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Do you use any Open Source Software?
I use some, but not exclusively. I don't pretend that it's always better either. How has open software touched your computing life?
Tags: OSS
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by GamePlaya on -
Ubuntu. Its a nice OS. Not my main one because I use Vista Ultimate but it has helped me solve problems with other things though. I use gparted. I think I have Yellow Dog on my old PS3. Thats about it. I dont really pay attention to whether or not a software is open source or not. Those are just the ones I know of off the top of my head.
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Permalink Reply by Nathan Davies on -
I sometimes don't pay attention either, but I find it curious how it really touches everyone. I'm not a religious zealot with either, rather I'm intrigued by the mix now found.
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Permalink Reply by implying implications on -
firefox, gimp, openoffice, vlc
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Permalink Reply by Nathan Davies on
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Me as well, minus OpenOffice. I have to have my Word...
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Permalink Reply by Dean on -
I go to great lengths to avoid paying money for software. I used Linux for years, however it wasn't to save money but rather an exersize in learning and problem solving. After I was finally bored with it, I bought a Mac because I'd never actually used the platform. I found that not only is it hard to find a wealth of open source projects on the Mac, that freeware is hard to find as well. I still have everything I need and haven't paid for any software yet, though being a Linux geek for a long time helped and installing macports was one of the first things I did. Additionally, I recently came across a newer gentoo alt project that's currently supported on OS X and have it installed as well. It isn't as good as macports yet, however it picks up some things where macports leaves off. It can be found here for those that are interested. The biggest advantage I've found with it is that anything that uses a bash script as part of the package in macports is at risk of failing at runtime because the BSD ports and Linux ports of the same utilities don't always have the same command line options and macport developers don't always test this out. I have at least one program that I like a lot, that I was booting into Linux to use but was fixed when I installed portage on the mac and put it before macports in the PATH variable. Gentoo on mac is still immature though, so although I was excited when I found that it had been revived, it will be a long time before it replaces macports, if it doesn't die again.
I just remembered that I actually have a tarball of a fully completed bootstrap that was build without any custom compiler flags so it should generally work for people with intel machines. It's here. It just needs the path adjusted as it looks in the first two instructions on the page, except that I built at /opt/Gentoo rather that $HOME/Gentoo and the only other consideration is that there may be problems if you use bash in the terminal and it finds the Gentoo one. You can specify a path to the shell you want to use in terminal's preferances. I had a little trouble with this but I don't remember specifically what it was now. It could be that I had invalid aliases after telling terminal to use Gentoo's bash instead of the default behaviour of the app which sounds more likely.
Sorry for the ramble. I get excited about Gentoo. I don't know why, its a rather large pain to keep an up to date system at times if you run a full OS of it.
Backing up. I still prefer Mplayer over all other media players. I have VLC, OpenOffice, GIMP, audacity, AMSN, avidemux, I think most people are using Handbrake, Virtualbox which is mostly open source. I use a lot of open source command line tools like (and I some of these may have come with OS X but I still built them because I wanted the more familiar cli options given the differances, and have now forgot) aria2, wget, netcat, subversion... this is actually a hard question both with GUI apps and command line apps as its hard to remember. I went through my Applications folder but I'm sure I forgot something. While I was in there I noticed Platypus... which is rather cool. For those that aren't aware and are coming from a *nix OS where you could just create a launcher and give it a script, or make a script that ran at boot or whatnot, OS X is annoying in the respect that it'll let you do this, sort of, but you're stuck with a terminal opening on your screen and then not necisarily closing when everything executes. Platypus can put everything back behind the scenes by creating an application bundle and it'll do it for any scripting language.
I guess I've typed way too much. It does answer the question though.
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Permalink Reply by Nathan Davies on
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That's a good response. I find myself using more and more open source software now that I'm getting into embedded Linux development. I'm dying to get my hands on an iMac though.
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Permalink Reply by Zach on -
I usually look for an open source alternative to actually paying for software.
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Permalink Reply by jamesjimmy23 on -
I use NeoOffice. It works ok... I with it was a little better though, but I can't complain much since it's free. Soon I'm going to be getting another computer that my college lets you use that will have Office for Mac on it which will be nicer for college stuff.
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Permalink Reply by Nathan Davies on
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I'm not really familiar with Neo. How does it compare to OpenOffice?
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Permalink Reply by Nathan Davies on
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I would imagine it is considering I use every service they offer. Just thought you might be able to elaborate on how well it works compared to OpenOffice.
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Permalink Reply by jamesjimmy23 on
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It's more like an optimized version of OpenOffice for Mac OS X. I think it's interface is better than OpenOffice. It has all of the same features of OpenOffice though.
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