I find people often spend unnecessary amounts of time and money either paying for expensive software or trying to obtain said software by illegal means when there are in fact plenty of free solutions out there. The Yahoo! front page recently ran an article on good free software. I agreed with some things on the list but not all. Here's my list of non-intrusive, well-made free software:

• Adobe Reader - PDF document viewer
• Audacity - Audio recording
• AVG Free Edition - Antivirus software (think free Norton/Symantec/McAfee)
• CDBurnerXP - CD/DVD burning (think free Nero)
• Daemon Tools - CD/DVD emulation for mounting ISO images
• DVD Fab HD Decrypter - Rip any DVD directly to an ISO image
• Microsoft Virtual PC - Virtualization for Windows virtual machines
• Microsoft Visual Studio Express - Microsoft SQL Server Express and other tools
• Microsoft Windows Defender - Antispyware software
• Mozilla Firefox - Web browser
• MySQL - Database server
• OpenOffice.org - Office suite (think free Microsoft Office)
• PHP - Server-side scripting support
• PrimoPDF - PDF document generator (think free Adobe Acrobat)
• PSPad Editor - Lightweight IDE (what I work in at Yahoo!)
• QuickTime and iTunes - Movie trailers, music, etc.
• Shareaza - File sharing
• SmartCVS - CVS client
• Ubuntu - Easy-to-use and good-looking version of the Linux operating system (think Mac OS X for PC…sort of)
• VMWare Server - Virtualization for Linux virtual machines
• WinRAR - Handler for RAR, ISO, etc. packages
• WinSCP - FTP/SCP client

Have had some time to use Ubuntu now and still really like it. It includes the OpenOffice.org suite and Gedit, which makes a good lightweight IDE (I prefer lightweight editors to heavy IDEs). Before I could ever think about switching to Ubuntu for good though, I needed to be able to add three items to the default installation:

(1) Chinese language input
(2) Sharing network resources with other PCs running Microsoft Windows
(3) Apache web server with PHP and MySQL

Ubuntu is built on Debian, and Debian makes it easy to add packages. Here is a list of packages I installed (along with their dependencies):

• scim
• samba
• winbind
• apache2
• mysql-server
• mysql-query-browser
• mysql-admin
• php5
• php5-mysql
• phpmyadmin

The following resources also came in handy:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SCIM
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SettingUpSamba
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP

(1) SCIM is the multiple language input tool for Ubuntu. I was able to install the package, add the necessary Chinese input methods, and then follow some steps in the documentation above to make SCIM the default input method for all applications.

(2) Installed Samba to allow for resource sharing between Ubuntu and peers running Microsoft Windows. This required some use of the console to add Samba users. Also installed Winbind so that I can ping Windows machines by hostname from Ubuntu and vice versa.

(3) Installed the regular packages for Apache 2, PHP 5, and MySQL 5 along with the PHP-MySQL connector and the MySQL Administrator and Query Browser GUI tools and phpMyAdmin for managing MySQL. The only real change I had to make after installation was to set the root password for MySQL according to the steps in the documentation.

Recently I tried out the following free virtualization packages:

- Microsoft Virtual Server 2005
- Microsoft Virtual PC 2007
- VMware Server

with the following free Linux distributions:

- Debian
- Fedora
- Ubuntu

The Microsoft virtualization packages technically support only Microsoft operating systems, but supposedly they can run Linux too. I didn't have any success with booting a Linux installation on either product though and didn't feel like messing with it if it wasn't straightforward. VMware Server is free, straightforward, and ran all the Linux distributions I tried with no problems. It's a great product.

Once VMware Server was running, I tried installing Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu to compare a couple Linux distributions. Debian alone isn't easy enough to use for my taste. Fedora is pretty bulky and the setup disc alone was a 2.8GB download. Ubuntu was my favorite by far. It's built on Debian and defaults to the Gnome GUI. It looks great and was easy to install and configure. Ubuntu Linux is a great free alternative to anyone wanting to avoid the cost of Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X.

Here's a tool I found useful a few years ago. Was going to delete it off my computer because I don't really need it anymore but then thought it might be helpful if it was made available to the English-speaking world. Basically, in Taiwan the situation is that there are lots of services only available to people with a Taiwan ID number. One would think that the number on an Alien Resident Certificate would work but it doesn't in lots of situations. This tool uses the Taiwan government's algorithm to generate a working ID number based on your gender and which county you are from in Taiwan.

身分證字號產生器