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Episode: 205
Title: HPR0205: Open Source for the Windows Addict
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0205/hpr0205.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 13:50:37
---
Oh.
The following presentation from the Utah Open Source Conference held August 28th through
30th, 2008 is underwritten by Guru Labs Training. Guru Labs Training is the trusted source
for Linux Systems Administration, Network, and Security Training. GuruLabs.com.
Streaming and podcast hosting bandwidth for this and many other presentations at podcast.UTOS.org
has been provided by Tier 4. The presentation was given by Edwin Phillips on Open Source for the Windows Addict.
Hi, my name is Ed and I'm a Windows Addict. Last time I used Windows was wrong, I'm using it right now actually.
But I really have a good reason for using Windows. I do have a valid reason for it.
It came installed on the computer. What more do you need than that?
Well, I mean, you know, my friends use Windows and my work that's what they give you is Windows.
You're expected to use it. I mean, I've heard of this Linux thing people talk about, but holy cow.
They said, grip, awk, command line. What's all that about?
And you know, you try to get on these forums or whatever they call them and try to talk to people.
And man, they make you feel so stupid. Geez. I try to put it on this laptop even, you know.
I even talked to Drill. It's a Dell laptop and you know, they called me stupid.
You should about the other laptop. This one doesn't work with it.
So, I've got more good reasons for it. And besides, Windows is board gates.
Now, board gates is a man that I know is looking out for my best interest.
He cares for me. He loves me.
Does anyone want something related to anybody here? Anybody ever heard of any of that?
Does it describe any of you? Friends that you know?
My name is Ed. And it's probably safe to say I am a Windows addict.
So, I think I'm qualified to bring this presentation.
This is the first time I've ever done a presentation before.
So, if I should happen to pass out or running screening me out of the room, don't worry.
It's just to be expected.
So, Windows addict.
What we're going to talk about a little bit is what a Windows addict is.
And their relationship to open source. And open source is relationship to Windows addict.
Why would a Windows addict benefit from open source?
And why would open source benefit from having Windows addicts involved in its conception?
Then we'll talk about some programs that are very Windows addict-friendly.
Great ways to introduce people to open source software.
Or just to use, if you yourself are a Windows addict.
Start with.
Right Windows. What is it about Windows that appeals to the Windows addict?
First of all, we talked about there's that obvious convenience familiarity.
You go to Best Pride by a computer. It's going to come with Windows.
You go by a piece of hardware. It's going to be Windows compatible.
The driver CD included with the hardware is going to be Windows drivers.
You go to a school. You go to
Office. Most likely they're going to have you using Windows.
Your parents probably use Windows.
It's everywhere. Your house has Windows.
Windows Windows Windows.
Might be required for your job.
I come from a company that
is I would say really Windows friendly.
They do so much business with Windows.
Microsoft actually has a Microsoft employee on-site or corporate headquarters.
So yeah, they like Windows.
There might be specific applications that keep you tied to Windows.
Games is obviously a big one.
So I put it up there in parentheses.
People like their Windows games.
There's a lot of people that love quick and love Microsoft money.
Want to use those Microsoft Office.
Obviously Microsoft Office runs on Microsoft Windows.
Because we talked about if you go buy a computer most of the time,
most of the vendors are going to provide it.
Can they hear me?
Okay. Does that help at all?
In the main piece,
let me put this background here.
It looks like one of them.
Does that help at all?
Okay, I'll try to project a little bit.
I'm a pretty soft spoken person too.
So I apologize for that.
I'll do the best I can.
The other reason, of course, is for open-source software.
Pandas can be pretty imposing creatures.
Most people when they think of open-source,
they immediately think of Linux.
Linux to them seems a little scary,
because it all seems like there's something involving configuring a kernel,
or compiling, or solving package dependencies.
These are words that they hear and think about,
and are worried about.
There's fear that they're going to get made fun of.
Certainly, the open-source community has some very opinionated people.
Sometimes, if you go into these chat rooms looking for information about something,
there's some pretty good fights going sometimes.
So I can be intimidating to a first-time person,
and right along with that goes choice.
How many Linux distributions are out there right now?
More than 100?
More than 200?
There's quite a few.
There you go.
That can be pretty intimidating to somebody that's used to being given Microsoft Windows,
and Microsoft Office, and those are your only choices.
It can be a lot to worry through and trying to decide which one is the best fit for you.
So maybe one of the reasons why there could be fear of open-source.
So what benefits does open-source software bring to Windows Addict?
First of all, there's lower cost.
Most open-source applications are free or very close to.
Just taking a minute here, though, to point out that while open-source software is generally free to download,
I would encourage you and encourage you to encourage others to donate when the opportunity comes.
First of all, that you find useful and use regularly.
Obviously, open-source developers like anybody else in the world need to eat.
And since they're giving you their product for free,
it would be really great if you could give something back.
