I come across friends & family who are forking out big bucks for everyday software like anti-virus, Office, spyware, photo editing, etc. They do so, not because they like to spend the money but because they have no idea that there are excellent, free, open source alternatives available. Today. Right now.

I have nothing against paying for excellent software or services that provide value. But, if there is a quality free alternative for your everyday needs why not save that money you would have spent for a better product/equipment that you wouldn’t have been able to afford before?

In fact, one of the most popular (all time number 3 .. if you looked at the footer) posts here has been about Free Software for your Computer. I should update that post soon with my new finds.

I recently wrote in a guest post at Techie-Buzz about a very cool project called WinLibre. WinLibre was a project where they put together some of the best in breed open source software available for free into one downloadable package.

A reader (thanks MechMike) quickly pointed out that WinLibre hasn’t been updated in a while and told me about the OpenDisk project. Here is an excerpt from their About page which summarizes this cool project!

OpenDisc is a high quality collection of open source software (OSS) for the Microsoft Windows operating system.

The two main goals of the project are:

• To provide a free alternative to costly software, with equal or often better quality equivalents to proprietary, shareware or freeware software for Microsoft Windows.
• To educate users of Linux as an operating system for home, business and educational use.

OpenDisc project gathers some of the best free & open source software out there into one easily downloadable CD image. They also list the programs in the cd image with description and link to the individual software home page if you’d like to get them A la carte.

Here are the list of programs that are included in the OpenDesc project categorized by its function:

Design

• Blender - a 3D graphics modeling program
• Dia - a Visio like drawing program
• The Gimp - Adobe Photoshop alternative
• InkScape - Adobe Illustrator alternative
• Nvu - WYSIWIG Web page editor
• Srcibus - A professional desktop publishing program
• Tux Paint - Free drawing program for young children

Games

• The Battle of Wesnoth - Turn-based strategy game
• Enigma - A puzzle game
• Neverball - A fun game where you tilt the floor to get the ball in a puzzle
• Sokoban YASC - Yet Another Sokoban Clone

Internet

• Azureus - A cool bit-torrent client
• Filezilla - FTP client
• Firefox - An excellent Internet Explorer alternative
• Httrack - Offline web browser utility
• Pidgin - Multi-protocol IM client
• RSSOWL - A Feed reader client
• Seamonkey - Web browser, IRC client, newsgroup client and HTML editor in one
• Thunderbird - A modern email client
• TightVNC - A remote control software
• WinSCP - Full featured SFTP client

Multimedia

• Audacity - Sound editing program
• Celestia - Simulation of entire universe
• Really Slick Screensavers - Collection of some cool screensavers
• Stellarium - Planetarium in your computer
• Sumatra PDF - Lightweight alternative for Adobe Reader
• VLC Player - Media player supporting numerous audio & video formats

Productivity

• GnuCash - QuickBooks alternative
• MoinMoin Wiki Engine - A wiki building software
• NotePad2 - Windows Notepad alternative - with syntax highlighting and other features
• OpenOffice - Full featured alternative for Microsoft Office
• PDFCreator - Generate PDF documents from any Windows program with the Print button

Utilities

• 7-zip - Packing & unpacking archives tool with support for a lot of formats
• Abakt - A backup tool
• ClamWin - Powerful anti-virus program (misses an on-access scanner - so it can’t replace a full time scanner yet)
• GTK+ - Toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces
• HealthMonitor - System monitoring tool
• TrueCrypt - Powerful encryption software to protect your private data
• WorkRave - Protect yourself from Repetitive Strain Injury

Whew.. isn’t that an excellent collection of free software? There are a few in here like InkScape & WorkRave I haven’t tried yet.

Download OpenDisc iso image | bit-torrent

OpenDisc uses a K-Meleon interface in the cd image so far and is experimenting with a Kiwix interface that’s supposed to be leaner and better for the next release.

