Best Free Open Source Software For Windows 324
snydeq writes "InfoWorld surveys the FOSS-on-Windows landscape, detailing the 10 free open source solutions most likely to unseat proprietary offerings. 'Some, like TrueCrypt and VirtualBox, are real diamonds in the rough: enterprise-grade solutions that deliver many of the same bells and whistles of their commercial brethren, but for free. Others, like Firefox and OpenOffice.org, are already legendary, and their strong followings ensure their continued development and support at levels that rival the best proprietary solutions.'" Rather than click through 10 different pages, the slideshow presentation at least lets you hover over each page's link to preview the author's top picks.
"Hover on the slideshow"...? (Score:5, Insightful)
You could just list them in the summary - in less space than it takes to explain the "hover" trick
Re:"Hover on the slideshow"...? (Score:4, Informative)
Print: (Score:2, Informative)
The list, for those who don't care about pictures (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The list, for those who don't care about pictur (Score:4, Informative)
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Thanks.
I couldn't make it to page 4 before it got /.-ed.
Re:The list, for those who don't care about pictur (Score:5, Informative)
This was from the installer I downloaded from sourceforge...
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Yeah, I had that happen when I recently installed it. It's pretty slimy and left me with a bad impression of PDFCreator.
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Thanks for the info. Enough reason to delete it from my download folder.
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Not to mention that if you're using OpenOffice (like this article suggests you do) then you don't need a separate PDF app. OO.o generates PDFs just fine.
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Which is useful if you only create PDFs from OpenOffice and no other program. PDFCreator installs a PDF printer driver. Once installed, any program that can print can make a PDF. That's much more useful.
Re:The list, for those who don't care about pictur (Score:5, Informative)
I downloaded PDFCreator to give it a spin, but after learning about the toolbar and reading your post I've deleted it without completing the installation.
Wikipedia has further [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDFCreator]details[/url]:
Re:The list, for those who don't care about pictur (Score:4, Informative)
On top of that, I got a URL re-director that was *not* mentioned in the install, and didn't go away once I uninstalled the toolbar plug-in in firefox. I had to uninstall the whole application to get rid of the re-director. That is slime on top of slime.
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Those instructions are clearly designed to mislead and confuse. How are you supposed to realise the "PDFCreater Browser add-on" is in fact a yahoo toolbar and 404 redirector? If I was installing some software called PDF creator that creates PDFs and part of it was called "PDFCreater Browser add-on" i'd assume it was some kind of necessary component to enable the creation of PDF files. Especially since just before you get the option to not install it, there is a nice piece of decoy hand-waving about opting o
Re:The list, for those who don't care about pictur (Score:5, Informative)
How about a list of more apps?
Anyone else have any good recommendations?
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I was going to suggest CutePDF, but it's freeware, not FLOSS.
CD Burner XP (Score:2)
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Celestia - astronomy program, lets you travel around the universe
Wireshark (as another poster already recommended) - lets you capture network traffic
FileZilla Server - FTP server
Cygwin - gives you Linux-like environment
Marble - 3D globe
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I have plenty more:
http://user.interface.org.nz/~gringer/iopencd/browser/home.html [interface.org.nz]
dcraw (Score:2)
Re:The list, for those who don't care about pictur (Score:5, Insightful)
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scp is standard issue on must unix / linux systems.
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Or through the gui on Ubuntu...
* Select places menu at the top of the screen
* Select connect to server
* Select the 'ssh' service type
* Type in your details and connect
You'll get a window where files can be manipulated as you would with your own machine. Locations can be bookmarked/categorised with credentials save as you like (although you should probably be using password protected certificates to authenticate yourself - which Ubuntu will also take care of). WebDav, FTP, Windows shares work the same, out o
Re:The list, for those who don't care about pictur (Score:2)
No mention of WinSCP [winscp.net]? That's criminal!
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Thank you, heartfelt, to the team behind MPC.
