Everyday Free Tools - Tech Stuff

Each and every day I use a set of tools, mostly free or open source ones that help me get through the day. I though I would list of a few of them for you so that you can give them a shot as well.

Home Computer

I have a Panasonic Toughbook laptop running Ubuntu 7.04 that I really haven’t modified too awful much because I like the look and feel of the OS as it is. Here’s a list of things that I use everyday or every so often to accomplish a task without spending any money.

Operating System – Ubuntu 7.04 – Stable, clean, easy to install, based on GNOME and very well supported by the community. I would say that the forums for Ubuntu are better than most and for some reason, the users of Ubuntu are much nicer than that of Red Hat and others.

Blogging – Blogger.com attached to my Gmail account (I do my own hosting)

Firewall – pfSense – I mentioned this a few post’s ago. I absolutely love this firewall.

Document Management – Google Doc’s and Spreadsheets – This one is really neat, you can upload your Microsoft Office Word and Excel files as well as OpenOffice equivalent documents up to Google, edit them, and even save off as PDF documents if need be.

Music – Pandora.com – This site has been around for a little while now, It allows you to basically make your own radio station, and it dynamically learns what music you want to listen to. A side spawn of this project is Squeezebox which allows you to turn your music library into a radio station with streaming music.

Chat – Gaim – It’s easy to use, installed by default on Ubuntu, and supports multiple accounts. On Linux and Windows you can use Pidgin and for Mac OS X you can use Adium.

VoIP – Twinkle – So far this is the best SIP capable client for Linux I have found. You can installed it through apt-get or Synaptic on Ubuntu or download it here. On Windows and Mac OS X I use X-Lite from CounterPath. I would say X-Lite is the best of the two but the Linux version sucks in my opinion.

PBX – trixbox – I just started using this because I’m trying to get my company or rather the company I work for into a new market so that we can make some more money as a company which personally helps me through profit sharing. Though, if I didn’t get that last bit, I would still peruse doing phone VoIP systems because I think they are interesting. I have it installed on an old PIII 500 with 256Mb of ram and it suits the needs of my wife an I just fine. A larger scale deployment would need a better server though.

Email – Gmail and Evolution – I just started using Evolution about a month ago because Outlook Web Access on Microsoft Exchange 2003 sucks when viewed from Firefox. Damn Microsoft. 🙂 Kidding. Evolution seemed to be a logical choice for me because well, it was already installed on my computer and quite frankly I needed a way to check my mail. Sounds like a match made in heaven. Gmail, as you all probably know, is free and has cool features like web sharable calendars, documents and photos. You will probably see a trend here for me liking everything Google.

I think that’s enough for now. I’ll make a part 2 to this one pretty soon with quite a few more added programs and services that I use everyday for free. Compute free or die.