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You insensitive clod, not all people want NT 4 SP2 on their win 98 boxes.

Seriously though, the first thing which goes on is the latest McAfee Stinger. When that's wiped out most of the viruses, I uninstall their out-of-date Norton - so many people don't realise that the major antivirus vendors are on a rental model and just buy the product and expect it to last forever. Then Avast! Personal Edition goes on, and the PC is fully scanned. After that comes Spybot and Ad-Aware. I use both because each product has its stregths and weaknesses. All of this is done form a CD burnt with the latest patterns so no internet connectivity happens until their PC has been cleaned. And then Sygate Personal Firewall completes the mix of security products.

After that comes Thunderbird and Firefox, The GIMP and Audacity (if they are into that sort of thing. And of course we musn't forget IrfanView.

Just why is this stupid? Counterfiting is illegal and undesirable. Please explain your opinion.

I'm neither the original poster, nor do I necessarily agree with him. But I think I can do a good job as advocate for the Devil.

The obstensible objection to the hardware and software currency detection would probably be that it does nothing to catch actual counterfeiters but does inconveniance legitimate users. Do you really think that people such as these are going to be bothered by such little measures. In order to procure the equipment, inks and papers to forge modern currency (at least in Europe), you have to be a professional. The only remaining result of this technology is the inconveniance to legitimate users.

Now that said, there is a secondary reasoning behind objecting to the law which is less commonly stated, but often underlies such arguments.

You stated that Counterfeiting is illegal and undesirable. Placed in a criticism, this indicates that you feel the law is essentially a good thing and that legality is an indication that something is acceptable. There are many who would agree that counterfeiting is undesirable (it reduces the value of their own / family's money) but would not instinctively add illegal as a criticism. This is because many now feel the government is an adversary, especially in recent times and especially in the US and the UK. They are heavily concerned about increasingly unjust laws and this is colouring their view of the entire legal process. The relation of something as large as this to something as small as the anti-counterfeiting technology is twofold. Firstly, in foisting this technology on innocent people, they naturally resent the presumption of wrong-doing. Much the same as you would feel about having people come around to search your home for stolen goods without grounds for suspicion, or having someone wire your car so that it couldn't go over 70mph to prevent speeding, or outlawing firearms (in the US). It's insulting to many people who no longer feel the government is their friend. It's especially insulting that this redundant technology was diseminated secretly and sneakily amongst people who did not know that what they bought had that it had been fiddled with by government agencies. Remember, many people no longer regard the government as friendly.

The second secret reason behind the objection may be that in order for this technology to work there has to be some subversion of people's computer systems. It can't be implemented in The Gimp and if Photoshop or Lexxmark is calling the FBI when it detects a banknote, then this is basically taking control away from the user. He can no longer trust his computer. Who knows what information it's providing to other parties. This will be especially true with technologies enabled by Trusted Computing. The issue about the anti-counterfeiting technology is not the thing in isolation, but that is part of a broader sweep of taking power away from the user and making their computers work for someone else, not their owner.

Okay, that's my analysis. Of course, the OP may not think this way at all, purely basing his comment on the fact that the technology is flawed (which it is) and inconveniances innocents (which it can do); but I think that many people do feel the way that I've described.

For myself, I just want someone to post the pattern so that I can mix it into my own images and mess with people's heads.

I'm a graphic artist, and I sympathize with your position, as I used to feel the same. After using the Gimp 2.0 (replaces Photoshop), and Inkscape (replaces Illustrator [still needs a bit of refining, but moving quickly]), the only real gaping hole that remains for me to make a complete switch to F/OSS is an InDesign replacement. Scribus appears to be the likely, eventual choice, but their latest version still needs much work. If you haven't tried Gimp lately, or Inkscape, give them a shot. They're both quite usable, as far as I'm concerned.

A little plain?? Logos are supposed to be plain. Take a moment and look at some memorable logos. They're generally very, very, simple. This makes them easy to associate with the product. It helps build the brand.

If only more Free Software projects would follow the lead of NetBSD. There are a lot of decent logos out there too but by and large Free Software logos constitute strong evidence that Graphic Design is indeed a valuable skill. Not as valuable as coding, but still valuable.

Specifically, it's not about technical prowess in using your favourite graphics program, it's about being able to come up with strong ideas and express them strikingly, visually.

Not that I'm any good at it...

50%? Are you kidding? It's rare to see a Windows computer with less than 100% pure, unadulterated, stolen shit in it

That certainly rings true among the people I know - at least with regards to their home computers. 100% of them run pirated copies of WinXP, pirated photoshop, pirated Office, etc...

Personally I think the likes of Abiword make a perfectly acceptable replacement for Word, at least for home users - and often times businesses would do just fine with it. I think Abiword is an upgrade from MS Word - others my not agree. But it's definitely faster to load, looks just as good (better in my opinion), uses less memory, and has more than enough features to keep home users, college students, and business people happy.

I'm not a huge fan of Open Office - not because there's anything wrong with it. It's just that I don't really need an Office Suite. (I imagine most home users don't.) But for those who do "need" it, I think it's a great substitute for the $300+ MS Office Suite.

