Have you ever faced these situations?

• That fancy package which cost me a fancy figure is full of bugs.
• That was version "n". Now, they (finally) released version n.0.0.1, but the upgrade pack costs a zillion rupees.
• I know how to fix those bugs, if only the sources were available.
• I know how to create the sources from the binary, ;-) but the EULA seems to say something about an appointment with "their-lordships-in-black-robes".
• I want to add functionality X to this program, but the EULA says if I modify the program, I am finished.
• I paid for the program and the upgrade. Not, I got another machine. Though I would be using only one of the machines at a given time, EULA does not permit, and my lawyer says that I need to get a new copy for my new machine.

The solution - get rid of the tyranny of the EULA. Go for freedom. It is your birth right. Demand it.

Read on to find the software which will end your miseries. They function better than software which costs you the green backs, and they do not cost you system resources. I reguarly use these for my day to day work. I am not a software wizard. You would not be able to read these pages but for these packages. These programs should work for you too.

Office Suite

My favourite, and the one I use most often is OpenOffice.org. Note that the program is called "OpenOffice.org"; not merely "openoffice". The download is about 70 Mega Bytes, and will take about a few hours to download. It took me about two weeks, spending about 1 hour each day. OpenOffice.org is an excellent program in itself.

It consists of six components. OpenOffice.org writer is a full fledged word processor, capable of writing into, and from several formats. OpenOffice.org impress, is a presentation software. This one too is capable of viewing several presentation formats. There are also Math, Calc, and Draw components for handling spread sheets. OpenOffice.org Basic is an API, in which you can write programs to control control behavious of rest of the components. This one is very much like macros in Visual Basic. I have used only the word processor and Impress. OpenOffice.org files use publicly available XML Document Type Definitions (DTDs) to store info. Try this simple trick with a file created in OpenOffice.org - the file has a .sxw extension. Change the extension to .zip, and uncompress the file. I will keep the results a secret.

Text Editor

My second most favourite text editor for editing plain text is jEdit, available here. The download is hardly 1.5 MB, and should be completed in a jiffy. The program is written in Java, and works on any platform (Windows, Linux) with Java 1.3 or better installed. It comes with several plugins which are best downloaded from the plugin manager from within jEdit. Some plugns however require the Java Run Time Environment v. 1.4 or better. It takes rather long to start up on my PIII 800 machine with 128 MB ram, but the wait is worth. One of the most useful plugins is a full-fledged accounting package called LazyLedger. One of the most useful features of jEdit is that it is capable of saving files in several formats, including plaint ASCII and Unicode. I use it to display Malayalam Unicode files, using the malayalam.ttf, a true type font released under GPL

Browser and Mail Client

One of the most wonderful features of swatantra browsers is that they come bundled with an integrated mail client, like the Mozilla. Best thing about Mozilla is that it is not vulnerable to e-mail borne viruses. Viruses are rarely a threat for me, since I use Debian GNU/Linux. But, several of my friends have been, for the past several months, laughing every time they get a virus. It simply shows up in Mozilla as a huge file with an attachment of the mime type "application/octet stream". Mozilla is a full fledged integrated internet development suite, with a html composer, chat client and down load manager built in. The html composer is impressive, and is capable of using external cascading style sheets. If you have a digital signature, and encryption software installed, (like GPG, you can download the enigmail plugin for Mozilla from Mozdev to send and receive encrypted and / or digitally signed messages.

If you find any pictures on these pages, be assured that they were created using The Gimp. In The Gimp, you have a free graphic editor. There is an alternate (ftp) download site here.

My favourite Operating System is the GNU/Linux Operating system. I use the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. I have described why you should prefer Debian over other distributions elsewhere. Debian comes with all the software described above, (excluding jEdit), and contains other packages which do the job far better. If you use some other operating system, it is time for you to move over to Debian GNU/Linux. If you use some other distribution of GNU/Linux, I suggest that you should move over to Debian GNU/Linux.

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