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Open-Source Software

Another Day at the Office - A review of OpenOffice 2.0
With the release of OpenOffice.org 2.0, I decided that it was time to break free of the bonds of Word, Excel and PowerPoint and move to an open-source office suite. Now, I should say that Excel has always worked well for me, but Word (that frequently decided it should change the font on paragraphs being cut and pasted) and PowerPoint (that has a mind of its own when it comes to automatically assigning fonts to lines of text) have always been a different story. So, does the OpenOffice suite provide a reasonable replacement?

Building a Better Image (Batch File Renamer and Image Resizer)
In today's world, digital cameras are all pervasive, and readily produce hundreds of images. The problem is that, straight out of the camera, the files have non-intuitive names, such as IMG_0671.JPG and IMG_0672.JPG. And, with multi-megapixel cameras, the file sizes can be huge (2MB and up) which makes sending several pictures by E-mail, or posting them to a web site, quite a challenge. This article reviews a freeware package (Batch File Renamer) and an open-source program (Image Resizer PowerToy Clone for Windows) that will rename and resize your pictures in batch mode.

Can we go to the next message? - Please! (Thunderbird)
In previous articles I have documented my gradual shift away from mainstream software packages to open-source offerings such as Filezilla, an FTP client, and OpenOffice.org, a suite of office applications. Having successfully discovered that OpenOffice provided an excellent substitute for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, I decided it was time to seek a replacement for Outlook, Microsoft's flagship E-mail client. Given my previous favourable experiences with Mozilla products, I decided to try Mozilla Thunderbird in its latest incarnation as Version 1.5.

File Encryption Revisited - TrueCrypt
I recently obtained a new laptop computer which, of course, runs Windows Vista. One program that I use quite regularly, Cryptext, my tried-and-true file encryption utility, couldn't install itself under Vista. So, it was evidently time to seek out a new encryption program, one that is compatible with Vista. TrueCrypt is both free and open-source. Now, that's often my kind of utility program. And, the description made it seem like the ideal package for my purpose, an "encryption program that lets you place files and folders in 'safes' of any size."

File Encryption with AxCrypt
There is an enormous wealth of free software available from the open-source community so, when you are looking for a specific utility, it's not hard to find something that will readily do the job at hand. When it comes to file encryption, one of the simpler open-source programs you can use is AxCrypt from Axantum Software AB in Sweden.

FileZilla - Open Source FTP
There's lots of buzz these days about open source software. The story goes that large numbers of dedicated programmers collaborate on a project and develop a robust, multi-featured application, which is made available for use by anyone at no charge. Because the underlying code is available for close scrutiny by so many knowledgeable individuals, any bugs are fixed in record time, and additional features are frequently added. This seems to be true for FileZilla, an open source FTP utility - the program appears to be bug free, and has superb functionality.

GParted - A little open-source "partition magic"
Historically, Windows hasn't provided a graphical tool for modifying hard disk partitions, and users have generally had to purchase third-party software for this purpose. Vista does offer such a tool, in the form of its Disk Management utility, but this disk partitioning program is rudimentary at best. So, if you want to resize or delete an existing partition, or create a new disk partition, what can the open-source movement offer to facilitate the process? One answer is GParted, the Gnome Partition Editor.

HoDoKu
Sudoku is a game that plays on a 9-by-9 grid that requires putting the digits from 1 to 9 in every row, in every column and in every sub 3-by-3 grid. The rules are pretty simple but trying to solve some of those little puzzles can get terribly hard, making the game a good exercise for your mind, and a good way to pass some time. The easy levels can be solved all in your mind, but for the harder levels it becomes necessary to write down all the "candidates" that a cell can have in order to solve the puzzle, and anyone who has tried to use a pen and paper knows that it gets pretty tedious to keep track of all of them. Lots of programs exist to play Sudoku, but one that I find particularly good is called HoDoKu, a free and GPL program written in Java.

Smart Boot Manager
When playing around with various flavours of Linux, I ran into a problem trying to install the OS from a bootable CD-ROM onto my old desktop machine. Basically, the machine wouldn't boot from the CD. Since the BIOS was set up to go to either the floppy disk, or the CD-ROM, before booting from the hard drive, I figured that this old machine just didn't support booting from a CD. But, while researching the problem on the Internet, I came across a really neat little utility - Smart Boot Manager - that provided the solution.

SpamBayes
From September to December, 2002, I wrote a series of articles and reviews on anti-spam programs. If you missed them, you can find them on the OPCUG web site in the Articles section at http://opcug.ca/public/Articles/2002.htm. Since then spam has continued to increase at prodigious rates and anti-spam options continue to proliferate. Last February, when Microsoft released beta 2 of Office 2003, they finally added decent anti-spam filtering to Outlook. I found it to be at least as effective as my previous favourite - iHateSpam from Sunbelt Software - and it seemed to work more smoothly. So, what was it that made me stop using Outlook's built-in filters? A truly wonderful, free, open source program called SpamBayes

Two Pluses for a Notepad Alternative (Notepad++) The Notepad utility in Windows has always provided a quick way to create and edit simple text files, but it also has some limitations, not the least of which are its inability to handle more than one file at a time, and the lack of a spell checker. Notepad++, an open-source program, released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), provides a ready alternative to Microsoft's old warhorse, and offers a vast array of additional features. Another Plus for Notepad++ When I wrote about Notepad++ as an alternative to Windows' Notepad, I noted that one drawback of the latter was the lack of a spell checker. However, what I failed to mention was that, although Notepad++ has an icon for spell checking, and an associated menu item under Plugins, you have to install the spell checking add-on in order to make this function work.

You Want It - When?!! (Sunbird)
Do you have calendar-envy of your friends who run the full-blown blown version of Outlook rather than Outlook Express? If so, open-source technology can provide an answer. You need Sunbird - "a cross platform standalone calendar application based on Mozilla's XUL user interface language".

Wubi
Wubi is a Ubuntu Installer for Windows, although if you look at the letter order, you would probably say it as "Windows Ubuntu Installer". The first thing you are going to be asking yourself is whatever are they letting this guy tell us about an Ubuntu install when we already know the havoc he inflicts willingly on his own computer! Well, I do have an answer, and it's really pretty simple. Allow me to explain.