For my own spreadsheet needs, I prefer Gnumeric because it feels very light weight while still having all the features I need. Plus I think it looks great and it's a heck of a lot faster to load up than OOo. The only problem with Gnumeric is that there isn't a Windows port (that I know of).

I also have several friends who pirate the "Pro" version of Trillian. I finally convinced my friend to give the Windows Port of gaim a try and he has been using it ever since. Bonus - download the encryption plugin for gaim and have secure messaging.

I don't know enough about Photoshop and image editing to know if The Gimp is an acceptable replacement. I've read several posts where people say it is *not* (an acceptable replacement.) I'll have to take their word for it. My image editing needs are very basic so gThumb is about all I really need.

I have another friend who pirates FTP software. With the existence of FileZilla, I fail to see the point. What can't FileZilla do?

A lot of people pirate WinZip. I have to admit that WinZip does have a pretty interface (if you use Windows), but if you don't want to pay for it, and you don't want to take the risk of infecting your Windows computer with a virus when you download a WinZip crack of Kazaa, then I recommend 7-zip as a free alternative. Also, the last time I saw WinZip (which admittedly was years ago) there were a few archive types it didn't handle.

There are so many great Free and Open Source alternatives available, even if you use Windows.

Get FireFox now

will SANE stop you scanning these notes?
will GIMP block based on this "secret" pattern?

clearly not, as this shows. (GIMPed with SPECIMEN removed, but intentionally low res)

The protection is pretty weak if a user can get around it simply by downloading a different graphics program or a patch. Certainly a skilled counterfieter will be able to work around this.

Now, if this were hardware based, then it would be pretty formidible. You could still get around it though if you really wanted to - and don't the sort of people who are going to do this on a big scale really want to?

Things licensed as Open Source do better on "just the facts" vs hype. Maybe it's because their audiences would take them to task if they did otherwise, but description of things such as GCC, Wikipedia , the Linux kernel, the GIMP, to name just a few, are completely factual. Not entirely free of marketing but tolerable are the Linux site's description of Linux, OpenSSH, bzip2, Project Gutenberg, and an XWindows organization X.org.

Particularly note Wikipedia and Google. The description of Wikipedia was made and chosen by the users. I can't think of a better testament that what users really want is just the facts. And Google understood that the last thing a person wants to do when anxious to find something quick is be forced to wait for a bunch of pointless graphics and generic ads to load. Really aggravating when on dial-up. Before Google, I got to where I knew just when to hit the stop button when loading Yahoo's main search page so I'd get the text input line and search button and miss all the extra crap they used to put on their main page.

Of course open source isn't totally above marketing. FreeBSD, Mozilla Firefox, KDE, Apache, OpenOffice all lay it on. They can point to all kinds of statistics to justify their hype, but the hype is still irritating when it catches my attention. These are easy to accept in spite of the marketspeak because I've heard from elsewhere that they're good.

Bad though some of those are, Microsoft is worse. Maybe what MS does should be called extreme marketing? In a few moments of searching, I was unable to find even a badly overblown description of just what Windows XP or MS Office is and during the search was wading through hype about MS's latest whatever: "Try the new digital music experience from Microsoft. You'll love it!"

As for throwing out the baby with the bathwater, I will spend a little time trying not to do that, but when it does happen I hope it clues the promoters in to realizing they made the waters too murky. Accepting something in spite of murk is not the way to persuade them to clean up. I like to tell them about it too. You never know when commentary might actually be heeded. I'm sorry if a good thing gets short shrift, but when time is limited, books will be judged by covers. People are often asked to try to word emails so spam filters will pass them. I feel I'm not asking too much of marketing to do the analogous.

Expenses for file-server workloads under Windows, compared to LinuxOS

They compared Microsofts IIS to the Linux 7.0 webserver

Application development and support costs for Windows compared to an opensores solution like J2EE

A full Windows installation, compared to installing Linux, on an Enterprise Server boxen: Is nearly three hours faster; Requires 77% fewer steps

Compared to the best known opensores webserver "Red Hat", Microsoft IIS:

Reliable companies with tried and tested products, or that bedroom coder Thorwaldes who publicly admits that he is in fact A HACKER???

MCSE, MCDST, MS Office Specialist, widely respected Amigan

...As long as your character is a Gimp. Sort of like a cross between a dwarf and a troll, but the Gimp wears a leather suit and a ball-gag as default equipment.

But I sincerely can't force myself to work adapt to the right-button interface

So use the menu interface they put in to placate whiners like you. I'll just turn them off, and get on with life. Right click, left click, who cares?

They think me is stupid! They think me is not as smarty as them is!

As a Photoshop Tutorial author, if I ever subjected my audience to that kind of bullshit, I wouldn't have a God damned audience! (intended)

Go ahead, make an excuse!

should work nicely. Use http://tigert.gimp.org/files/fonts/vga.pcf with rxvt in X11, and it will be pretty close to IBM-PC high ascii. I've used this solution on various Unix/X11 systems for years in order to display ANSI art properly (for BBS's, etc).

