http://alternativeto.net/

Wow cool site Niode, thanks

Ivo.

[Limewater]

1. burning DVDs (I think LoD mentioned using some on Linux). I use Discjuggler which limits itself to CD-sized stuff and slowest speeds on the free version, which is mostly what I burn - but when I want to burn something DVD sized or whatever (rarely) it is annoying to use the "built-in" stuff from Windows.

I heartily recommend ImgBurn (www.imgburn.com). It works very well.

2. Editing videos and/or music (nothing fancy). I needed to cut out segments of long video files and used the time-limited trial of the ULead software. Is there anything free that can just selectively cut out segments (I don't want to "fancify" the video with V FX or anything).

I'm pretty sure you can do this in VirtualDub, though lately all I've been using it for is stripping out audio to clean up in audacity, then put things back together, so I could be wrong on this.

[fastbilly1]

Yalls stories about asinine schools reminded me of one of my own. My degree is in Food Science and Hospitality Management, so as you can imagine, my class were in both the Food Science and Management schools. The Management program held similar asinine beliefs. It was a crapshoot per professor, but my use of Wordperfect universally did not fly. Apparently rtf (rich text format) files were not acceptable either. So I had to shell out for a copy of Office XP - and I am still bitter about that since the on campus site was sold out and I had to spend $150ish out of pocket. On the flipside in the Food Science building, well I ended up doing IT for them for a while. Heck my advisor wanted me to copy dvds for him when we first met...

But the story I was getting to was this. Their were computer labs all over campus but some were obviously better than others. Some were still using P2's and the P4 had just come out. We were forced to use a bloated webmail server for our .edu account and the P2's and 3's just couldnt handle it. So I jumped back to the old standby - Telnet and Pine. I popped into one of the Management computer labs to just check my email, fired up Pine, and all of the sudden I had an IT lackey ontop of me saying that I was hacking and had to stop or I would be removed. The fact that on the damn website it says for slow connections to use telnet I was flabbergasted. I didnt have time to talk to the guy so I just checked my email and left. Turns out the story got around and one of my buddies who was a sysadmin at the time hassled me about it until I graduated.

It is sad that not too long ago (2002/2003) people who saw something different thought it was wrong and evil. Its like the darkages for technology... Hmm, what smart phone has commandline support?

[AmishSamurai]

I don't dabble much in spreadsheets and powerpoints, but for standard docs I use Abiword. For IM and IRC Pidgin, for videos and music VLC, and for pdfs Sumatra. I don't use Gimp or photoshop, since I don't do image editing at all.

[sevin0seven]

I also used alot of open source program and such myself. Among my favorites are Firefox, Open Office, VLC, CCleaner, Burn Aware, and Paint.Net.