A lot of times, that's a great thing that you can give them is money so they can buy food and clothes,
and all that good stuff, new computers.
I want to focus a little bit on the zero benefit cost, though,
and there's two of them specifically that I want to talk about.
One is anti-piracy systems, and the other is bundling.
Now, anti-piracy systems, what do I mean by that?
When you buy software and you have to put in a license key or go and activate the product online,
or some of the more aggressive ones require you to put a USB dongle in your computer
before the software will work.
Well, somebody had to work and develop all this cool software,
and there's a lot of cryptography behind you a lot of times.
There was a lot of experts that went into developing those anti-piracy mechanisms.
Well, those don't give anything to you.
In fact, they're getting you real a lot of times.
But you have to pay for it when you brought that software.
Part of the cost of buying the software you wanted to use was to pay for our R&D and effort and hassle.
Bundling.
A lot of times you go out and buy a software package,
and there are other things included that you don't want.
A real great example might be say in the case of Windows XP,
you are an operating system for your computer.
You have no interest in a web server or an FTP server.
Those are included for free.
Well, no, because somebody had to develop those components that are on there.
And so those are included in the price of the software.
So you're paying for something that you didn't necessarily want.
So these are what I call zero benefit costs.
There are things you're paying for where they're getting you nothing back.
Okay, so that's one benefit.
The other is open standards.
You know, your average Windows Outlook is not a developer, generally.
They're not really interested in source code,
so open source isn't that important to them.
So what open standards are,
if it rides them away to ensure that their data is protected in the wrong term.
If the standard is well documented,
they can always get back to it to recover their data.
They wind up with an old version that serves no longer supported.
In a proprietary world, they're pretty much out of luck.
With open standards, that's not something they have to worry about.
The other of course is improving collaboration.
No matter if the person that you're working with is using a Linux system,
or a Macintosh system,
or an Amiga OS, it doesn't matter.
The standards are open and compatible regardless.
The other is security.
Now security always gets to be a little touch point,
because there's all those debates about which one really is more secure,
open source proprietary.
I'm not really going to focus on the more debatable aspects of that.
I just want to focus on a couple of aspects,
where there is real security and open source software.
One, just talking about legitimate hardware,
sort of a gator, whether bug,
bronzy buddy, you know these.
These are legitimate programs that you can download from legitimate websites,
that you can legitimately install on your computer.
Do some other things in the background that you may or may not know what they're doing.
A lot of times it's pushing advertisements down to you.
Sometimes it may be collecting information about you to send back,
so they can help build better targeted advertisements for the audience.
That may be innocuous enough.
The problem is you don't necessarily know what they're doing.
What if they're sending out information in an encrypted packet?
How do you know it's in there?
You're just going to have to trust them if they're a word.
With open source, that's another problem. The code's open.
Somebody, maybe you don't understand the code,
but somebody is probably looking at that code,
and is going to raise their hand and scream if they find somebody doing something illegitimate.
So you buy a lot of safety from the community there.
The other coming back to us, anthroporecic mechanisms,
something that I call the anti-piracy denial of service.
Who I heard of the WGA failure?
Sound familiar to anybody?
Around August of last year.
Microsoft had a little issue.
Human error.
Something got injected into their activation servers.
12,000 some odd customers couldn't use their VISTA computers
because the activation servers told those people that their legitimate
and paid for computers were not legitimate,
and put them into their restricted mode.
They spent the weekend without their computers.
Now, you know, one-time mistake.
Certainly something like that wouldn't happen again.
Certainly not less than a year later.
Recently, VMware made the news for a similar thing.
VMware, of course, virtualization products.
They have an enterprise-level product that allows you to run lots of
virtual machines on a single physical server.
They provide a source pack for their enterprise product about a month ago.
Again, human error, somebody screwed up on the anti-piracy mechanism
and yet expired everybody's licenses.
So you were fine, so as you didn't have to re-booting your virtual machines.
If you had to restart your virtual machine, it wouldn't start back up.
It's pretty inconvenient.
I'm sure that it costs companies some dollars in downtime.
There's no benefit to anti-piracy mechanisms in open-source software,
since the code is right open, so that's not something that you have to worry about
with open-source software.
Again, it comes down to visibility.
The code is exposed, is accessible.
Maybe you don't understand it, maybe you're not a developer,
but you have a whole community of people out there that do understand it,
and they're all looking at it.
It's pretty hard to build a conspiracy of the public.
The only benefit, of course, is freedom,
specifically talking about cross-platform or credibility freedom.
The ability to use your applications where you want, when you want, how you want.
It's a little secret, the vast majority of users don't care at all about the operating system.
They don't use a computer for windows.
They use it to browse the web.
They use it to check for email.
They use it to write documents to watch movies, to listen to music.
It doesn't matter what the operating system is to them.
So, we've talked about these benefits that the edit can gain from open-source.
Why do we want these prophetic addicts involved in open-source?
