Free Software
So this weekend, I restored one of my laptops to the factory defaults, i.e. ran the drive restore utilities to get Windows XP back to its happy, mostly-clutter-free, initial state. Rather than go and reinstall all those old, mostly pirated, Microsoft and Macromedia software cds, I decided I would try and see how far I could get my machine set up to be equally as useful, 'legally', and instead installed free and open-source software only.
First off, I got a copy of md5 command line utility from Fourmilab -- most of the free/open-source software is hosted on server mirrors and I want to make sure I don't download something which might have trojans or other things which might make my happy fresh installation a sad panda.
Instead of Microsoft Office, which is a bloated waste of space, I opted for an install of the OpenOffice.org suite. It managed to handle my MS Office documents no problem, including some powerpoints which I had to look at on Sunday. The light-weight-ness of OpenOffice makes it more pleasant to use, and in general it was trivial to find any needed equivalent MS Office functions. So bye-bye to MS Office-- good riddins.
I installed MySQL for my database engine, mostly because it's the free db engine I'm the most familiar with. I will probably try out other systems as the months go by, especially for Java projects, since there may be other engines which make better sense in the context of making Juju's installation hassle-free for end-users who don't want to have to worry about setting up a database engine just to run or try one program.
Since MySQL is just a back-end, I needed a good front-end client to do all my database setup and administration etc, so I am using Aqua Data Studio 4.0 which is just fantastic. It also supports many other database back-ends, so it makes a nice alternative to MS SQL's Enterprise Manager if you're just doing table creates/alters/selects etc. It supports all the other big guys like Oracle and Sybase and DB2 too. PostgreSQL is in there as well, and it will do generic JDBC/ODBC connections in addition to native support for the DBs listed.
Now that I'm doing more JSP, I went and put Apache/Jakarta/Tomcat on there for JSP development, which is hella less problematic of a setup than Apache/PHP was. No config files, just install and go. Nice :-) I installed the Java Development Kit (JDK). I decided to not install the bundle with NetBeans, Sun's IDE, mostly because it's kind of slow and tries to do a little too much out of the box.
So now I need a Java/JSP IDE, and I decided to install both jEdit and Eclipse Eclipse is a bit heavy and a little overwhelming, but I'm warming up to it. jEdit is much leaner and better suited to quick editing and testing, but of course it's java-centric whereas Eclipse is really universal or getting there.
Since I hate the AIM, MSN, and Yahoo! IM clients, and as much as I think Trillian is kick-ass in most respects, I decided to go with a more lightweight mulit-IM client called Miranda IM. It will let you connect to any/all of your IM accounts in one program, and it doesn't waste a lot of memory or diskspace. It doesn't have "Emoticon" support, which frankly, I'm quite okay with, mostly because it makes it easier to IM bits of code back and forth, since I don't have to worry about smileys eating all of my colons.
Last, but not least, of course, I got Firefox on there. Obviously this isn't just because it's free, but certainly I didn't install Opera. That should be enough said about browsers. If you're still using Internet Explorer then, well, I doubt you even read this far!
So that's the free software round-up for now. The best part about switching to this free software, is that most of it is cross-platform, which means I'll be using the same stuff whether I switch to Linux, Solaris, or Mac! Now that's freedom :-) w00t
First off, I got a copy of md5 command line utility from Fourmilab -- most of the free/open-source software is hosted on server mirrors and I want to make sure I don't download something which might have trojans or other things which might make my happy fresh installation a sad panda.
Instead of Microsoft Office, which is a bloated waste of space, I opted for an install of the OpenOffice.org suite. It managed to handle my MS Office documents no problem, including some powerpoints which I had to look at on Sunday. The light-weight-ness of OpenOffice makes it more pleasant to use, and in general it was trivial to find any needed equivalent MS Office functions. So bye-bye to MS Office-- good riddins.
I installed MySQL for my database engine, mostly because it's the free db engine I'm the most familiar with. I will probably try out other systems as the months go by, especially for Java projects, since there may be other engines which make better sense in the context of making Juju's installation hassle-free for end-users who don't want to have to worry about setting up a database engine just to run or try one program.
Since MySQL is just a back-end, I needed a good front-end client to do all my database setup and administration etc, so I am using Aqua Data Studio 4.0 which is just fantastic. It also supports many other database back-ends, so it makes a nice alternative to MS SQL's Enterprise Manager if you're just doing table creates/alters/selects etc. It supports all the other big guys like Oracle and Sybase and DB2 too. PostgreSQL is in there as well, and it will do generic JDBC/ODBC connections in addition to native support for the DBs listed.
Now that I'm doing more JSP, I went and put Apache/Jakarta/Tomcat on there for JSP development, which is hella less problematic of a setup than Apache/PHP was. No config files, just install and go. Nice :-) I installed the Java Development Kit (JDK). I decided to not install the bundle with NetBeans, Sun's IDE, mostly because it's kind of slow and tries to do a little too much out of the box.
So now I need a Java/JSP IDE, and I decided to install both jEdit and Eclipse Eclipse is a bit heavy and a little overwhelming, but I'm warming up to it. jEdit is much leaner and better suited to quick editing and testing, but of course it's java-centric whereas Eclipse is really universal or getting there.
Since I hate the AIM, MSN, and Yahoo! IM clients, and as much as I think Trillian is kick-ass in most respects, I decided to go with a more lightweight mulit-IM client called Miranda IM. It will let you connect to any/all of your IM accounts in one program, and it doesn't waste a lot of memory or diskspace. It doesn't have "Emoticon" support, which frankly, I'm quite okay with, mostly because it makes it easier to IM bits of code back and forth, since I don't have to worry about smileys eating all of my colons.
Last, but not least, of course, I got Firefox on there. Obviously this isn't just because it's free, but certainly I didn't install Opera. That should be enough said about browsers. If you're still using Internet Explorer then, well, I doubt you even read this far!
So that's the free software round-up for now. The best part about switching to this free software, is that most of it is cross-platform, which means I'll be using the same stuff whether I switch to Linux, Solaris, or Mac! Now that's freedom :-) w00t