Set yourself free! - II

Hello All, Thanks for the comments ( 2 here and 1 by mail ), I hope I would be able to come up with content worth reading by you. Getting on with my Setting Yourself free series, I bring you the second part of the journey I went towards freedom.

As I told, I started it with the removal of Windows XP. After this the foremost thing that was required was the development of belief that "Yes, freewares can do it for me", every now and then when you will not be able to get a freeware replacements of the softwares you love, or you wont just get the feel out of that, you will be tempted to divert away from this path, but believe me the situation is getting rosier for people like us - the freeware freaks. This step of making up my mind took a little longer then what I expected. SO dont worry, give yourself a lot of time, days, months or whatever, just keep in mind that you are on the right track. Yeas, 1 thing important here is that, in this period you are allowed to use the pay-me softwares ( or their pirated versions, the way you were, before setting on to the path ). And be prepared to face the teasers of those, who you have told that you are "setting yourself free" and then they tease you like "Oh! So whatever happened to your GOING FREE plan, is it over, huh??"

Then the next thing for me was going away from the pirated version of Norton Internet security or Kaspersky Antivirus ( two of the most preferred of the lot, trial version successfully cracked by the mates ) and then switching to a free antivirus, like AVG-Free or Avast! Home Edition, or go a step further, hug FOSS (??) and use Clamwin, and bear ( or enjoy ) with its features. I prefer Avast, just because of its small update size, and because of its boot-time scan that removed most of the malwares already there in my system. Believe me you have covered a considerable part of the journey just by doing that. Now you should keep it updated with a frequency of your comfort, and DONOT turn it off for whatever reasons.
One thing I would like to mention here is that Though I love using linux, but I am on a break. Yestersem, I realized that though i have used windows, but i dont know any thing about it, and then to gain some knowledge as well as to prove to myself that Windows can be piracy-free too, I am in Windows. Apologies to Mr. Linu(x/s) and to those who would like to see more linux stuff in a FOSS blog.

Set yourself free! - I

So here you are, listening a lot about FOSS, i.e. Free and Open Source Softwares, but the real practical process of going into the skin of this term is really unpleasant, if not impossible, and that too after so much ho-ho about the world being converted into FOSS-friendly. How many of us have ever thought of going completely independent of those pay-me-to-use-me softwares, which according to RMS (Richard M. Stallman, hey this name won me a prize when i identified his pic in a quiz at my college, thanks buddy!), are freedom-snatching. Personally I was moved by the thought of going free (not just in terms of money, as we, indians do take the term 'free' to mean, more often then never), I, as per my style, started to join this revolution by injecting myself into the bunch of people who are just freaked out by the amount of piracy they see around, and REALLY want to do something about it.

I started my journey by myself trying to remove each and every pirated bit around me, and I should admit, it is not yet possible, especially in India, where the comfort of using a software is at the highest amongst priorities, no matter what one has do for it, going for KEYGENs, CRACKs and all of the stuff that invites the machine to get a malware strong enough to overwhelmingly defeat, yet again, the pirated version of the personally favorite antivirus program. Well in the process, i faced a lot of challenges and i now can very comfortably say, it was all fun. Though My machine was crushed by a virus, just a day before I had to show my assignment, allegedly because of not using the antivirus program that was well tested against that particular virus, but at the same time was pirated, with the activation keys bundled in a compressed package along with the setup.

Firstly I removed my favourite Windows XP from my lappy, and started to bear with Vista, which is a pain in itself, just because it came licensed with my laptop. Note here that I dont even give a damn to use of windows, Linux and Solaris are just more that enough for me, rather I needed Windows for my Windows Programming Course. Well, I cant learn Windows programming on Linux... ( I wonder, why so??? There must be some emulator or a WINE like software that may encompass the huge size of Visual Studio!). The second step was removing, again pirated copy of Microsoft Office, ( I sincerely opologize from Microsoft for this all! ), and using a brand new OpenOffice.org, I realized I never lacked in free resources thanks to DIGIT magazine that i subscribe to, and which gives a bunch of free softwares in its DVDs every month.

Even then the jouney till here towards going completely free has not been like eating, I would continue in further posts what are the tools I have now finalized to use in place of the soul-of-computing paid softwares (Will try to give the links also, in case you have a decent internet connection!). Please be with me on this journey, and make your comments and suggestion my companions. Thanks for reading.