What are they bringing back to the table?
First of all, they bring a different point of view.
It's some different ideas and ideals.
They typically are the non-death people.
So, they can bring these ideas about the end user experience and usability,
or software that's not related to development at all.
They also can do non-death work.
How many developers do we have in the room?
How many of you, your favorite thing, is writing the documentation for your code?
Okay.
There are some people out there that are really, really good at documentation.
Why not get them involved?
They can also do a lot of usability stuff.
One of the downsides of having a developer do his own usability is he builds it.
Well, he knows how it works and he knows what it's supposed to do.
So, it's really easy and comfortable for him to deal with the little niggling issues that it might have.
These people that are non-developers, people that maybe are doctors,
can bring a lot of improvement to the usability of medical software if they're involved.
And of course, cross-discipline projects, the ability to pursue projects that cross disciplines of biology,
science, math, medical, whatever it might be.
And of course, dollars.
Addicks have money.
And open-source developers need to eat.
So, again.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about applications for the Windows addict.
The requirements of an application to be a good candidate for Windows addicts.
First of all, it needs to be really a point-and-quick,
wizardy kind of install and operation both.
They have to edit a config file if they have to enter special arguments at the command line in order to run the program.
Not a good choice.
It also needs to have what I call manual free operation.
We want to focus on products that they don't have to read a document in order to get it running.
They should be able to just launch it and basically figure out how it works.
Stable, duh.
An effective GUI.
What do I mean by that?
It needs to provide easy access to the kinds of tasks that they rarely do.
There's a lot of things that you might do once a month, once every six months on your computer.
You have to dig out a book and read through to figure out how you did that six months ago.
It should be something that's fairly easy to figure out and intuitive just by looking at the interface.
It shows as much as possible leverage existing knowledge.
It's sort of the term embrace and extend.
We usually turn, this is a Microsoft strategy.
When somebody comes up with something cool on the market, Microsoft embraces it.
It pulls it into great stuff and then adds stuff onto it.
Nobody else can do extending it so that you can only use it on Windows.
The same idea can be applied to open source software.
We can embrace the good things that have occurred in Windows and then add on to that.
We have even better systems that take advantage of visual leveraging.
What I mean by that is it needs to have an interface that is clear and well organized.
These are some examples of stuff you don't want to see.
Lots of clutter, colors that don't make sense that don't pull you to anything.
Lists that aren't even an alphabetical order.
You want to see interfaces that are more like this where things are clean,
they're well organized, they're well laid out.
You may not understand specifically what this product does.
But they've used colors and icons so that somebody that has had some basic familiarity
with quicker identify what's going on, what it's doing, and how it works.
Here's another good example.
This one actually is an open source application eclipse.
You as a non-developer, this may not make a lot of sense to you.
But to somebody that has a little bit of understanding of development or developing,
these icons, the layout, the colors, allow you to quickly draw your attention
to the categorizations and classifications of what's going on there.
This is the kind of stuff we're looking for.
Create a list here of some of the common applications that people use.
The normal windows offerings and then a list of open source equivalents
that are pretty good fits for these within the constraints that I've set.
I've got one there that I've kind of let great out evolution.
You're going to see a couple of places where great things out.
I have to confess that it really shouldn't be on this list because they don't really quite meet the criteria.
But they are so close and so cool that I just wanted to make sure they were on the list
so that you can consider them and think about them in the future.
Why did you say that?
It doesn't quite meet because in my first attempts to install,
the first couple of installs, it didn't install cleanly.
The install for windows is just a little bit shaky still.
And that's the reason for it.
It's really close and there's a lot of benefit that it has over the other two,
and being that it's much closer to an outlook, look and feel.
As I said, I'm pretty up there because I think it is a wonderful candidate,
but give it another month, maybe one more release.
Okay, let's dig into a couple of these.
Firefox, first the obvious one.
We spend time on the web.
I already installed, why would I want to put Firefox on there?
Well, as of IE7, we're pretty close, feature-wise and security-wise,
once IE cut onto the whole cab thing.
But I've actually had to focus on my machine,
and I found that there's certain applications that want to come around better than the others.
I'm not doing download, but there's other applications where there was an including a lot of websites
that don't like to work better.
Exactly.
Yeah, the newer versions of Firefox have actually incorporated that IE tab as I understand,
so it's a lot better at it.
Yeah, they've improved that.
A few things that Firefox definitely builds give you loads of improved speed.
There have been a lot of metrics done to demonstrate that,
particularly in your JavaScript or Java rendering engine,
Firefox is head and shoulders above Internet Explorer 7,
and as well as the beta's Internet Explorer 8, it just eats it.
The download manager, as you mentioned in Firefox, is cool.
It's way better than the way IE handles it.
It's much easier, it's cleaner, it's well organized, it's concise,
it gives you a lot more power.
It's cool.
The other thing are the add-ons for Firefox,
and I've listed three in particular.
