Free Software
From Steal This Wiki
As we are fighting to break free from corpgov, we should be freeing our computer systems from huge corporate giants like Microsoft and Adobe as well. Linux and BSD are free as in, "Take one; you can have it for no price," but much more importantly it is free as in liberty do with it as you see fit. The fact that the code is open to review makes it more secure as anyone catching a security bug can update or notify the project. This makes for our favorite operating systems and accompanying software to be capable of being very secure against hacking, viruses, and exploitation remotely or locally.
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Linux
A good way to start off is to play around with a Live CD, where you boot straight from the disk instead of the hard drive. Once you get used to it and can tell that your computer parts all work with the distro and version you want, and after you've backed up the things you need on your hard drive, install it. It feels very liberating to wipe Microsoft off of your disk but it might be useful to have for some programs. You can either keep it on a different partition on your hard drive, or use a program like QEMU or VirtualBox to emulate Windows within Linux.
- QEMU - http://bellard.org/qemu/
- VirtualBox - http://www.virtualbox.org/
Ubuntu
Ubuntu is considered by many to be the easiest Linux distribution to use, with lots of tutorials available to get anything working like it should. You can download the CD and burn it yourself or have them sent to you for free, usually within a month. (http://www.ubuntu.com/)
Ubuntu now has a very excellent windows installer which does away with the need to burn a installation disk and will create an Ubuntu install alongside your windows installation until such time as you want to wipe windows for good.
As far as preparing yourself; try going down the open source software and firefox/online document/email route as far as you feel comfortable then when you swap you will hardly notice the difference!
Backtrack
Test your knowledge of networks and systems with this Linux distribution designed specifically for penetration testers and hackers. With over 300 tools designed for offensive security, this distro is any hacker's dream come true. The only downside is the lack of easily accessible live CD's. Remote-Exploit, the makers of Backtrack, offer both a CD and USB version of their distro, but there are no endorsed distributors. It is most useful in case your forget your admin password to someone else's computer. (http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack.html)
Staying on Windows
If you have to use Windows, use free and open source software as much as possible. Here's a list of a few free alternatives to proprietary software. Most are open-source, which is an added benefit. Many of these programs are also available for Linux and Mac as well.
Mozilla
Mozilla, the creators of the original Mozilla web browser produce excellent (and free!) open source programs. The following is a list of most of their creations, which can be downloaded at http://www.mozilla.org/ .
Firefox
- Arguably the most well known open source program around, Firefox is one of the fastest, most lightweight web browsers available. It is almost infinitely extensible with over thousands of plug-ins and themes.
Minimo
- Minimo is a web browser for mobile devices such as cell phones and pda's.
SeaMonkey
- SeaMonkey is an All-In-One internet application suite with Web-browser, advanced e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, web development tools and an HTML editor.
Sunbird
- Sunbird is the Mozilla calendar application. It lets you easily manage upcoming events and obligations.
Thunderbird
- Thunderbird is an easy to use e-mail application, rss reader, and Usenet newsgroup reader. It has a huge number of plugins, like all Mozilla apps, one of which adds on calendar abilities to Thunderbird.
OpenOffice.org/NeoOffice
OpenOffice.org is a productivity suite meant to replace Microsoft Office. It supports all Microsoft Office filetypes (.pps, .xls, .doc, etc.) and allows you to save your documents in open-source alternatives (.odt, .ods, .odp, etc.). It's a great alternative to M$ Office, and is easy to use.
NeoOffice is an offshoot of OpenOffice.org designed specifically for Macintosh OS X.
The GIMP
GIMP or GNU Image Manipulation Program is basically the open source version of Adobe Photoshop. It has many of the same features as Photoshop and other popular image editing tools. These features include: Color support, selection and masking tools, paths, effects, scripts, and filters. One of the advantages over Photoshop is that GIMP does not take up the whole computer screen while you use it, all its windows can be shrunk down to make them more manageable. Also there are many communities and forums for GIMP users. These communities give tutorials and allow artists to communicate and display their art on the internet.
Scribus
Scribus is a document creating software similar to Adobe PageMaker and Adobe InDesign. It allows you to create PDF files and allows you to manipulate your documents much better than in Microsoft Word. It features many different fonts and allows you to insert images and text. Full tutorials are available online for free.
Audacity
Audacity is a free-to-download software that allows you to record sound on your computer. You are able to choose between your computer's direct input, microphone input, phoneline, and stereo mix. Not only is Audacity good for recording your own music (as it allows an unlimited number of tracks per file [however, adding too many tracks slows down the program and makes it glitch-y]), the stereo-mix record function allows you to record whatever is playing through your speakers. This means that you can easily rip music from live-stream web-radio, music players, Purevolume, MySpace, etc.
It comes with some basic built in studio effects, like a hard-to-control reverb and delay patch, a quality fader function, phaser, flange, tempo/pitch controls, right v. left pan control, and volume control.
The interface is very basic and easy to use, and allows you to manually affect and change any bit of any track you're working with.
VLC
VLC is a media player that supports almost all multimedia formats. It also allows you to easily create a music stream, which offers a great way to start up a Pirate Radio station!
Pidgin
Originally called Gaim, Pidgin is an instant messaging client that is compatible with many of the mainstream clients (AIM, MSN, etc.). This allows you to have all of your messaging accounts available in one program. Pidgin is easy to use, and open-source as well.
SUPER
SUPER (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer) is a Windows freeware program that can convert almost any audio or video format into any other, including I-pod format, mp3, mobile phone video, DVD format, and many more. It's free for unlimited use, and very simple to use.
Games
Frets On Fire
- Frets on Fire is an open source clone of the Guitar Hero games for the computer. To play you hold your keyboard like it is a Keytar, using keys F1-F5 as the frets and pressing enter to strum. The game features three songs by Finnish guitarist Tommi Inkilä, a tutorial, three levels of difficulty, a song editor which allows you to create tracks for other songs, and competition against other users online. Another feature is the ability to download different themes and songs for Frets on Fire off of fan communities and forums.
Tremulous
- Tremulous is a free and open source first person shooter game. It is multi-player and can run on almost any computer. The game has two teams, humans, using traditional weapons, and the much more original aliens. It is a 100mb download, and installed takes up exactly 99mb. This makes it incredibly portable, as well as being very fun and addicting!
Bittorrent
The bittorrent protocol allows for easy downloading of large files as well as aiding you with the dissemination of your own stuff. Using torrents, you can find anything (free!) from the latest movies and games to applications and operating systems. The bittorrent protocol uses your upstream bandwith to reshare as you are downloading.
uTorrent
One of the best torrent clients available, this torrent manager is extremely lightweight and easy to use. It makes torrent creation very easy and torrent downloading even easier. It supports encryption (which is always a good thing!) and also lets you pick and choose which files in a torrent you want to download.
Vuze
One of the most popular torrent clients, Vuze, formerly called Azureus, lives up to its reputation. It's full-fledged, fun to use, and has a very refined look and feel. While many of its features are included in other torrent clients, Vuze has taken things and optimized their performance while maintaining an ease-of-use that works for anybody.
FrostWire
Frostwire is a free, open-source alternative (it's essentially a clone) of Limewire, a popular P2P client. It's on this list because it supports torrent files as well as allowing you to access a large P2P network. It supports encryption, which is very important when using a torrent client, and even more important for P2P clients.
- Warning: Be sure to use PeerGuardian 2 or similar block lists if you download unlicensed content through P2P networks. This may protect you from being contacted by known copyright license collection organizations that are known to use questionable legal intimidation tactics.
- PeerGuardian2: http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2