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Your own inability to use the program does not imply that it is a horrible program. I am sure that there are many people here that would extol the virtues of vi or emacs, not because either is easy to use, but because they are powerful. Furthermore, complaining that one product sucks, but failing to provide a better alternative is not constructive. It may be true, but it is not h
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No kidding. You can't even easily run guests without being logged in, which makes it next-to-useless for headless vm hosts. It's damned good for desktop virtualization, but if they want me to move over to it, it needs to run guests fro
Lisp in a Box (Score:2, Interesting)
Not going to be the next firefox in terms of popularity... but lisp in a box is just nice for getting into lisp/emacs on any platform. Used to be a big learning curve how to set slime, etc. up and all that.
http://common-lisp.net/project/lispbox/ [common-lisp.net]
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Re:Lisp in a Box (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, don't be dissing Lisp. Lisp is the foundation of a lot of the niftier concepts in lots of languages today, and is considered by most computer scientists to be one of the most perfect languages ever invented. Yeah, all those parentheses are a pain, but they consistently push you to do the Right Thing, and for me one of the highest complements I can place on non-Lisp code is "that looks almost Lisp-ish".
And if you don't believe me, believe these guys:
"The greatest single programming language ever designed." - Alan Kay
"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot." - ESR
"LISP being the most powerful and cleanest of languages, that's the language that's the GNU project always prefers." - RMS
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." - Philip Greenspun
"These are your father's parentheses. Elegant weapons, for a more... civilized age." - Randal Munroe
Truecrypt (Score:3, Informative)
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There is a Linux version of TrueCrypt.
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And that's all I have to say about that.
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How do you justify the $800 price tag on Win 2008?
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Maybe he has a bunch of illegal files on there (KP).
If you're worried about the security of data on your server, then keep your house/office locked properly.
Wubi? (Score:4, Informative)
But still, I say Wubi [wubi-installer.org] is the #1 piece of free software to be had on Windows -- har har har.
jdb2
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jdb2
And then there is... (Score:3, Informative)
The Open Source For Windows project
http://osswin.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
And while the Open Source CD project is dead, it looks like there's an alternative.
http://www.ttcsweb.org/osswin-cd/ [ttcsweb.org]
Now if only Windows had Debian style repositories.
--
BMO
paint.net? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:paint.net? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there a reason, other than complexity of interface, that one might choose it over gimp.
"complexity of interface" is a pretty damn good thing to base a decision on.
I suppose gimp does not have all the shapes of a drawing program, but it does paint, with colors.
When you have to look up documentation [gimp.org] to figure out how to draw a straight line in the Gimp, and that documentation is somewhat condescending, you might start to think that the Gimp isn't actually that good for simple tasks.
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The best thing about that assholish tutorial is the terrible spelling and grammar. What a joke.
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Paint.net is 1.6 megabytes and does everything most people need, even people who take a lot of photos but don't need to go into professional-level editing. It's one of the most impressive programs on any platform.
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Article conflates the meanings of "Free".
It says it's "free" only, not OSS. They mean free-as-in-beer. However, the Free if FOSS means free-as-in-freedom.
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According to its website (http://www.getpaint.net/license.html) Paint.NET is MIT-licensed. I don't know which doublespeak definition of "free" that goes under, but it's definitely open source.
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Except that the source code does not seem to actually be available. The download page that is linked from the license page does not say anything about source code except how it is licensed. Looking at the source of the page shows a commented out section that talks about how to get the source code and links here [dotpdn.com]. However the link to the source code on that page is dead.
Also, the license has an exception for the GPC code, which is free for non-commercial use only. Admittedly, I don't know how much functio
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Because not everyone wants to retouch photos or do other complex things requiring a tool like GIMP. Many times, simpler is indeed better. If I'm just drawing a simple diagram, and don't want to futz around with some Visio-like tool (such as Kivio) since it'll take me three times as long, I just start up a simple paint tool, such as KolourPaint in KDE.
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Paint.NET is extremely small (1.6 MB download). It uses the .NET framework so it's well integrated with the Windows GUI. Unlike the GIMP it's very easy to use. It's fast. It doesn't have as many function as GIMP sure, but what it does have, it's nicer to use than GIMP by miles.
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Sure, here's two reasons:
1) It's rock solid stable. GIMP is crash-prone on Windows. I swear I've caused it to crash by missing a toolbar button and clicking inbetween.