When we come back to that security being about parity with them,
well, until you add these add-ons, and then Firefox once again kicks Internet Explorer's,
but in my opinion.
Let's see here.
Real quickly, I do just like to show a little video here,
just to demonstrate this.
In Firefox, we go to YouTube.
You can see here we've got this error saying that,
you can't play videos because you've got JavaScript turned off
or something's going on.
The little clicky things aren't working on this page.
You can see, you can't really read it.
It's telling you that the scripts have been blocked on this page,
and this is that node script plugin that we've added.
It basically just prevents those scripts from running.
You just go over and click on options, you pop it up,
you have the option then or the ability to allow,
either temporarily or permanently, scripts from each of the sides
where scripts are embedded on here.
So it's got someplace called right-image and YouTube.com,
where these scripts are coming from.
You can also allow just everything for this page.
So we only need to allow the YouTube ones.
We find that really not much has changed.
Things are working about the same.
Go back in.
Well, we decided we can trust right-image as well,
so we go ahead and allow scripts for minutes.
Now, the little clicky things start to work.
So you can actually open those.
Things are behaving the way that we think they should.
Over here now we've got something new,
and now we're going to that flash brought plugin.
You can see that it is indicated that there is a flash object here.
You've got this little icon here.
When you hover over it, it turns into a little play button
which you can click on and then play that particular item.
You can also right-click and allow for that site,
which essentially right-lists YouTube at that point.
And I'm just clicking on it to play, plays the video,
just as we expect.
Now up here, we see something else.
There's this little block box that appeared.
That's onto the add block plugin.
Let's see something that's flash here,
and says, oh, this might be an advertisement.
I don't know if you want it brought.
You can click on that.
It gets added to flash, or add blocks.
Brack lists the video, start playing that particular flash content.
Now, if we go back to our page,
you'll see it comes right back to being brought again by flash block,
because we didn't tell it to allow it permanently.
We didn't right-list it.
Once we right-list it, though,
you'll see it doesn't immediately play.
But if we exit and then go back to that page,
now that it's right-listed,
it will immediately play as we expect.
So we have these varying layers of granular security
that we can control how it behaves.
I'm just taking a look inside of these add-ins now.
Here's our no script.
You can see the right-list there,
which unfortunately you can barely read.
I apologize for that.
YouTube and right-image are right there,
because we put them in.
You can remove their send that are put in there by default.
Some that you may or may not really feel like you trust.
And you can, of course, remove those or control those.
If you don't really trust msn.com or hotmail.com,
for instance, we can remove those.
It's got a great deal of control,
as far as how you set it up.
It has support for Silverlight already,
so they are keeping up to speed on new or scripting technologies.
A lot of ways you can change the way
it is, as far as the look and feel,
is you get more interested in delving into it.
The most proper right-list is going to be sufficient
for your Windows addicts to use it.
Flashproc now.
Same thing, there's a right-list there,
not much to it since all it does is block flash.
Again, once you have sites in the right-list,
you can always remove them if you change your mind about trusting them.
No big deal there.
Now, this one is a little complicated for the average Windows addicts.
They're probably not going to want to dig into the guts here,
because you're essentially building a filter.
The nice thing is that there are subscriptions.
So, when it first runs, actually,
it gives you an opportunity to just click a checkbox,
subscribe to this list.
And some kind of smart person has built that filter for you,
so you don't have to worry about it.
And so, they'll probably just want to go into and use the update
and possibly subscribe to other filters.
And that's pretty easy to use.
And that's all the basic features of those three plugins in play.
It gives you a great deal of granular control over your security.
Good stuff.
Okay, next up, email, PIM.
First of all, it's one since we've been talking about Firefox,
the state of the same company, Thunderbird.
A Thunderbird is not an outlook replacement.
It's an outlook-export replacement.
It works wonderfully for that.
A lot better, in fact.
But if this person is using outlook and taking advantage of tasks,
they're probably not going to be happy with Thunderbird.
Now, from the aspect of just email,
that's all they're doing.
This is a great replacement.
And the nice thing about it is that it does do a very nice import
of your information from outlook and outlook-express.
After you complete the install on first run,
it notices if you have outlook or outlook-express installed.
It says, hey, do you want to import your settings?
Here, forward your email.
It does it wonderfully.
One thing that's a little bit different about it is junk mail.
Outlook basically uses a really cool algorithm
that they come up with to try to identify what is junk mail
and it dumps everything in there.
Now, if stuff goes in there that isn't supposed to,
then you can go and say, hey, this wasn't junk.
Well, I'm going to write with the address that they can't
but came from.
And so now, anything coming from that address is legitimate.
Yeah, it works all right.
So, I'm going to go and actually uses a Bayesian algorithm.
Now, when a first runs, it's not going to be
a good catching junk.
But you go in and you start marking things.
This is junk.
This isn't junk.
This is junk.
