YHGfL - Making the most of your broadband
Free Software for Your Schools
Generally speaking we all expect to have to pay for the software we put on our computers. But there is an enormous amount of software available for free*!!
There are some excellent products out there and the YHGfL Foundation is going to be testing and reviewing them regularly and posting the results on these pages.
Read on...
* Free software is usually released under the GNU or GPL licence - please see this web site for more information.
Juice Reciever
Want to listen to internet audio programs (podcasts), music and shows but can't when they are scheduled? Juice is for you.
Juice lets users select and download shows and music and play whenever they want on their iPods, portable digital media players, or computers automatically.
Click here to download Juicer.
Audacity
This Is the free programme we use to create audio podcasts on your PC
To download the Audacity main programme click here
To export the audio as a MP3’s you will need to download and install the LAME MP3 software. Details on how to do this are available on the audacity help page.
The GIMP photo editing suite
- The GNU Image Manipulation Program
The GIMP, short for The GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a graphics package comparable to Photoshop or PaintShop Pro. Normally associated with Linux, it is also available for Windows...
It has fully featured pallets and developers have produces hundreds of 'plugins' which can be installed to give special effects and easy graphic manipulation.
Click here to visit the GIMP web site.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR INSTALLING: Assuming you want to install GIMP on Windows, you will need to download two packages, a GTK+2 package and GIMP itself. It would also be a good idea to downlaod and install the documentation too! All of these packages can be found here.
PDF Creator from Sector7g
- PDF Creator from Sector7g
You've probably read plenty of PDF (Portable Document File) documents, but have you ever actually created one? It's quite easy. PDF Creator from Sector7g allows you to easily create PDF documents from programs such as Word. You simply write your document as normal, and when you choose to print it, instead of selecting your normal printer, select 'print to PDF'.
Click Here to go to the Sector 7g homepage
FireFox - a web browser
- The Firefox web browser
FireFox - probably the best browser in the world! It is solely a web browser - but so much more. It is fast and reliable. It conforms to all of the web standards and can intrigate Flash and Java applications easily. It allows for tab'ed browsing, has a pop up blocker, it's skin-able...
Like its big brother, it can be skinned to suit your tastes and is a firm favourite in the 'open source' community!
Click Here to find out more.
OpenOffice
- The Open Office suite of office tools
Open Office is officially called OpenOffice.org. It has stemmed from the commercially available Star Office. In fact it is maintained on an unofficial basis by the same developers as Star Office and is supported by Sun Microsystems.
OpenOffice.org is easy to install and is just about as powerful as MS Office. In fact you can open MS Office documents and spreadsheets in Open Office and if you want to you can use it to save your documents in the same format as MS Office - how cool is that !!
For full details on what there is on offer here, visit their web site.
With the kind permission of PC Pro Magazine, we are able to bring you two great articles on OpenOffice, one comparing it against other Office suites, and the other describing how two businesses fared by switching over to OpenOffice!
Thunderbird Email Client
The write up on the home page of Thunderbird says it all;
"Thunderbird is Mozilla's next generation e-mail client. Thunderbird makes emailing safer, faster, and easier than ever before with the industry's best implementations of features such as intelligent spam filters, a built-in spell checker, extension support, and much more."
Thunderbird is an excellent email package and is this webmaster's favourite by far!!
7 Zip, a file compression utility
7 Zip is a file compression utility. It is an alternative to the better known WinZip. It does, however, have a lot of advantages over its rivals. It has a better compression ratio (meaning the zipped files it produces are smaller), it can handle a wider range of files and it is VERY easy to use.
You can still use it to handle your existing '.zip' files, so it is fully compatible with all of your existing files.
Another great feature is the ability to zip files up into lots of smaller files. This means that if you had a single large data file of say 1GB and you wanted to back it up onto CD, you could create a lot of 50MB files with 7Zip and burn them across two CDs.
Visit there web site for all the details
Syn Text Editor, a rather fancy editor
Syn Text Editor is ideal for those who are giving computer programming a try. It has excellent syntax highlighting, and has support for a wide range of programming languages.
The Syn Website has all the details about what it does and has some great screenshots which will give you a good idea of what it is and what it can do.