If you’re like me and bought a netbook, you likely don’t have all those great programs that you had on your laptop or desktop pc. Assuming you’re not a pirate (yharr) and you don’t have any copies of those programs and add in the fact that you need an external hard drive to install a program (unless you have it on a thumb drive), then you might find that your netbook is running a little bare.

That’s okay, there are a bunch of great free programs, many of them open source free software projects that are available to you. Here’s what I like and use.

App For Working with Code. . .

Notepad ++
http://notepad-plus-plus.org

Notepad ++ (plus plus) is a free source code editor built with C++ that allows you to happily work in code without jumbling up your work. It was build as a replacement to MS Windows Notepad, and works absolutely great. I mainly use it for working in css, but it also handles a wide range of code.

App For Batch Photo Resizing. . .

FastStone Photo Resizer
http://www.faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm

If you’ve ever needed to upload a bunch a photos to the web, you have probably come to the conclusion that you either need to start shooting in a lower resolution or you need to resize your photos. Instead of sacrificing your large images, try this batch photo resizer. It allows you to easily group your photos and reduce their size to one the web can handle. There are a bunch of batch photo resizers out there, but this one has worked great for me.

App For Graphic Design. . .

Gimp
http://www.gimp.org

Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks are great for design, but if you need an alternative, consider Gimp. Gimp has many of the basic features of the other programs but is available as free software. Gimp has a bit of a learning curve, but if you are familiar with any of these other design programs then you’ll pick it up quickly. There is also a manual that will can help (Gimp 2.6 Cookbook).

App For Documents and Spreadsheets. . .

Open Office
http://www.openoffice.org

Open Office is giving Microsoft Office a run for it’s money, and it’s free. This full suite of programs does basically everything you need it to do, but if you’re expecting it to be as polished as Microsoft’s, then you’re going to be a bit disappointed. I know I’m still waiting for Calc to run a little smoother, but hey, it’s free!

Google Docs
https://docs.google.com

If you have a Gmail account or a Google Apps account then you have access to Google Docs, another challenger to Microsoft’s Office. While it only works when you’re online, unless you are running the upcoming Chrome OS, it is polished and works very well. Plus, you also have the option to easily share documents.

App For Playing Video and Media. . .

VLC Media Player
http://www.videolan.org/vlc

An open source media player that can handle a wide range of media, and it will play just about anything. It is available across platforms and is again… a free player. I really only use it for video, but supposedly it handles music as well.

Have any others?

Do use an free open source programs for anything that are not listed here? Good or bad, let me know in the comments.