This isn't.
It then learns what is junk to you and what is not junk to you.
And it very quickly figures out and does an incredibly good job
of identifying what you want and what you don't want.
It is excellent.
I put a note on here about data location.
It's really not fair to do this because Outlook does the same stupid thing
in my opinion.
They put your Outlook data in a hidden folder under your profile,
which makes it kind of annoying to find.
The way that you find it is just sort of start running
and put percent out data, percent.
And then you can jump right into the folder where both of them are located.
You'll see the Thunderbird folder there.
Just go into it and find the profile.
Now, one thing that's kind of cool about Thunderbird, I think this is cool anyway,
is rather than just using one single file, the PST that Outlook uses and dumps everything in there,
it actually treats each folder in your structure as a separate file.
So if you, for example, have a particular folder that you need to share or transfer to a friend,
you can just copy the file.
There's actually two files, one I think is an index and the other actually stores the data.
You just copy those files out, given your friend, he dumps them into his folder and there it is.
I think that's pretty cool.
Every location, again, as I said, it's a little rough still.
It's not as stable and as easy to install as I think it should be.
Great potential though, yet it is a full Outlook replacement.
It has the same set of features that Outlook has.
I do have a screenshot here just to show you what it looks like so you can see.
Looks a great deal like Outlook.
The other one, Chandler.
This is kind of the newer kit on the block.
Again, very, very nice interface.
High focus on collaboration.
When you get into Chandler, they're going to immediately start advertising to you,
hey, you can get an account on our site where you can build teams and share and collaborate this information.
If that's something that's appealing to you, that's actually probably one of those
embrace and extend things where they've extended beyond what Microsoft offers.
Let's see.
The one base, of course, that I would bring up is that none of these appear to easily do pda syncing.
That may not matter to most people because most people probably don't carry a pda around.
But if they do, that may be a showstopper form.
So just be aware that if they're putting their tasks and stuff out of Outlook,
this may not be a good fit.
At least not yet.
I know that they're talking about it, so we'll see what happens.
Of course, if you get converted to Linux and using Evolution, then PalmPilot's work.
And I think there's even solutions for the Windows pda's as well.
So we went on to Office.
Open Office.
I'm coming here to see the Open Office.
So I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it just to move us along.
The three core apps here, your root, Excel, PowerPoint, very compatible.
Through Office 2000, slash 2003, they read and write the files.
Rude, exceptional compatibility, both reading and saving.
Excel, pretty darn good.
Some of the more advanced features you may have trouble with.
PowerPoint, similar.
That's a pretty darn good job.
Occasionally, a few of the things don't render quite the way you expect, but the pretty darn good.
2000, they can read 2007 documents.
They can't say it to the 2007 format.
Not yet.
The includes access to quids, isn't an access equivalent.
If they're a heavy access user, they're probably not going to be happy with it.
Just not quite as easy to build databases.
If you don't know anything about databases, those accesses.
Of course, that can be a good thing.
The less people that don't know about databases, building databases, they better off we probably be.
Composer, composer is a web editing tool.
Probably more similar to, I'm going to forget what it's called.
Something that makes fireworks.
I'm drawing a blank on my name, I apologize.
Not quite as front-page-y as more similar to the other application whose name I forget.
Dream lever.
That's the one.
Thank you.
Now, it doesn't come with an installer.
It's just a zip file, so it's extracted on your computer and run it.
That's, in my mind, just as easy, so we'll accept that.
You're also doing that.
There, and you can all find it first.
Absolutely.
Yes.
Eclipse is, as we're showing there, it's a development platform.
And it can be used for web page development as well.
You can actually do a lot more advanced stuff in it.
But yeah, as he says, you need to be a little more daring.
It expects a little bit more of you.
But for a very simple web page editing, it does handle CSS.
Nice little program.
Other PDF creator.
Now, open office can actually save to PDF.
So, PDF creator is into interesting PDF from that standpoint.
But if you have other applications that you want to create PDFs out of, PDF creator is wonderful.
It installs on your computer and actually creates a PDF printer on your computer.
So then, for many applications, you can just do your file print and select the PDF creator printer.
And it pops up a dialog saying, well, what do you want to call this PDF?
And what do you want?
Use for your author and title information or whatever.
Do your stuff and it saves it up.
You've got a PDF.
Along with PDFs then, Sumatra is a really cool acrobat PDF file reader.
I think it was like 200K in size or less.
One single file.
It doesn't do a lot of high-end, rendering, cool stuff that acrobat does.
But that too can be a plus because it is much less of a security threat.
You don't have to worry about somebody putting malicious code inside of an acrobat file and attacking you via it.
Because it simply won't run.
The other cool thing that I really like about Sumatra is if you read PDF books, your ebooks.
If you're reading a book, you close it.
Next time you open it, Sumatra actually remembers where you were and opens it to that location again.
Very nice feature.
Very teeny.
