Great Free Software Hunt 20 September 2005 at 4:11PM edited 30 November -1 at 1:00AM in Freebies (no spend required) 143 replies 60.1K views

MSE_Martin

What's it all about?

The virtual free equivalent of Microsoft Office and other graphics programs can be had for free. It's what's called open source software. This is because often the developing community, much like MoneySavers, like to hunt as a pack and work on constantly improving software rather than being locked into the rigid constrains of commercial software.

So I'm starting a Great Hunt for the best and I'm putting my own suggestion, Open Office to start with.

Other site users' recommendations:


Opera
Firefox
Picasa
Nvu
paint.net
Serif

bytie_bit

http://www.filehippo.com/ all the main ones what you need........ :A

mike_paterson

http://sourceforge.net/index.php is the source of pretty much all open source software.

mike_paterson

http://www.snapfiles.com lists loads of freeware and shareware as does http://www.tucows.com

bytie_bit

My second best site is http://www.majorgeeks.com :A

--_Adam_--_2

Just a couple of my personal favourites:

GIMP - Nice graphics program equivalent to Paint Shop Pro/Photoshop

Resize-O-Matic - Does exactly what it says on the tin - allows you to resize one or more images from your right-click menu

VLC - great media player

WinSCP - SFTP and SCP client

Adam

sertav

Audacity --> Digital Audio Editor

http://audacity.sourceforge.net

oldrimes

My favourite is freemind - a mind mapping tool.

More details and can download it from here:
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

rgcoleman

www.download.com is an immense collection of commercial, shareware and freeware software titles.

doing an advanced search allows you to choose only the freeware items

wealthsaver

Thanks for the thread Martin.

See part of FAQ copyright by Rick Moen of linuxmafia.com

Wordperfect can be obtained for Linux some mirrors listed here.
http://linuxmafia.com/wpfaq/downloadwp8.html

He also writes about available proprietary and opensource office applications for linux here: http://linuxmafia.com/wpfaq/future.html

As well as Office applications it is possible to get downloads for open source operating systems and free to use for non-business purposes software.

eg
Tucows downloads for freeware, shareware and commercial.
http://Tucows.com

Free Linux distributions:
https://www.slackware.com
https://www.debian.org

Software Porting and Archive centre for HP-UX (HP Unix)
http://hpux.connect.org.uk/

Sun Solaris V10 - Free download.
http://www.sun.com/download/index.jsp

Sun Software, Information and Technology Exchange (Sun SITE) program.
One of its goals - Provide easy, global access to free software and tools
ftp://sunsite.org.uk/package

cashless_2

There is a great selection of quality Open Source software for everyone available from:

http://theopencd.sunsite.dk/

The idea is that you download a special file that allows you to burn a CD with all the software for sharing. Of course you can just download and install individual pieces of software if you like. Software is specially chosen for its reliability and common appeal.

The CD is frequently updated, so the software varies slightly on each version.

A great starting point for Open Source and free alternatives to commercial software.