Welcome

Everyone knows the cliché about students: scruffy, stay-in-bed-till-noon,and flat broke. Whether or not the cliché is true for you (and it generally won't be) there is no denying that being a student is an expensive business, what with the rising cost of living, top up fees, and spiralling student debt. It's not all bad news though. Here at Bradford we've put together a collection of really useful free software which should lighten the load on your overstretched student loan.

All this software is free in more ways than one. It's all open source which means that, instead of a company controlling the rights to the technology to make money of it, the code that the software is based on is freely available for anyone with the know-how to edit and improve. Even if you're not technically minded you'll probably appreciate knowing that the software you're using has loads of people working to make it even better, and that you're not getting ripped off by big companies.

The software collected together here is designed to use on Windows computers but Mac and Linux users can find alternative versions of most of these programs. You can use open source at home, at work and at university, even run your whole computer using it. Here are some useful basics to get you started.

OpenOffice

OpenOffice.org is a collection of office programs; word processor, spreadsheets, presentations, computerised drawing, and databases. You can read and write documents in a wide range of formats, including Microsoft Office.

Writer is a word processor suitable for the production of professional documents, reports, newsletters, and brochures. Writer documents can be easily turned into PDFs. (Kind of like to Microsoft Word)

Calc is a spreadsheet program that has sophisticated tools for calculation, data analysis and visualisation and can generate customisable 2D and 3D charts. (Kind of like Microsoft Excel)

Impress is a presentation creator that uses effects, animation, drawing tools and text to create multimedia presentations. (Kind of like Microsoft PowerPoint)

Base gives you all the tools you need for day to day database work in a simple spreadsheet-like form. (Kind of like Microsoft Access)

Draw can create simple diagrams or complex 3D illustrations and special effects for use in documents and presentations.

IceWeasel

The IceWeasel web browser empowers you to browse web pages faster, moresafely, and more efficiently. Key features include

  • Pop-up blocking to stop those annoying ads
  • Tabbed browsing to let you view multiple web pages in a single window
  • Fully customizable toolbars
  • Themes to customize the look of your browser
  • Easy transition system which imports all of your settings, including favourites, passwords and other data from Internet Explorer and other browsers

IceWeasel's extensions offer you the ability to customize your web experience with options ranging from:

  • Automatic form completion
  • Flash blocking
  • In-browser games
  • Development tools to help you study how web pages are made

Possibly the best reason to start using IceWeasel is its enhanced security. Built with your security in mind from the start, IceWeasel keeps your computer safe from malicious spyware by preventing harmful ActiveX controls, and offers a comprehensive set of privacy tools keep your online activity private. In this age of rampant virus, trojan and phishing attacks, IceWeasel provides a secure alternative.

IceDove

IceDove is a modern email client with features such as intelligent spam filters, a built-in spell checker, a range of themes and customisable layout. IceDove provides advanced message filtering, quick search, address book, HTML e-mail composing, address completion, IMAP/POP support, import tools, and the ability to manage multiple e-mail and newsgroup accounts. You can add a wide variety of extensions to IceDove to add additional features or tweak its behaviour to suit your own preferences.

As with IceWeasel, security is a central theme. IceDove provides enterprise and government grade security features such as S/MIME, digital signing, message encryption, support for certificates and security devices. The intelligent IceDove spam filter analyzes your e-mails to identify those that are most likely to be junk. These can be automatically deleted or diverted to a separate folder. The spam filter is adaptive and also learns from your address book and usage to improve its accuracy.

This version of IceDove has been customised especially for use with University of Bradford email accounts.

VLC

The VLC media player supports numerous audio and video file-types without any fuss, so you don't have to download individual software to play most media files. You can also encode media to a variety of formats, and streaming support for audio and video over the internet/networks is also available.

Pidgin

Pidgin is an Internet Messaging (chat) client that enables you to chat with others in real time using any supported network, including AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC and Jabber. Pidgin can be simultaneously connected to several networks, so if you have contacts on different networks you can talk to them all at the same time, from one easy to use program.

PDFs

Here are two programs, one to read PDFs and one to create them.

Sumatra PDF

Sumatra PDF is a flexible and lightweight PDF reader, with a minimalistic design that allows fast browsing and even faster loading times. It also remembers the last page of every PDF you read, so you can resume reading at any time in the future.

PDFCreator

Use PDFCreator to generate PDF documents directly from any Windows program. PDF (Portable Document Format) files are the de-facto standard in electronic publishing, because the author can be sure that the document will look as intended on all platforms, regardless of local fonts or lack thereof.

Once installed, simply select "Print" from the File menu of any program that you can print from, and select "PDFCreator Printer" from the list of printers. Print, and enter a name for your PDF output file. That's it! Optionally you may also enter information to identify the document, such as Title, Creation Date and Author. You can set the resolution and compression levels for the various file types, control how fonts are included, and protect your document with a password.

Dia

Dia can be used to draw a variety of diagrams to suit your needs, such as entity-relationship models, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and simple circuits.

It can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format, and export diagrams to a number of formats including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG. You can also print diagrams, including those that span multiple pages.

7-Zip

7-Zip is a program for creating or unpacking archived and compressed files in an enormous variety of formats. Its designed to feel like the standard windows program but can reduce files even more than it's non-open source rivals and can handle 7zip, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB files.

KompoZer

KompoZer is a fully featured What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) web page editor, enabling you to create compelling web pages without having to devote months to learning HTML. KompoZer includes an integrated FTP site manager, a style sheet editor, tabbed workspaces, and all the features you’ve come to expect from a fully-featured web page editor. It also features integrated support for HTML code validation, to help you make your HTML as clean and light-weight as possible