Use Open Source

I think I do lot of criticism in my blogs - thought of writing something new.

I would like to share with you my little knowledge about the world of open source. I should also mention thanks to my couligue Chetan Verma and Great friends Ketan Deshpande for introducing me to many of these programs

For those who want to know "What is open source?" - I will suggest them movie/documentary "Revolution OS".

Operating system -Linux
Thanks to Linus Torvalds for giving us truly free operating system.
I use - OpernSUSE 11.0, I think Fedor10 is also good (I have not tried this much)
Good thing about it - when I started working with OpenSUSE, I do not feel like working with XP. You can use every thing like -
- Internet
- auto detect camera
- auto detect USB
and other things which you generally need.
Takes me to next software

MPlayer
If you want to take total control while watching video like
- Change frame rate
- Adjust lag between sound and video
- give post process quality option
and feature like this then MPlayer is for you.
Though VLC is also good option I personally do not like VLC much.

GIMP -
GIMP - GNU Image manipulation program
Try this if you like to edit images (even if you don't like you will start liking it after playing with GIMP).

InkScape -
InkScape is program for creating SVG (scalable vector graphics). I personally like to play with InkScape- quite simple to use but very powerful. People with CAD background will find it quite easy. Good thing about SVG images is the quality remains same even if you scale it 100 times.

WinMerge -
Open source utility for solving merges. Earlier I was user of araxis - but I think win-merge is equally powerful. If you want to compare 3 files at a time then try KDiff3.

Emacs -
My favorite editor for coding. Customise it to suit you requirements.
Best thing is you can make it's background completely black - your eyes won't feel stressed even if you spend 10hours in front of computer coding in Emacs (I personally even use black background for Visual Studio 2005 - but the feel is not as good as emacs)

Dia -
Simple and useful software for creating flow-chart diagrams and network diagrams.

OpenOffice3.0 -
I agree this is not as great as Microsoft office, but this is free!! And you can create PDF just by clicking on one button.

Voilet UML Editor -
Simple and very useful for creating UML and class diagrams. If you want advanced features then you might need StartUML - I am happy with Voilet since this is easy to use and solves my needs.

GCC -
I have not learned this yet - but heard that this is good and powerful compiler.

Mozilla Firefox -
I have tried almost all web-browsers like - Internet explorer (worst), Safari (amazing), Opera (good) but Mozilla Firefox is "The good one". Just look for it's customization options - choose your favorite theme and enjoy.

Pidgin -
Do you want to use single application for numerous chatting accounts like - yahoo, Gtalk, ICQ and what not - use pidgin. You can login into all your accounts and see all contacts from single application window.

It is possible that I might have forgot to mention many other good open-source projects. If you want to know more, go to http://sourceforge.net/