here are many free tools avialable for end users. Many of these tools rival the functionality of expensive applications offered commercially.

This is by no means a complete list. It's just a list of the more familiar ones.

Office Suites

OpenOffice : A complete office suite including word processor, spreadsheet and presentation editor. Contains most of the functionality in the Microsoft Office suite. Works for Linux and windows.

Math: The OpenOffice.org suite's equation editor. The markup language is similar to LaTeX, the de facto standard for creating scientific and technical documents. Once you become proficient in ooMath, you can produce accurately marked-up equations for lab reports and papers.

Lotus Symphony: Lotus Symphony was voted office productivity software product of the year for 2008 by Datamation Magazine readers. In what can only be described as an upset, relative newcomer, Lotus Symphony, beat out Microsoft Office, OpenOffice 2.3.1, ThinkFree Office and other nominees.


Image Editing and Screen Capture

Audacity: A free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:

• Record live audio.
• Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
• Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files.
• Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.
• Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
• And more! See the complete list of features.

Capture Fox Movie: A Firefox add-on and a handy tool to create tutorials about a software, a web site or anything that can be displayed on your computer. It records your screen frame by frame. You can also record your voice.

Fotoxx:Fotoxx is a free open-source Linux program for improving image files made with a digital camera.The GUI is available in English, German, Spanish, and French. See thissimple introductory artcle on Fotoxx features

GIMP:GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

Inkscape: An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development. Versions for Linux, Mac and Windows. See these videos on how to use various features of Inkscape.

Jing: Always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere. Free. But only Windows and Mac

jUploadr is a cross platform, cross-site Photo uploader. Currently it runs on Windows Linux and OS X and supports both Flickr and Zooomr. It allows you to set all properties of a photo before you upload it. It also supports batch editing, so you can make short work of uploading a bunch of files.

Keepvid A free tool that allows you to capture video from any webpage and create a video file that you can download to keep. Save as Flash file or a more user friendly MP4 file. Great tool for collecting streaming video and keeping it locally (in case the site is blocked inside your school network)


NVU: A Web Authoring System for Linux desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu (which stands for "new view") makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.

Smushit : A service that goes beyond the limitations of Photoshop, Fireworks & Co. It uses image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images - without changing their look or visual quality. You'll get a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and all the changed images as a single zip for download.

Image and Video Hosts and Editors wiki page: A portal into a list of image and video tools

Miscellaneous

A running commentary on Open Source (free) tools for both Linux and Windoz. Open source projects you should get to know

Blabberize : Allows you to upload a photo, add sound, and animate the mouth so it looks as though the subject is talking. It’s best to upload a picture (jpg, gif, png, or bitmap) in which the subject is facing forward. Nothing special, but can be fun

CutePDF: Portable Document Format (PDF) is the de facto standard for the secure and reliable distribution and exchange of electronic documents and forms around the world. CutePDF Writer (formerly CutePDF Printer) is the free version of commercial PDF creation software. CutePDF Writer installs itself as a "printer subsystem". This enables virtually any Windows application (must be able to print) to create professional quality PDF documents - with just a push of a button!

PrintWhatYouLike is a free web page editor that gives you control of how web pages look when printed. Ever print a web page only to find your printout is full of ads, empty space and other junk you don't want? No need to anymore.

Scribus: An open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.

Subsonic is a free, Web-based media streamer that lets you -- and your friends -- access your music collection over the Internet. Subsonic can handle large music collections, running into the thousands of CDs. It also works with video; in fact, it can let you remotely access any format that can be streamed over a standard HTTP connection. If needed, Subsonic will convert your collection to a streaming format on the fly, taking into account the available bandwidth. You can use any browser and media player combination to listen to your music; I went for Firefox and RealPlayer, but other combinations are equally valid.

tinyurl is an online utility that converts a long, cumbersome URL into a nice small one. Sick of posting URLs in emails only to have it break when sent causing the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together? Then tinyurl is for you..