Office or Open Office? This is the matter.

A necessity for every computer user is probably a software which he can use for typing emails and papers, making slideshows and managing tables and organizing information in several ways to be easier to understand. Such a software is for windows and is very good and popular and it’s Microsoft Office. But if there is an application for windows, I’m %99.9 sure that you can find an open source replacement for it. There is an Open source replacement for Microsoft Office and it’s called Open Office.

It’s free, open source and very lighter than Microsoft Office. You can download it for free from it’s website (openoffice.org). It’s downloads are for Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris. It has any office program you need. One of it’s most useful features that Microsoft Office doesn’t have is to save as PDF (It can be used easily and it’s command can be find in the file menu without using any extensions. Please note that it had this feature before Microsoft Office 2007 was published).

After all I wrote in this article I’m sure you can guess that today’s suggestion would be to replace Microsoft Office with Open Office.

An introduction to linux

After first electronic computers were built, each of them had it's own language so if you wanted to write a program to run on one of them, then you had to completely rewrite your program to run it on another. In the bell labs, the experts wanted to make it simple. They made a new programming language which was called C to write a program which could be placed between program and computer so that a program that was written for that software could run on many systems. They wrote this program (which is called Operating System) and chose the name Unix for it. Unix was very powerful and also useful so it was popular for many years. It was first open source, which meant that every one had full access to it's source code. After a few years, they made it non-open source. That was why some new operating systems were written based on it (like Minix). But this it not what I want to mention in this post.
Minix and Unix were both based on Posix standard. Minix was mainly written for use in universities and also for educational use. Linus Torvalds saw that Unix is a bit complicated for home and desktop use so he started to write an operating system which had the advantages of Unix but was also open source and was easier to use. It wasn't in fact a complete operating system. Torvalds wrote the Kernel (The main part of the operating system which operates with hardware. It doesn't have a user interface so it needs to have one to work. Kernel and UI make a simple operating system.) of the operating system. It was named Linux. It was completed with the software written for GNU project, So it's complete name is GNU/Linux. It was first completed in 1991.
Linux is very better and improved since 1991. Different publishes of Linux with different software are known as Distributions or Distros. Linux now has hundreds of distros. You can see a list of registered distros in linux.org website. This variation of distros means that you can find something that completely fits your needs.

About picture : Ubuntu is one of popular and powerful distros of linux.

I'll write more about linux history, development and distros in next posts.

Today's Suggestion - Replace Windows with One of Linux distros.

Introduction

There are a lot of opensource software today, and there are also a lot of non-opensource software. Most of the opensource ones are as good as their non-opensource similar software, and some of them are even very very better. In this blog, you can find useful information about opensource software and their usage and important tips about them. You can also learn about most popular linux distros and replacement of non-opensource software with their opensource similars.

Today's suggestion - Replace Internet Explorer with Mozilla Firefox.