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“Everyone's doing it."
"Even Christians are doing it"
"What else can poor Indians do"?
"Its too costly; I can't afford to buy it."
These are but a few excuses that we find for making
illegal copies of copy-protected software, songs,
movies, books, articles, etc.
India is one of the countries that has gained a bad
reputation for violation of intellectual property
rights. We do not let creators of original
software/music/movies make money out of their products.
If we think we are saving money by pracitising piracy,
we are mistaken. When we create original content, others
among us cheat us out of our legitimate profits.
For those of us who wish to come of out this
 debilitating sin, there are a number of options
available today. We can use free operating systems, and
free application software. We are already aware of free
content on the web such as Wikipedia.
Operating System
There was a time when Linux was considered to be the
exclusive preserve of techies and wizards. Not any
longer. There are a number of user friendly Linux
distributions. Most of them come free and can even be
downloaded off the internet. One of the most popular
versions of Linux is Ubuntu. Ubuntu will ship you free
CDs if you register your address at their website! No
postage or handling charges! Not only is installation
easy, Ubuntu takes up less resources of your PC. It
starts up faster than Windows and has loads of free
software in it and for free download from the net. You
can run many of your Windows programs in Ubuntu if you
install a special program called Wine.
Office Productivity
For creating documents, letters, reports, spreadsheets,
presentations you have always relied on MS Office.
OpenOffice, a free software can do almost all that MS
Office does for you. It can even handle the file formats
created by Office 2007. Documents created by OpenOffice
are much smaller in size as compared to those created by
other proprietary applications. You can download
OpenOffice for Linux or Windows from OpenOffice.org. The
Star Office is a variant of Open Office that is
available for a nominal fee.
Desktop Publishing
The best free substitute for MS Publisher and the likes
is Scribus for Windows/Mac/Linux available for free
download from scribus.net. Recently, a book created
using Scribus won the Belgian Design Award.
Accounting and Balance Sheet
There are many people who think that there are only a
few quality accounting software available in India such
as “Tally” or Tata EX. Piracy of these packages is not
uncommon. Opt for the free accounting packages available
from the internet. TurboCash is one such package that
can do everything that Tally can do.
Vector Graphics
There are expensive programs from the house of Adobe and
Corel for creating vector graphics. However, there is an
excellent free software that can replace them - Inkscape
for Windows/Linux. It is fun to work with Inkscape!
There is so much you can do with this lean package even
without the use of a mouse! It is available for free
download.
PDF Creator
OpenOffice has the capability to export documents into
PDF. If you need to convert other documents or pictures
into PDF from various applications, you could use the
free version of PRINT2PDF from Software602.com. Through
PRINT2PDF, you can give a print command and get a PDF
file.
Image Manipulation
Although the industry standard of image manipulation is
Adobe Photoshop, we can very well do with th e free GIMP
which is available for Windows and Linux platforms. The
program is easy to use and very easy on computer
resources. Just because GIMP is free it does not mean
that it is inferior in quality.
Liberation fonts
The Liberation Fonts are intended to be replacements for
the three most commonly used fonts on Microsoft systems:
Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New.
On May 9, 2007, Red Hat announced the initial public
release of these fonts under the trademark LIBERATION at
the Red Hat Summit. There are three sets: Sans (a
substitute for Arial, Albany, Helvetica, Nimbus Sans L,
and Bitstream Vera Sans), Serif (a substitute for Times
New Roman, Thorndale, Nimbus Roman, and Bitstream Vera
Serif) and Mono (a substitute for Courier New,
Cumberland, Courier, Nimbus Mono L, and Bitstream Vera
Sans Mono).
Free Utilities and Tools
There are numerous free utilities available for
download, if you have the inclination to do so. These
include Personal Calenders (Sunbird), spyware cleaners (Spybot
Search & Destroy), sound editors (Audacity), system
inventory monitor (Belarc Advisor), download managers (LeechGet),
cleaners of temporary files (CCleaner, ScrubXP), RSS
feed reader (FeedReader), Wifi troubleshooter (Netstumbler),
etc. These are for Windows platform. There are hundreds
of free programs available for Linux environment too.
For more free programs and utilities, go to
Http://www.pcworld.com/article/116456/the_best_free_software.html.
The author uses the free operating system Ubuntu Hardy
8.04
Ppe@praisethealmighty.com |
