Introduction of Some Useful Free Software Cheng-Han Du

Outline  General Use  Entertainment  Science  Development

General Use  OpenOffice It is almost the same as Micro$oft Office. Many functions work similarly. The only downside is its compatibility with M$ PowerPoint. You can install OpenOffice in M$ Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

General Use  FireFox Originally, it is called “ Mozilla ”. The one which can completely beat M$ Internet Explorer. Much better security comparing with IE. Lots of available plug-ins to enhance user experience. You can install OpenOffice in M$ Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

General Use  Pidgin A software that allows you to access MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, ….

General Use  GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) A graphics editor which is much more robust than M$ painter. Its usage is more complicating. However, it can handle advanced functions if you know how to use it.

General Use  Dia A useful tool draw diagrams such as flow charts.

Entertainment  Foobar2000 A music player with clean and simple user interface. Interface can be fully-customized. Some functions can be used for better audio quality. Great number of media formats support.

Entertainment  Amarok A music player in KDE Linux environment. It provides a iTune-like user interface. You can listen to web broadcasting.

Entertainment  SMPlayer A popular media player in Linux. Before watching some videos such as RealMedia, Windows Media Video, or AVI, obtain the codecs first.

Science  Octave A free software to perform calculation. It can handle most of MATLAB programs. Gnuplot is required for drawing figures.

Science  Gnuplot A package which can help you with numerical plots. It can handle 2D and 3D plots. Many aspects of the plots can be customized.

Science  R-Project A robust tools for statistical computing. Instead of simple figure-drawing software, it can support statistics-relating problems. Harder to learn since it is generally used in command-line mode.

Development  GCC Originally called “ GNU C Compiler, ” now it is “ GNU Compiler Collection ” If you want to learn C programming, you should use GCC. (Visual Studio S**ks!!)

Development  Python A programming language of growing popularity. Simpler code and more dynamic. Some commercial software requires it to work properly. Many other programming language and can be integrated with Python (Ruby, Perl, Tcl).

Development  OpenGL An open-source graphic library to efficiently handle 2D and 3D object imaging. For better visualization experience in Linux, OpenGL is essential. OpenGL is prerequisite for 3D scientific data rendering.

Is That All?  There are too many useful free software to be discussed in this class.  In fact, several free packages are quite easier to use compared with some commercial software.  Try them out!!