Also, OpenDisc has a pretty active forum if you have questions about any of these or if you’d like to see something included to this list. I have downloaded OpenDisc and I am going to make copies and give it to friends who have an open mind about trying new things. I am sure some of them are going to chase me away but hey it’s worth a try, isn’t it?

If you feel like I am preaching to the choir, I would love to hear about a (more the merrier) open source software that’s not on this list but that you feel should be.

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

Today marks the Vernal Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere and Autumnal Equinox in the Southern Hemisphere. In layman’s terms, the Sun will cross exactly over the Earth’s equator today. This will mean that the night and day will be about the same length all over the world!

Now on to the main intent of this post. We have been seeing a lot of action lately with Firefox. Firefox 3 Beta 5 seems to be slated for release on Mar 27. While we await the release of Firefox 3, lets look at a few awesome extensions.

• FirefoxView - If you use IE and Firefox together for reasons like some websites just don’t work on Firefox but would still like to open your links in Internet Explorer in Firefox, this extension adds context menu option in IE. Earlier, I showed you how you can open a link in IE in whatever browser you have set as default. This one works well if Firefox is your default browser. (Thanks HitMeWithIt)
• Vertigo - If you have a widescreen monitor, you will love the extra few vertical pixels you can gain by having the tabs vertically in the side. It doesn’t seem to work well with the combination of Tree Style Tabs featured in last week’s picks but it could be some other add-on messing with it too.
• Prism for Firefox 3 - When we start using Firefox 3 (if you haven’t already), we can split web applications right from within Firefox 3 with a simple click with this handy extension. You can read my Mozilla Prism review and how I use it as a GTalk alternative for Linux/Mac.
• Wesabe Uploader - If you use the excellent personal finance tool, Wesabe, you’ll appreciate this Firefox uploader that works in Windows, mac & Linux. You can add accounts and use this extension to automatically update your account trabsactions in Wesabe. It provides a cool desktop sidebar dasboard to view your recent account balances, transactions, charts, etc in a quick glance. After a recent over-draft charge, I have gone back to using Wesabe & Mint side by side to keep a tight handle on my finances.
• Microsoft Activities for Firefox - Microsoft Activities is one of the much touted features in the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 release. It is similar to Operator extenion in Firefox with a bunch of differences. Read this post to get some more information on it. [Download version 0.3 here]
• WebSlices in Firefox - Another IE 8 feature that lets you see a custom tiny version of a website you are interested in and stay updated. This is now available in Firefox via this Firefox extension.

What is the world coming to? We are seeing Firefox extensions for features coming in Internet Explorer! I am not looking to start a flame war. But, if Firefox made Microsoft get up and start making its browser better after years of lethargy, I am all for it.

We are the winners, in this case.

It’s no secret GTalk client is for Windows only. Linux and Mac users have so far sought out other IM alternatives thanks to GTalk using Jabber protocol for their IM client. I use openSuSE 10.3 as my primary desktop and have had trouble getting some of the excellent IM clients like Pidgin to work behind a proxy.

Thanks to GChat in Gmail, I have been able to use IM even if it has to be within Gmail. I even used a Greasemonkey script for Gmail 2.0 to alert me with the tab flashing when there is a new IM. However, I did find this a little annoying to keep going back to Gmail to check on IM messages. Because, everytime I go into Gmail to see IM messages, I would also end up checking my Inbox and before I know 20-30 minutes would have vanished. This kind of goes against my goal of trying to increase productivity with all these web apps and hacks.

So, I started to run Google Talk gadget in my browser sidebar with a browser bookmarklet. This freed me up from using GChat in Gmail to GTalk in my browser sidebar.

You’d think I’d be content at this point. Not.

Run Google Talk (GTalk) gadget with Mozilla Prism

Mozilla Prism released their 0.9 version last week and I am smitten by the usefulness of it. If you haven’t heard of it, check out my Mozilla Prism review. In that post, I also show how you can run it from behind a proxy at work or school. Since it’s a beta version and a work in progress, they don’t have a straightforward setting for proxy in it’s options yet.