2) It has easy to create extensions, vastly enhancing capabilities. Stuff like, altering the colour tone of multiple images to match. You give it an old-style Western scene, and it'll turn any photo into that. Like most gimp-lovers, you seem to think "ease of use" counteracts "powerful". Software can be both. Paint.net is simplistic, powerful,
Cygwin! (Score:5, Informative)
Cygwin!
InfraRecorder (Score:2, Informative)
I recently came across InfraRecorder and was impressed.
http://infrarecorder.org/ [infrarecorder.org]
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Same here.
Combined with DVD43_4-4-0_Setup.exe you can burn/play anything. DVD43 eliminates all those pesky region locks and such.
Da link... http://www.dvd43.com/ [dvd43.com]
VirtualBox, eh? (Score:2, Informative)
I suppose it has a few pluses:
--It isn't a memory hog like VMWare.
--Guest tool installation is noticeably easier for non-MS guests.
But I still have issues:
--Installing guest tools completely breaks my OpenSolaris guest display.
--My shiny 1 GB graphics card becomes a 128 MB POS in the guests.
--No USB support in the Open version.
--Running my OpenSolaris guest in NAT mode totally gimps the connection.
VirtualBox isn't bad, but I can't see it being a VMWare killer anytime soon.
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Yes, calling VirtualBox "enterprise grade" stretches it a little bit. It's a nice tool and they're making consistent progress, but I wouldn't recommend it for mission-critical solutions. There are just too many little bugs, also regressions in new versions. Most of them get fixed over time, but I still have to work around some things. VMWare on the other side has "always worked" for me.
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--My shiny 1 GB graphics card becomes a 128 MB POS in the guests.
Yes, that certainly is a disadvantage compared to other virtualisation products which do exactly the same fucking thing.
What about VLC? (Score:5, Informative)
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Prettiness aside, I wonder why extended settings to for example tweak audio or video metrics always require two clicks to access.
And even after accessing them, you need to re-activate them before any adjustment.
Why? The reason I access these settings is to adjust them so it's better if I find them already activated. Is this too much to ask?
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It's probably worth mentioning Media Player Classic Home Cinema, which is a fork of MPC that contains (among other things) integrated codecs via ffdshow. I prefer using this to VLC because of the various weird GUI bugs in VLC, plus the accurate seeking MPC-HC has compared to VLC. VLC comes a close second though, and first place if you aren't running Windows.
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VLC is certainly better at playing random video files, but I prefer the UI for MPC.
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Surely VLC [videolan.org] should have made this list?
The list was posted on a U.S. web site. VLC contains patented algorithms but doesn't come with a license to use the algorithms in the United States.
if you're going to do all that (Score:2)
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Unfortunately, that's not an option for those of us condemned to corporate serfdom, so these FOSS-on-Windoze programs are great for keeping us sane.
I don't know how I'd survive without Vim.exe, for instance.
Paint.Net isn't open source any more (Score:3, Informative)
It's really bizarre that the article author included Paint.Net in a list of "best free open source software for Windows", because the source code - as the author himself even admits - is *not* available for free download for any of the recent versions of Paint.Net.
If that wasn't enough, there's been no new release of Paint.net for almost a year and I'd have thought GIMP (or GIMPShop) was a clearly superior (and fully open source) graphics package on Windows anyway.
Enterprise ready winners (Score:2)
If we're discussing enterprise ready winners, why not talk about Zimbra and Alfresco?
The main reason suits don't want to talk about leaving Microsoft or considering FOSS on their desktop is because they are very much tied to Outlook. And right now Sharepoint is Microsoft's new big gun.
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Lets talk about Zimbra. I've tried to bring up the following subjects on the Zimbra forum but can't get straight answers. What is disaster recovery on Zimbra like? Does it have single mailbox / single message restore functionality? For example, if dumb user Jane tells me that she deleted the super duper important email that she absolutely needs to have, do I need to restore the entire mail database, or can I go into the most recent backup of Jane's mailbox and restore the single email that she deleted?
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Believe me, I'd love to walk away from Exchange, but as of yet, I have not seen what I consider to be a credible replacement. Since a lot of the data in my organization is highly confidential, services like GMail are right out.
