Posts tagged Open-Source

Over the past few weeks a few friends of mine have asked for my advice about different types of software.  Each of them have a need and the software industry has the solution.. but that solution is horribly expensive.   The good news is that there are tools for these needs that don’t have a retail price tag attached to them – the software we’re talking about is open-source.  Open source software is generally written by individuals or small groups and is intended to be free to use – but donations are gladly accepted by the authors to help fund continued development.  I’ll stand up for the open-source community right now and tell you straight up – if you use open-source software you should by all means donate!  The quality of software that is out there is often far superior to its retail competition – support is done by the user community and the release/upgrade cycle is usually much shorter than retail products, which means that new features show up much more quickly.

Here’s a few selected OSS selections that are quite appropriate for the holiday season:

GNU Image Manipulation Program (The GIMP)

Image by Al Brown

If you need to do serious photo editing – say, for instance you decide that picture you have of your friend Eric wearing his full-face MTB helmet just needs some creative editing to make it pop.  Just fire up your favorite photo-editing software and, voila!  Eric now has Darth Vader’s body!  Hilarity ensues – especially if you post the picture where all of Eric’s friends can see it.  Everyone has heard of Adobe Photoshop.. that brand name has become synonymous with photo editing and it is indeed a powerful program.. but it is almost prohibitively expensive for the home computer user.  A great alternative that is equally powerful is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, or The GIMP for short.  I haven’t found anything that I can do with Photoshop that I can’t do with The Gimp.  You can get The GIMP from here.. and if you like it, please donate.

InfraRecorder

I’m greatly annoyed by the fact that until recently you had to use a third-party program to perform what I consider to be basic operations with your CD/DVD burner – for instance, creating an .ISO image of a CD/DVD.  If you still use Windows XP you’re still stuck in that spot without third-party software.  You could go buy Nero or Roxio to perform those tasks.. or you could go download a copy of InfraRecorder.  From InfraRecorder’s site, here’s some of what you can do with it:

Features

• Create custom data, audio and mixed-mode projects and record them to physical discs as well as disc images.
• Supports recording to dual-layer DVDs.
  
• Blank (erase) rewritable discs using four different methods.
• Record disc images (ISO and BIN/CUE).
  
• Fixate discs (write lead-out information to prevent further data from being added to the disc).
• Scan the SCSI/IDE bus for devices and collect information about their capabilities.
  
• Create disc copies, on the fly and using a temporary disc image.
• Import session data from multi-session discs and add more sessions to them.
• Display disc information.
• Save audio and data tracks to files (.wav, .wma, .ogg, .mp3 and .iso).

If you need these functions, go here to download InfraRecorder.  If you like it, please donate!

Have any OSS suggestions you’d like to share?  Leave a comment!