If you don’t want to click over, Prism is a prototype from Mozilla Labs which lets you split your web applications from the web and run it in your desktop as a standalone application. They even allow separate profiles for each Prism app which means you can have multiple Gmail accounts open in different Prism web apps in your desktop.

I have taken this idea and created a Prism web app for the Google Talk gadget and now I have a GTalk client like app running standalone in my desktop!

Here’s how you do it:

1. Install Mozilla Prism - Windows, Mac & Linux installers (v0.9 at the time of writing)
2. Create a new web app with url https://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/client
3. Give it a name and choose to save it on desktop
4. You are done!

If you are a Mac or a Linux user, you can now run GTalk standalone in your computer with Mozilla Prism. If you are already using Firefox 3, with this Prism Firefox extension you can just open this url (or any other web app) in Firefox 3 and then directly create a desktop application for GTalk right from your browser.

I see that Prism has an option to install extensions. It doesn’t look like it’ll accept Firefox extensions as it complains that they are not compatible. I even tried turning off compatibility checking but didn’t have much success. I would love to hear if someone has succeeded installing extensions with Prism as that would open up a whole new world of options to these Prism web apps. I am sure it will be obvious in the coming releases. But, I want to make it work today!

GTalk makes it the fourth web app I run in my Linux desktop with Prism after Gmail, Google Reader and Remember the Milk.

What other web application do you see yourself running on your desktop with Mozilla Prism?

Firefox 3 beta 4 was released recently and some of you voiced that you’d rather wait until Firefox 3 was released as a stable version. I am going to tempt you again to try it.

There is a portable version of Firefox 3 Beta 4 now available for download that you can try risk-free along with your Firefox 2 install. However, see here if you’d like to install Firefox 3 simultaneously with Firefox 2.

I love portable applications that I can carry around in my usb drive and this is my latest addition to my favorite portable apps.

Download Firefox 3 Beta 4 Portable

[via Lifehacker]

Elliott Spitzer, the New York state Governor, resigns after getting caught in a prostitution ring. Every news outlet is repeating how he spent $80,000 on hookers. How about we take a break from that and look at some cool Firefox extensions?

• Bookmark Previews: Have you seen the CoverFlow in Apple products? It’s where the album covers gets neatly stacked with the one of interest in the front and the others waiting to be scrolled? Now, you can get the same effect for Firefox bookmarks with this extension. [via CyberNet News]
• FireVox: It is an open-source and freely available talking browser extension. It is like a screenreader designed especially for Firefox and can be very useful for the visually impaired as well as web developers who test their pages for accessibility.
• Tree-style Tab: As the name implies this extension can list tabs in a tree style showing you in the order they were opened and the pages they originated from. Check out the options to customize this powerful little extension to your needs. If you constantly find yourself having 15-20 tabs open and have no idea where you got them from, wait to thank me until you have tried this.
• gTranslate: Just select on the text and right click and choose the language you want to translate the text to. As simple as that. Check the add-on page for languages supported. [via Brown Thoughts]
• Multi-Sidebar: I have been showing you how to open Google Talk gadget, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Remember the Milk, etc in your browser sidebar. But, wouldn’t it be nice you could open these sidebars simultaneously say at different sides of the browser. For eg. Google Talk in the right and the Google Calendar to the left? This extension lets you do that as well as remembers the position next time you open the sidebar. Very neat and I love it!
• Better YouTube: Lifehacker has put together some cool Greasemonkey scripts for YouTube together into a Firefox extension. They have recently added the simple URL hack to view YouTube videos in high resolution to this extension as an option you can turn on.

We saw the release of Firefox 3 beta 4 this week. I love the speed improvements it brings and waiting for some of my favorite extensions to become compatible with it. It’s cool that they offering free t-shirts to the Firefox extension developers to make their Firefox add-ons compatible with Firefox 3.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s list. Do you like sushi? Wait until you see tomorrow’s post.

