Free Software

Sick of MSN Messenger and Yahoo Chat? There is a free chat alternative called Jabber, and it works with all of your friends that are on Gmail!

Here is a tutorial on how to chat for free with Jabber:

ActiveCollab used to be a free project management and collaborative software that was a great alternative to services like Basecamp and Goplan. ActiveCollab is no longer open-source. There is a new alternative though.

The resources below will help students and teachers (or anyone) load up their computers with all the legally free software needed for school. There are free replacements available for Photoshop, Illustrator, Microsoft Office, and many other commercial programs.

There are three lists of free software below:

1. Free Software for Windows
2. Free Software for Mac OS X
3. Free Software for Linux

Many people have probably experienced this problem — you are at work and want to use your favorite programs, but you don't have the admin access that you need to install software.

There is a way to run software on Windows without needing to install anything. It's the perfect solution for restrictive work environments and public Internet cafes.

Xara Xtreme is a vector graphics program that until recently was only available for Windows. There is now a version of Xara Xtreme for Linux that has been released under the GNU GPL. It's still only in version 0.7, but I've just downloaded it and installed in on Ubuntu Dapper and it works great.

Here is a screenshot of Xara Xtreme LX on Ubuntu 6.06:

If you are a Microsoft Windows user, check out a web site called OpenSourceWindows.org. It has a great list of many free programs that you can download.

There are free programs for Web browsing, instant messenging, email, rss, podcasting, filesharing, media playing, word processing, photo editing, ftp, personal finance, 3D graphics creation, games, and much more.

An even more comprehensive list of Free open source software for Windows can be found at osswin.sourceforge.net.

Also check out the Best 46 Free Utilities web page for more free software.

PHP-based Photo Gallery Software

Gallery

Gallery is the classic free PHP photo album program for web sites. If you don't have a database on your server you can use Gallery 1. Gallery version 2 requires a database. The Gallery web site has a full list of requirements. Gallery can also be integrated into several content management systems, including Drupal.

There are many ways to save web pages and web sites for offline viewing. These methods will work on Linux, Windows and/or Mac OS X. These tools will save entire web pages and web sites. If you are looking for a way to take screenshots, try this page instead.

If you use Linux and are looking for a good desktop feed reader for GNOME, try Liferea. RSS (or Atom) is a great way to keep track of when web sites are updated.

If you are using KDE, a good desktop feed reader is Akregator.

There are many good CSS editors for Linux. Basically, all you really need is a text editor that will perform syntax highlighting on CSS files. Some of the programs below are just simple text editors, while some offer additional features.