You can throw it on a thumb drive and pack it with you.
Dala, that's your Visio replacement.
How many people here use Visio?
What's that?
Yeah.
Most of the things that you do in Visio, I would do just fine.
It doesn't have quite as rich as sort of templates.
Well, actually, I think that I actually have more Cisco templates than Visio does.
The last time I looked at it.
And I will do a lot of other things that if you're into software development,
that Visio doesn't do well as far as the object oriented design.
Project, MS projects.
This one I struggled with a little bit trying to find some options.
Open Workbench is one.
I haven't actually looked at it because you have to register with the website to download it,
and I didn't feel like doing that.
But screenshots, it looks pretty decent.
Open project is one that I did download and take a look at.
Again, neither of these is as rich as Microsoft project.
At this point, as far as features,
but for the vast majority of people,
more than I have to do some basic project management.
That's sort of a less common application that people use, but I mentioned it anyway.
Graphics and sounds.
For pictures, you've got the GIMP.
The GIMP is a Photoshop equivalent.
Pretty coruscant in quality and capabilities, I think.
I can't say that I know that because I haven't used Photoshop for eons
because I haven't been able to afford it since the one time it came free with a scanner 10 years ago.
GIMP works just fine for me.
Does everything in actually more than I can help to understand about photo manipulation.
I had an ink scape in here too.
Inkscape may not be as appealing to most people, but I mention it because it does appeal to people who are really into graphics.
It specifically focuses on vector graphics as opposed to your photo or bitmap type graphics.
People use it a lot.
So I mentioned it.
I installed it and looked at the interface and said, wow, that's cool.
That's a lot of stuff that I don't understand.
Yeah, I should mention that.
GIMP was, I guess we called it a fork project of GIMP.
I worked with the GIMP core and they tried to make it more photoshoppy for the photoshop people.
Music, I put a couple in here that I use heavily.
One is CDX, a very simple program for just ripping your CDs to MP3 or WAV files.
It connects to the internet CD database.
You can stick your CD in, it can pull up the track information for you.
It's really easy, not a lot of work.
You can stick your CD in and push a button and move it just as it's thing.
You don't have to look on it.
What are the ones that I will let us add to the CD?
Yeah, I'd add to the CD is an editing tool for sound.
It basically gives you a visual view, a timeline view of your audio file.
You can play it, see it takes a tracker that follows through.
You can mark set points in it, begin point end points.
It has filters to allow you to do things like reverse things.
If you want to hear what sounds like backwards, you can go and flip it around and listen to it for yourself.
I've used it a lot personally.
It has a built-in filter for removing noise.
I've used it to take some old cassette recordings I have with scratchy records and play those.
Remove noise with it.
That's a pretty good job of cleaning it up.
I love it.
I think it's a great program.
Multimedia.
In player, of course, is one of the options.
I don't know as much about it because I don't use it myself.
I did install it here.
There's a nice gentleman who has put together a package called MPUI,
that bundles M Player, which M Player itself is not a graphical program,
but it has a couple of runners for front-ends and he's included both of those in there.
One is called SM Player.
The other is called MPUI.
They give you a nice clean user interfaces.
You can kind of take your pick, choose whichever one you like the best.
The one that I use a lot is VLC.
Now, VLC is kind of ugly to look at.
It is skinnable so you can go in and make it look pretty much however you want.
That takes a little bit of knowledge to do.
The thing that is cool about VLC is it plays everything.
It plays corrected video files frequently.
I've had files that I could not get to play anything else.
VLC is a problem.
There's no big deal.
Awesome program.
It'll play your DVDs.
It plays DIVX.
It plays every audio format and video format you can imagine.
Just incredible.
You just don't have to fight for it.
Exactly.
Yeah.
For example, you're using Windows Media Player and you hit DIVX file.
Well, it starts trying to find a codec for it, which it may or may not be able to find.
VLAN doesn't need any codecs.
Just play it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's definitely one of my favorites.
I use it because I like to rip my DVDs to my hard drive and then watch my DVD movies to trick it off my hard drive.
It saves you a lot of battery life.
You're not running your DVD drive.
You get a lot more battery life out of your computer that way.
That's a personal thing.
I'm probably not supposed to say that because that's probably illegal.
I put Super on here and then after I thought to realize that I should have graded out or probably not included it at all.
I'll mention it because you may find it useful.
Super is a tool that you can use to convert VOS from one format to another.
Super uses open-source software.
Super itself is a closed proprietary front end.
You can't even distribute it according to their rules.
I can't give you a copy of it.
It's a real pain in the butt to get off of their website because they give you two bazillion pages about how super super is.
Somewhere in there you'll find a link that you think is the download but that just takes you to another page of how super super is.
It should be grayed out.
Sorry.
A.V.I.D. Max.
I'm guessing that this is probably a really core program on Linux.
It's really close to Chrome on Windows.
At least my experience with it.