Mozilla Prism is an open source initiative from Mozilla Labs which attempts to bring web applications from the browser to run directly from your desktop. In Mozilla’s words,

Prism is an open source cross-platform prototype of functionality that lets users split web applications out of the browser and run them directly on the desktop.

Web applications like Gmail, Google Reader, etc. are more and more mimicking the functionality we have gotten used to in desktop applications such as right click contxt menu, drag and drop interface, etc. But, you still need to fire up a browser, go to the website and login to use the web application. It does give you the flexibility to access from anywhere with a browser but takes a bit of time if you are using a desktop day in and day out to go through all these steps to get to your favorite web applications.

Mozilla Prism attempts to bridge that gap and splits the web application from the browser and lets you run a web application like Gmail straight from your desktop. It helps web applications act like desktop applications with the benefit of being on the web without the web application developer having to do anything to offer that to an user, you.

Prism is cross-platform and is availble for Windows, Linux and Mac. You will have the option of having a location bar, status bar or the location bar in the web application window. I just include the status bar alone to see the links when I am hovering and hide the other 2 to maximize my screen real estate.

New Features in Prism 0.9

Prism 0.9 was just released last week with some major updates and new features. A few of those are:

• Simpler installation and desktop integration capabilities
• Browser integration with Firefox 3 through an extension Prism for Firefox 3. This extension lets you split a web application you are on directly out of Firefox without installing and maintaining Prism as a separate application. You will get a ‘Convert Website to Application’ option in the Tools menu with this extension.
• Ability to pick an icon to represent the desktop application (or pick it from the web by default)
• Run each webapp in its own profile - in other words, you can have 2 desktop Gmail webapps for 2 accounts simultaneously (link to old post)

If you’d like to learn more about it, check out the Mozilla Prism Wiki. Here is a screenshot of creating a web application for my favorite online task manager.

Running Prism from behind a Proxy

At work, I was first unable to run it from behind our proxy and found a helpful tip in Ubuntu forums on how to do this. Here is what I did to get Prism working from behind the proxy. This involves editing a all.js file in the Prism installation.

1. Open the <install-directory>/prism/xulrunner/greprefs.js in your favorite editor
2. Find and edit this line from:
   pref(”network.proxy.type”, 5);
   to
   pref(”network.proxy.type”, 1);
3. Then add your proxy information in the following lines: (enter your own ip & port there)
   pref(”network.proxy.http”, “127.0.0.10″);
   pref(”network.proxy.http_port”, 80);
   pref(”network.proxy.ssl”, “127.0.0.10″);
   pref(”network.proxy.ssl_port”, 443);
4. That’s it!

I am already running my favorite web apps like Gmail, Google Reader, Remember the Milk via Prism from my desktop. One downside right now is that I am missing my Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail & Google Reader. But, with Prism being built on Mozilla’s platform, I wonder if there will support for Firefox extensions. If I find out how or if it’s even possible, I will write another post soon.

Also, I am yet to see how it affects cpu & memory usage by running multiple Prism applications. Although I am getting rather spoiled with our new addition of 2GB memory to our Windows XP desktop making it a 3GB RAM! Firefox can consume a gig of ram as fas as I am concerned and I can test even more extensions to share with you without affecting it’s performance.

Firefox 3 is one more step closer to its final release with Firefox 3 Beta 4 now available for download.

Here is a gist of new features in this release:

• Better search support in the download manager and the ability to zoom entire page or full text.
• Better integration with Vista, Linux and Mac
• Better personalization with the address bar history based on site visit recency and frequency
• Improved support for data storage for web applications
• Comes with better performance than before with improvements to the javascript engine which helps with loading time as well as memory usage.

If you don’t like browsers crashing on you in the middle of your day, Firefox 3 final release should be coming out in a few weeks. This is for you if you can’t wait to see what’s coming in the new version and if you haven’t already tried the Firefox 3 Beta 3 release.

In fact, they say this is a milestone release aimed at developers and testers for testing purpose only. Please do read all the bugs and features in this release before downloading it.

Download Firefox 3 Beta 4