Now some is spyware or just crippled commercial programs to try and make you buy the product, but there are some genuine gems out there. Searching for ‘Open Source’ rather than freeware is a good place to start. Here are some of my favourites, why not add yours?
Audacity.
If you ever have to edit sound or change formats, this is an excellent program.
Audacity
Subsonic.
This is amazing. Put your music files into a folder on your PC, install subsonic & it indexes them and makes them available to any PC on your network. If you have an always on internet connection you can access them from anywhere, it’s simple, feature rich and looks very professional. It even configures the ports on your router for incoming connections
You can have a look at mine if you like. Username, UKPS, Password UKPS (lower case)
http://dunford.subsonic.org
If my bandwidth gets clobbered too much I may have to remove this. No laughing at my esoteric music collection!
Subsonic
Apache
The biggest and best webserver. Run loads of sites using this.
Apache
Filezilla
People know this as an FTP client, but there is also an excellent server. Very easy to install & maintain. I use it to grab large files from my home server.
Filezilla
Linux
Having recently given away 200 odd PCs to staff, we could not give the licensed Microsoft software away. We installed Ubuntu with Open Office & I must say I was very impressed. If I did not have access to Microsoft software at (ahem) very low costs, I would have no hesitation about going down this route. Forget crunchy old command line interfaces, this is now a proper operating system.
Ubuntu
Just a start – what can you find?
Edited by phildunford, 01 February 2011 - 11:50 AM.