Best audio editor (Score:2, Informative)
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Ubuntu
Best open source software for WINDOWS (Score:3, Insightful)
THEN Ubuntu.
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I was thinking the Ubuntu LiveCD
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Ballmer? Is that you?
AutoHotKey and AutoIt are a necessity. (Score:3, Interesting)
AutoIt [autoitscript.com] makes programs that do automatic installations for examples.
Both can imitate keystrokes and mouse movements.
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One could argue that the best thing that could happen to windows is to be replaced with Ubuntu.
Not that I completely agree with that reasoning. Driving the computer illiterate masses into Linux just causes headache for the Linux savvy that have to spend their days explaining to people where the Start menu is in Linux.
Re:Best open source software for WINDOWS (Score:4, Informative)
Or andLinux [andlinux.org].
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I know many people who have used OpenOffice and not one of them thinks it holds its own against MS Office.
Me. Now you know one. Will that stop you from posting trollbait like this?
Re:OpenOffice legendary? (Score:5, Informative)
That's interesting.
I did a recent verbal survey in a literature class at the community college I am attending and 45% of the class was using it exclusively(other then the forced use of MS Office at the college labs).
I did it again at the end of the semester and that number had changed to 60%. It is possible that my first survey prompted the increase, but I also asked if the newer users preferred it over MS's product. ALL of them said they did. I then asked WHY.
The most common answer was that it was completely cross-compatible as far as opening MS created files...and it was free. The students could create files on the school MS system, then go home and open it in Open Office. And that it was free. Another reason they gave was that it was free.
I understand that there are some issues with bouncing back and forth between MS Office and Open Office, but most students choose one or the other. And its free.
As you might expect, students are not keen on spending upwards of $200 on MS Office when they can get Open Office for...free.
Did I mention that it is free?
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Hmmm, I fought with MS Office 2007 today and lost the battle. I had to complete the task with OpenOffice. The document reached a size where things started to screw up at random: Paragraph numbers disappear, the table of contents screws up, the bullets menu becomes greyed out so I cannot apply bullets to a list (but doing them one at a time by typing an asterisk worked). Gawddammit.
So people who keep saying that MS Office is better than OpenOffice are probably only working on one page memos. In my experi
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This the kind of thing that makes me question... why? Sure MSOffice is great, has nifty features and comes with most business computers; OO.o comes with a substantial number of the features of MSOffice as well as a few of its own, cost effectively. OO.o is great for fixing MSOffice faults, true. But if you are know you doing a document that is larger than a quick semi-informal letter, why the hell are *s/geeks/nerds/technocrats* not using latex, or even just Lyx Kile or whatever? Y'know it puts out professi
Re:OpenOffice legendary? (Score:4, Informative)
Though Base is a heck of a lot more usable now than it was in OO.org 2, it still has a long way to go to match Access 2000, much less anything more recent. No ODBC connections to multiple outside databases (at least that I could find), the form builder is still explicitly designed to create the worst-looking forms imaginable, importing into Base databases, especially with larger data sets, is ssssllllloooooowwwww (we're talking 15-30 minutes to import a 60,000 row Excel sheet, something which Access pulls off in well under 5), no multiuser support unless you're willing to host your own SQL server... yeah. It's better than it used to be, mind you - at least it's now obvious that you can actually code macro events against state changes on your forms. That wasn't true in 2.
Calc is better than it used to be - seriously, Sun went out of their way to clean up the worst of the problems in the upgrade to 3, which I'm very appreciative for. That said, it's still a little flaky on larger data sets that Excel seems to handle a little better. No personal anecdotes of pain on Calc 3, though, which is far more than could be said for Calc 2, so no real complaints.
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That's rather impressive given the fact MS Office is pirated up the wazoo. People at my uni would much prefer pirating MS Office instead of having to spend the time learning OpenOffice. It's free either way.
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Spend the time learning how to use Open Office? Dude, your in the wrong University then. I'm talking about a Community College here and 60% of the students I surveyed managed.
You do realize the interface is almost the same, the hotkeys are the same, the layout is the same....etc, etc., right?
