Sunday, July 31, 2005

OpenCD -- Free Programs for Windows

OK, some of you would rather not follow all the notes I've left on Working With Fedora Core, and prefer to stick with Windows. I understand that. However, there are ways to make your Windows computer run better and cheaper. To help you out with that, the OpenCD project makes a bunch of Open Source programs available for Windows on a single CD. There are a large number of open source programs, including Firefox, Thunderbird (email), OpenOffice.org (Word Processing, Spreadsheets, etc.), games, screen savers, and more.

Plus, if you just pop the CD in the drive and reboot your computer, you get a LiveCD version of Ubuntu Linux ("Linux for Human Beings") to give you an idea of how Linux looks.

The programs are great, I really like Celestia, which is a space simulation which lets you look at the Universe from any vantage point in the Universe. But on my generic Dell computer, Ubuntu came up with a 640x480 screen, so the graphics were not good, and there was not option to change it. A better CD for playing around with Linux is probably Knoppix, which doesn't have trouble detecting my graphics card and giving me a properly sized screen.

But ignore that, and download or order the OpenCD disk. Or just download the programs you want.

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