If it is for video, what adaptability is for audio.
Just give you your video a nice clean timeline.
You can drag along.
You can pick your start point to end point to copy paste.
Cut up bits and pieces out.
The only problem I had with it is that it was really easy to edit my video.
I couldn't just easily save my video and then have something that I could watch afterward.
Save the video out and it would just play garbage for sound and freeze on one frame.
I imagine that if somebody was more determined they could probably take the time and figure out how to make it work.
That, of course, doesn't meet my requirements that it works without having to dig or pry.
Now, being said, VLC will play the problem even though nobody else will.
If you want to use it and plan on only ever using VLC, reach that.
I throw a media center up here as a category because it's really an up and coming thing that people are starting to do with their computers.
None of the candidates are quite where I think they should be to be on the list.
But there are some really, really cool ones.
First of all, it was more of a mirror.
It really shouldn't be here.
It was classified as media center.
It really probably belongs in media player more.
It's a unique media player and that it caters to online web media.
It does a really good job of pulling web TV kind of stuff down.
So it's pretty cool, but I don't think it should really be in the same class as these others.
Media portal is incredibly cool.
Well, let me start with Alisa just because I think that media portal is probably the next jump up after that.
Alisa has a nice clean, crisp interface.
I didn't have any problems getting installed on my computer.
It really qualifies in virtually every sense other than I found that there were a lot of video formats that it wouldn't play.
So if you're using it for video or picture slide shows and for music, it's probably playing sufficient.
Media portal, everything about what was there, the install was easy, played pretty much any format right throughout it.
The nice thing about it is that it's easy to extend.
You can actually, without much knowledge, get into it and tell it well, I would like to use VLC to be my video player, please, and it will happily do that.
And it doesn't take a lot of work to do that.
Cross interface, skinable interface, ties into TV.
You can get your, if you have a capture card, you can take advantage of TV to do your recording to get your TV guide.
You can set it to give weather information so you can have that as your online screen when you're not using it.
Why are different skins to choose from, to change the way it looks?
The only problem I had, and this may be because of particular video cards, so it may work well for you.
I'd give it a try.
The videos, when I would play them, would tend to break apart or delineate, desaturate, split into multiple tiles.
That could just be a video card issue, so it may really be there.
Another cool feature about it is that it can add FTP directories as part of its repository.
So you can set up, if you've got a NAS on your network, you can actually say, well, when you use this NAS, just FTP to hear and find my files there.
So that's really cool.
I mentioned Linux MCE, too, although it doesn't really qualify because it doesn't run on Windows, first of all, and it's not easy to set up, secondly.
But from a Windows add the external points, if you want to spend a little money, or your company called FIRE that makes an entire range of products based on Linux MCE that will control your house, control your security system, turn your lights on and off, cook your toast for you, as well as do all the media kind of stuff that you expect a media center to do.
So I mentioned just in case they have more money than time and want to dig into it, and it's pretty reasonably priced, really.
When you look at Windows Media Center and what it does compared to what Linux MCE will do for you, the rule price is pretty reasonable.
I hope I don't get in trouble for advertising.
It's totally a risk, just to bring up a few more.
Finance, that's a big one for a lot of people, quick and money.
New cash, total cash, grocery.
The first two are actually more quick books than quick.
New cash, however, does a wonderful job of importing from quick and, and the first time you run it, it will run a tutorial to help you learn how to use it.
So it's really not that bad to get into.
It's not going to be like quick and, but, you know, a pretty good job of holding your hand.
Grizzby's a lot closer to quick and, it doesn't look the same, just works at the same level.
It comes from Europe, so it comes up in Europe by default, watch out for that.
I am pigeon, everybody that uses I am ought to be doing pigeon, because it does everything, all from one system.
You can access your aim, your Google Talk, your ICQ, IRQ, whatever you want, it's right there.
Security, now this is an area where the Windows folks who are at this advantage, because they don't have these things.
But it's definitely worth introducing them to you.
How many people have more than 20 passwords left to keep track of?
User names and passwords accounts.
More than 30.
More than 40.
More than 50.
More than 100.
Can you imagine if every single one of those people have followed the Microsoft bus practice,
requiring you to change that password every 90 days?
I mean, you have to come up with a new password every three days.
And then try to remember, forget it.
Keypaths is a wonderful little password store.
It allows you to organize your passwords however you want, through an explorer-like interface,
store your username, your password, URL, you can put your credit card pins, whatever you want, into a credit program.
You ought to introduce your Windows friends to love you for it.
GPG for a win.
Cryptography, again, is something that the Windows people aren't really familiar with.
GPG for win makes it pretty easy for them to encrypt and decrypt files to send via email.
The package GPG for win, if you download, includes a mail client called clause, which they may or may not like.
If they do like it, it's nice because the encryption is all transparent then.
True Crypt allows you to actually encrypt an entire hard drive or create a file on your hard drive that looks like it itself is a drive.
