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Give Open-source Apps a Whirl With Click2Try

Samuel Dean — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:00:08 +0000

As IDC recently reported, business adoption of free, open-source software is rapidly on the rise. It’s also true that many open-source applications are being launched as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) appls, free to try online, where you often don’t need to download or install anything. Recently, on the OStatic blog, we covered a site called Click2Try, where you can immediately try out many open-source applications and Linux distributions online by running them in a virtual environment. I’ve been using the site, and it’s a really easy (and eye-opening) way to dive into useful applications before deciding to download and install them on my own machine.

Click2Try offers several categories of free applications and platforms, all available via the links down the left-hand side of the home page. There are several types of business software, office/productivity applications, web development tools and more. As long as you have a supported browser and an updated version of Java 1.6, following a brief wait for a virtual machine to load, you should be able to jump right into applications that you want to try without having to install anything on your own machine. Currently Click2Try supports Internet Explorer 6 & 7, Safari 3, and Firefox 3 and 3.5, and you can run it on Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS X or Linux.

Among the many business applications that Click2Try offers, you may want to try dotProject or Gantt Project for project management. You can also try Knowledge Tree’s widely used document management platform, or the OWL document repository. There are quite a few other categories of business applications, including e-commerce, accounting, human resources, CRM/ERP and groupware.

Although Linux distributions have become much more graphical and easy to use in recent years, I still find that some people on Windows and Mac OS X shy away from them because they perceive them to be “technical” and difficult. One of the nicest features of Click2Try is you can try multiple Linux environments without going through the hassle of downloading and installing them. You can try OpenSUSE, CentOS or the ever-popular Ubuntu.

Click2Try isn’t the only site that allows you to dive into popular free, open-source applications and environments. I’ve written about OpenSourceCMS before, which allows you to “play” administrator of many popular content management systems, such as Drupal and Joomla. If you’re looking to start a site or blog, it’s an excellent way to investigate platform software before you jump in.

Have you discovered any interesting open source apps through sites like Click2Try?

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Google Chrome Alpha Available for Mac & Linux

Simon Mackie — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:00:08 +0000

Google yesterday made “developer channel releases” (alpha versions) of my current favorite browser, Chrome, available for Mac and Linux. Beware — these releases are not suitable for day-to-day browsing, as they are likely to be unstable and lacking features. The Chromium blog even posts the warning, “[P]lease DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.” Issues include an inability to print, set the default search engine or alter the privacy settings. However, if you just want to play with Google’s blazingly fast browser and get a taste of what your Windows-owning friends have been raving about for the past few months, go ahead and try it out.

The Mac developer release is available to download here, while the Linux version is available here (requires Ubuntu 8.04 or Debian 5 or later. You’ll need to select the correct build depending on whether you have a 32- or 64-bit system).

Let us know what you think of Chrome for Mac/Linux in the comments.

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GKrellM Lets You Customize System Monitoring Tasks

Samuel Dean — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 23:00:54 +0000

I regularly install and try lots of free, open source software applications. One of my better recent finds is a customizable system monitor utility called GKrellM. Like many open source applications, its name is puzzling, but it is a useful and very customizable way to monitor processes and components on Mac, Windows and Linux systems. Lifehacker and MakeUseOf originally alerted me to the large ecosystem of plugins that you can use to customize GKrellM, which made me want to try it.

GKrellM started life as a Linux application, but you’ll find download options for the Mac and Windows at the bottom of this page. When installing on Windows, you’ll see the application’s Linux roots at work in a list of files that represent components in the application, similar to how package components are listed for Linux applications. You actually just need to download the program’s installer .EXE file, though, and it will take care of the whole setup.

The application presents you with a stack of separately monitored processes and components on your computer. It offers all the essential system monitoring applets, including a CPU monitor, a disk monitor, an Internet monitor that displays TCP port connections, file system meters, a memory meter, and much more. The memory meter, for example, could be particularly useful for people working on netbooks or other systems with limited hardware resources.

GKrellM is most differentiated from other system monitors, though, by its plugins. There are many really creative examples to be found on the plugins page. You can get a plugin for periodically updating your desktop wallpaper, including a timer that will execute the next change. There are also plugins for showing the time in multiple timezones, and an organizer plug-in for tracking to-do list items. Just as open source applications such as Firefox get their appeal from useful collections of extensions, GKrellM benefits from a user community that contributes free plugins.

GKrellM sits on your desktop as it monitors processes, but it is a polite application. You can shut it down at any time by right-clicking on it and selecting “Quit.” It’s worth a try, especially if you’re working with limited system resources.

What’s your favorite GKrellM plugin?

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6 Free, Open Source Resources for Web Workers

Samuel Dean — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:00:39 +0000

Over on the OStatic blog we’ve rounded up 25 resources for free, open source applications, tutorials, and more. Some of the citations are previous roundups themselves, so there are quite a lot of free tools to be found there. In these economic times, open source software applications are faring well, and some tools may especially appeal to web workers.

From the collection posted, here are six resources that may appeal to you, and you can find out more on them in the original post.

Video playback and encoding are increasingly being used on cutting-edge sites and blogs, and there are a lot of good open source tools in this area, as discussed here. For Mac users, Simple Theora Encoder is a particularly easy-to-use video encoding tool–a favorite among several of the OStatic writers.

Two of the shortcomings that open source applications often have are minimal documentation and support. Especially when it comes to popular applications, though, the open source community does a good job of posting free tutorials for useful applications. You can find 16 of them here for GIMP (graphics), OpenOffice, virtually every Linux distribution, and more.

For Mac users, Mac Libre remains an unparalleled way to get a bushel of free, open source applications in one download. The download is fast and light enough that you can even store all the applications on a USB thumb drive. Editors choose the applications, which include Gaim Portable (instant messaging), OpenOffice.org Portable (office suite), Mozilla Sunbird–Portable Edition (calendars and tasks).

Most web developers are already pretty savvy about the many free tools–many of them open source–that are available to them. There are some lesser-used tools, though. Kompozer is a huge favorite with developers who are into CSS (cascading style sheets). Kompozer’s rendering engine uses Gecko, the same layout engine in Mozilla’s Firefox. It stands out for its very easy-to-use CSS editor, and strong WYSIWYG features.

Mozilla has recently updated its Thunderbird e-mail engine, which is a good adjunct to webmail. One of the strengths of Thunderbird is the galaxy of useful add-ons that are available for it (similar to Firefox extensions). Here you’ll find many top-notch add-on examples.

Are you looking to buy a netbook? These inexpensive, lightweight portable computers aren’t for everybody, but they’re currently outselling the iPhone. Here are some thoughts and a collection of links that you may find useful.

You can find much more of these resources, and lots of free, useful software, in the OStatic roundup.

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Watercooler Clips: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude

Liz Shannon Miller — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:22 +0000

Need a quick break from the grind? WWD sister site NewTeeVee Station brings you Watercooler Clips, a selection from our collection of what’s good, interesting and/or of note in the online video world — whatever the web is talking about at the virtual watercooler.

Today, we offer The Website is Down‘s dramatization of that most epic of clashes — the sales guy versus the web dude. Told from the perspective of the Web Guy’s monitor, this breakdown of office relations will seem all too familiar to those on either side of the screen.

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