Recommended Programs
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program)
The GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP, is a multi-platform photo manipulation tool. Typical uses include creating graphics and logos, resizing and cropping photos, altering colors, combining multiple images, removing unwanted image features, photo retouching, image composition, image construction and converting between different image formats. It is an alternative to Adobe Photoshop, the most widely used bitmap editor in the printing and graphics industries; however, it is not designed to be a Photoshop clone.
GIMP's manipulation tools can be accessed via the toolbox, menu paths, and dialog boxes (which can be grouped in docks). They include filters and brushes, as well as transformation, selection, layer and masking tools.
GIMP is expandable and extensible. One of The GIMP's strengths is its free availability from many sources for many operating systems. Most GNU/Linux distributions include GIMP as a standard application. GIMP is also available for other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows™ or Apple's Mac OS X™.
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Mozilla Firefox (Web Browser)
Mozilla Firefox is a free open source web browser. Firefox had 21.34% of the recorded usage share of web browsers as of December 2008, making it the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer. Mozilla Firefox made the Guiness Book of Records for the most downloads in 24 hours (8,002,530 copies of Firefox downloaded) when version 3 was released.
Firefox includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search system that uses the user's desired search engine Functions.
Firefox runs on various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and many other Unix-like operating systems.
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Mozilla Thunderbird (E-mail Client)
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open-source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation.
Thunderbird is a public benefit organization dedicated not to making money but to improving the way people everywhere experience the Internet.
The common thread that runs throughout Mozilla is the belief that, as the most significant social and technological development of our time, the Internet is a public resource that must remain open and accessible to all. With this in mind, Mozilla's efforts are ultimately driven by their mission of encouraging choice, innovation and opportunity online.
The Thunderbird community exists as a virtual Mozilla organization that is independent of employment status. Leadership in the Mozilla Project derives from respect: the more valuable your contribution, the greater your authority. We are a meritocracy, so even Mozilla Foundation employees must earn the respect of the community.
Mozilla’s technology and products belong to everyone. Not only are their products freely available, but their entire code base is a shared public resource. Many other projects use Mozilla technology as the foundation for their own products, both free and commercial.
In the end, the Mozilla community, organization and technology are all focused on a single goal: making the Internet better for everyone.
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Amarok (Music Player)
Amarok is a free sofware music player for Linux or other varieties of Unix.
Despite the fact that Amarok uses wolf-based artwork, and that the name "amarok" or "amaroq" literally refers to the Inuktitut word for "wolf", it was originally named after the album Amarok by Mike Oldfield.
Amarok is an audio player for KDE that is extremely powerful, yet surprisingly simple to use.
With Amarok you can simply drag and drop music into the playlist instead of searching through endless menus. Just looking for that one song in a huge collection? Amarok's collection browser with its quick-search bar will help you find it in a matter of seconds.
It may seem that Amarok has the same old features found in the average audio player, but we did not stop there. One look at the context browser and you will see why Amarok is one step ahead of the rest. The context browser shows all kinds of information related to your currently playing track - from the album cover, through to other music by the same artist, as well as related artists - an informative and fun way to learn about your collection!
Do you already have many different playlists but can never decide on which one you want to use? Then the playlist browser is just for you. Never know what to listen to? Amarok's Dynamic Mode will choose your music for you, and Smart Playlists allow you to jump right in to specific parts of your collection.
Amarok has outstanding support for Apple's iPod, iRiver's ifp and a multitude of generic USB devices. It also features many different audio backends allowing YOU to choose how you listen to your music. These and other features make it the most advanced audio player available. Amarok is smart, sexy and clever.
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VLC Media Player
VLC media player is an open source, free source, free software media player.
VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various formats.
It is one of the most platform-independent players available. VLC has versions for BeOS, Syllable, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, MorphOS, Solaris and Zaurus.
VLC includes a large number of free decoding and encoding libraries; on the Windows platform, this greatly reduces the need for finding/calibrating propriety plugins. It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux by using the libdvdcss DVD decryption library.
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OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org, commonly known simply as OpenOffice, is a free cross-platform office application suite available for a number of different computer operating systems. It supports the ISO/IEC standard OpenDocument Format (ODF) for data interchange as its default file format, as well as Microsoft Office formats among others. OpenOffice supports over 45 different languages.
The project and software are informally referred to as OpenOffice, but this terms is a trademark held by a company in the Netherlands and is also in use by Orange UK, requiring the project to adopt OpenOffice.org as its formal name.
OpenOffice.org Writer lets you design and produce text documents that can include graphics, tables, or charts. You can then save the documents in a variety of formats, including Microsoft Word, HTML, or Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF).
OpenOffice.org Calc is a spreadsheet application that you can use to calculate, analyze, and manage your data. You can also import and modify Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
OpenOffice.org Impress lets you create professional slide shows that can include charts, drawing objects, text, multimedia and a variety of other items. If you want, you can even import and modify Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.
For on-screen slide shows, animation, slide transitions and multimedia are a few of the techniques you can use to make your presentation more exciting.
OpenOffice.org Draw lets you create simple and complex drawings and export them in a number of common image formats. You can also insert tables, charts, formulas and other items created in OpenOffice.org programs into your drawings.
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Scribus (Desktop Publishing)
Scribus is a desktop publishing (DTP) application. Native versions are available for Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.. It is known for its broad feature set of page layout features comparable to leading commercial applications such as Adobe PageMaker, QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign.
Scribus is designed for flexible layout and typesetting, and the ability to prepare files for professional quality image setting equipment. It can also create animated and interactive PDF (portable document format) presentations and forms. Exmaple uses include writing small newspapers, brochures, newsletters, posters and books.
The Scribus file format is XML based; open and completely documented. Unlike proprietary binary file formats, even damaged documents can be recovered with a simple text editor - sometimes a challenging problem with other page layout programs. There is an easy to use drag and drop scrapbook. Scribus has been translated into more than 25 languages and more are coming in the future.
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TurboCASH Accounting
TurboCASH is a free software accounting software package. It is aimed at the small to medium-sized business market. This places it between being a home finances package and being an ERP package. Its core function is a General Ledger, posting transactions into accounts and producing financial reports. Plugin technology enables developers to extend the system.
TurboCASH integrates directly with osCommerce, CRE Loaded and Zen Cart. Being originally developed in Delphi, it only turns natively on Windows, although the developers have released a version for Linux that runs under Wine. A version that runs under CrossOver, and will therfore run on Apple, is also under development.
TurboCASH is much more than a simple 'home finances' or small business bookkeeping system. Small business accounting software providers typically release a low-end product for $200 that excludes such basic features as stock control. TurboCash includes most functions a business will ever need: debtors, creditors, general ledger, full stock control, VAT accounting, invoicing, bank reconciliation, trial balance, balance sheet and income statements, full reporting and analysis, as well as multi-company and multi-user capabilities.
TurboCASH accounting software is flexible. It can be configured for any country and any small business.