Again, really easy use, transparent, wonderful program.
Eraser, so we're going faster because I think I'm running out of time.
Eraser allows you to shred files rather than just deleting it.
It actually goes through and writes where the file was using some sort of DOD wipe to completely eliminate it.
It does the DOD, it will do, I think it does a 23 pass, it's capable of doing.
You have a, you can select which one it uses, but I believe it does a good one.
It will do up to the...
So yeah, your friends ought to know about it.
Another one I would recommend introducing them to if they ever need to sell their computer is DBAN.
DBAN is not Windows, it's Linux, but it's included on the list because it is really easy to use.
You bring on a CD, you stick it in your computer, you boot up your computer.
You go through a very simple, clean interface to wipe your hard drive.
It will do a DOD wipe, it will do the Guteman wipe and shred your entire drive.
Now, not a good thing to tell about as a prank because it will write their drive out.
But your friends ought to know about it if they ever need to sell a computer.
Make sure they have this so they can write the drive before they pass it on to somebody who might go looking for old credit card numbers or social security numbers.
A couple more, seven zip, every computer just ought to have it installed, I think.
Windows obviously has the built-in functionality for a zip.
Seven zip does basically the same thing, other than it gives you a little bit more flexibility and power.
And seven zip does it for more than just zip files, for your RAW, LZH, and other compression schemes.
Another one that I find kind of cool that is a great way to just sort of get your Windows addict hooked is Winderstatt.
It just gives an easy way to see how the space on their drive is being used.
You can see which folders are taking up the most space.
What kind of files are taking up the most space?
It gives you sort of a graphical representation there to try to give you a more cleaner idea of, oh gosh, man.
All systems taken up by applications were applications.
So it's a nice little program.
I actually used free lines to deal out of my research on this program.
It's the first time I've ever used note-taking software, I loved it.
It's really easy to use.
You can do a whole thing from the keyboard very crisply without feeling like you're having to think about it.
You can just navigate up and down inside of the trees, enter to add another line.
Very slick, easy program to use to allow you to do brainstorming, thought mapping, kind of things.
Talking more real fast, if you've got kids you ought to introduce in the text paint.
Text paint is so much cooler than Microsoft paint.
Text paint has music.
Text paint has all kinds of cool brushes for doing all kinds of fun things with.
Text paint has stamps.
What do you do with that with Microsoft paint?
Your kids will have a blast with text paint.
A couple others.
Portable apps.
I've actually installed on my hard drive that's made to be a start on a thumb drive.
With this and start on your thumb drive, you have open office, pigeon, sumatra, king pass, and your packet.
You over at your friend's house you need to work on an open office document and he's a jerk and won't let you install open office.
No problem.
Pop in portable apps and where you go.
It's essential to carry your computer with you.
Other interesting things to mention.
It wouldn't be fair to do an open source presentation about packing at least a little bit about Linux.
There are ways for an addicts to appreciate Linux.
First of all, you've got live CDs, not picks a green tooth and make it really easy to wrap the CD and play around a little bit and see what it does.
The other possibility, similar to open apps, there are portable versions of Linux.
Can we view puppy and DSL or two variants that you can find?
Runs off a thumb drive, you stick it in, you double click on an icon or window pops up and it boots up Linux inside of a virtual machine.
PBL is another one.
It's found at pendrivelinux.com.
Makes it pretty easy to find.
It's a good way to play around with Linux without having to mess up your Windows computer if you're worried about that.
I'll describe and leave this slide up.
This is a list of sites that I used for some of my research for this presentation, actually.
The first sites are great place to look for particular applications.
I need an application that's kind of like this.
They bring various categories either identifying by, well, here's a Windows program.
Here's some open source equivalents.
Here's a category of application.
Here's some open source programs that might meet that category.
Pretty well listed.
Some of them have good reviews to help you select what fits you best.
Pendrivelinux, I mentioned a good place to find information about running Linux off of the USB stick.
This one I threw on here just because I really think the media portal is cool.
This gives a nice how-to.
Might help overcome some of the issues that I ran into just doing a blind install.
We're taking a look at that.
And then of course I added fire.com there just because, you know, I do a shameless plug for a company.
I know nothing about that has a little core product.
Now, I severely underestimated the number of people who would be interested in this cross.
I did burn some CDs.
I've got about a half a dozen that include the applications that I did for this presentation.
There's someone here that I didn't do in the presentation.
There's a couple of games, a few things.
There's a few things that I had to leave off because I ran out of space.
I've got about a half a dozen discs here and about another half a dozen blank discs that if somebody wants to help make some copies we can,
or if somebody wants to just grab this CD and copy it to their laptop or whatever,
but you're welcome to grab a copy if you're interested.
Questions?
Okay.
And I was not the best of luck in overcoming your addiction.
And thanks for your time.
Thank you for listening to Haftler Public Radio.
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