With about 5 minutes of reconfiguring, it looks and feels exactly the same as MS Office. Hell, I'm pretty sure you can create MS Office template clones.
Another thing I forgot to mention in my first post. Of the people I
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Whoops, responded to wrong post.
Intended to respond to GF678 (1453005).
Sorry.
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OK, now I'm confusilated.
Anyone else having /. scrambling the order of posts like I just had it do?
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Maybe it's a rendering bug. I'm seeing your message as having responded to GF678 (1453005) as expected.
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For the record, anybody with a .edu email address can get Office 2007 Ultimate for $60 (less than the cost in the MS company store, in fact).
http://theultimatesteal.com/ [theultimatesteal.com]
Re:OpenOffice legendary? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know many people who have used OpenOffice and not one of them thinks it holds its own against MS Office. Including myself.
OO.o will:
* Export to PDF
* Import a plethora of formats that MS Office can't open.
* Export to Open Document Format (MS Office 2007 with SP2 will do this, but previous versions can't)
* Allow me to easily install and manage extensions
* Run natively on Mac, Linux and Windows
* Doesn't cost a penny.
We pay $400 a pop for MS Office licenses here at work. Novell's Go-oo fork implements better macro support and such which is one of the few complaints I get about vanilla OO.o. So, a free product that implements 99% of the paid product's features, including every feature I've ever needed over the past 20 years, and then does several things that MS Offiice can't do, can't hold its own?
What is your definition of hold its own?
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For me it is getting excel to link to external data from web pages. That is one of the 1% of features oocalc doesn't support.
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* Export to PDF and XPS (Beginning in SP2). Also, using beerfree programs like CutePDF and the like, you can simulate OO.org's PDF exporting abilities in any Windows program.
* Import a plethora of formats that OO.org can't open. Go ahead - import a Microsoft Works file. I dare you.
* Export to ODF if you install the Sun ODF Plugin [sun.com]. There was an article here fairly recently about MS' native ODF plugin being extremely incompatible with OO.org's implementation of the sta
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For what OO does offer Outlook was the last thing it needed. Maybe now would be a good time to include it but overall it seems that most home users are using web mail.
Hell, I have Outlook on my machines and I still don't use it.
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Outlook needs to be replaced with a full, proper PIM solution. Evolution, Kontact, Thunderbird/Sunbird, etc. all do the chore. OpenOffice can play nice with those apps.
And again, if most users at home will never use it, why does OOo need it?
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Is free and open source software only to be used in the home then? Why should it not be used in the office as well?
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Open Office + Thunderbird?
Works for me, and has for quite some time. It really isn't that hard to Control-c and Control-v.
Outlook not in my suite spot (Score:2)
Why does a document suite need a mail program? It's not like there's not forty zillion perfectly good mail programs out there, so why should they waste resources creating another one?
You might as well complain that it doesn't include a flight simulator.
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What an idiotic post. Outlook is a giant turd of a program, and the only reason I use it is because my stupid employers always require it. For my own email, I use gmail, like millions of other people, and Gmail has a calendar too which works great. As a bonus, it's faster to read email using Gmail (with its servers located who-knows-where), than it is for me to read email using Outlook which is located on my own machine. How'd MS manage to accomplish that?
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Thats just blatantly untrue for me anyway - i am using the VirtualBox open source edition extremely frequently and i get USB support out of the box for input devices, mass storage, etc. So far i havent found anything 'bad' about it, and trust me, i have been looking. Are you using the latest versions and have you actually *tried* the USB support?
Frankly i like VirtualBox better than any other commercial or open source solution for virtualization, and i have tried them all. Maybe when a good microkernel virt
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VirtualBox doesn't include USB support in the Open Source version
I thought this changed recently?
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I was using 2.1.4 from the Ubuntu repositories. VirtualBox themselves still list it as only being in the closed Source version only (http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions) and a quick look at the release notes doesn't show a change in policy, but someone else replied that they've got USB with the OSE in the latest version, so maybe it is in v3 OSE
Certainly the closed source edition has very good support for USB and they say proprietary features may be included in the OSE in the future. Can anyone clarify?