But the Google Instant Messenger Program has such a nice ring to it. And it's not like the GIMP is being used for anything else right? ;)

"Get the gimp."
"The gimp's sleeping."
"Well I guess you'll just have to wake him up then, Won't ya?"

There'd be no internet

If there were no Internet, there would be no free software community as we know it and thus no GIMP, and if there were no GIMP, there would be no film customized GIMP. Heck, if there were no free software community as we know it, then there would be no GNU/Linux OS on which to run render farms.

But then someone let slip that GIMP was one of those hippy-freakout open source programs. They tried to call it the 'Photoshopped' version but were pummeled by Adobe. They now call it the 'Paint' version - eminently confusing but better than the 'Windows Picture and Fax Viewer' version.

Unless, of course, free software can match commercial equivalents.

Mozilla and OpenOffice are always seeking documentation help and seeing as these two products are the windows worlds's first glimpses of open source, they need all the help they can get.

GIMP could also use some documentation help to bridge the gap for Photoshop and PSP users.

When copyrigth expires, of course

? That's what i am asking !
When can i take the source code of GIMP and release a closed source (commercial) Super-PaintBrush ?
Why I cannot find the word expire in GPL ?

However, the OSS End User Apps like AbiWord (that are not corporate backed) are perpetually trying to catch up with the proprietary vendors.

Yes, I could probably make a pretty good living patching and enhancing open source projects for indivdual companies... Compiere (as one example) has a lot of room for such improvements, but that's not the point. It's not about making a living, it's about launching a successful project. I am certainly not saying that the proliferation of OSS developers alone will stop me. It's that the threat of OSS developers reworking my idea into a free application is equally as high as the threat of Microsoft reworking the idea, and making it a core part of the next Windows.

The two; "big proprietary" vs. "small but numerous OSS" balance eachother out. Between these two major market forces, there's little room left for the "small but still propietary".

Again, I don't see this as a complaint as much as a simple statement of fact.

I think I ought to be able to go into a store and buy a copy of gimp. In fact, I think there are several Open Source packages which would lend themselves well to being sold seperately from distributions. This would do a lot to raise the visibility of these packages from a consumer perspective.

I have to admit, I've been using Slackware since 7.1 as my desktop OS. I was a total n00b when it came to linux, and it took me a week or so to get my X display setup and lovable, but it was a head-first dive into linux anyway. Slackware had most of what I needed; Mozilla for mail and browsing, KDE for a desktop (even though Steven seems to lean towards GNOME), and Gimp for the pictures. I just had to add OpenOffice for the wordprocessing and rlpr to print to our OpenBSD print server. But the thing that saved me the most was the beloved documentation in /usr/doc. Almost every How-To was stuffed in there! I'd recommend it for any newbie that wants to go hard-core fast. I can't wait to try Slackware 10, but I'll probobly wipe out my boxen first (as I've been using the -current branch for so long).

You have no idea how true this is!

Why, just the other day I got a call from the people over at GIMP telling me what a bastard I was for not going out and purchasing their software.

I'm sorry, but I doubt the guys at Alias Wavefront are going to go after the high-school kid that jacked a copy of Maya. If it weren't free to him, do you think he'd shell out the $10,000 just to fuck with it?

The same goes for apps like Photoshop. In fact, I'd argue that Photoshop piracy actually helps Adobe. You figure if that app was impossible to copy, people would be flying to the GIMP like crazy...the GIMP gets more development done due to greater use, starts to develop a feature-set equal or greater than that of Photoshop, Adobe's sales decline because people are getting what they want for free and bang...another vendor bites the dust because they were worried more about piracy staying on top of their game...

People are going to steal software no matter what. The successful company is the one that figures out how to cope....

...or pay off Senators to draft draconian punishments.

I have heard this said many times before, and I don't think there is any justification for it. The GIMP's interface is not that different from Photoshop's.

It's hard for people who are used to Photoshop when they try to use the Gimp. But that's because they are used to finding things where Photoshop has them and not where the Gimp has them.

Recently I installed the Gimp on a friend of mine's iBook. This is someone who had never used Photoshop before. A few days later, she was designing logos for her business, using the Gimp.

Why steal software? Many software packages are reasonably priced, and many are offered with rebates and upgrade coupons. See more here

On the other hand, most of the truely great apps are written for linux. They are usually feature packed, have very little security problems, etc.. Examples would be MythTV, Apache, MySQL, the GIMP, Mozilla and Firefox, etc... The list goes on!

--
Craploads of deals updating in real time from all the best deal sites.

why not try gimp instead?

You forgot: the gimp
oh wait... that's the one thing that console only can't quite duplicate. Still, the average coder doesn't seem to be all that asthetically inclined, or artistically gifted.
But for me, when i'm in left brain mode, I have fluxbox fine tuned to run all my stupid GUI bloat applications using only the keyboard. But when i switch over to right brain mode, i like to fire up the gimp and make things that look purdy.
Personally, i can see the appeal to a console only system but, it's just all so .. ugly to me...

That has to suck... or maybe we're just smart enough to have our web browsers lie and say, we're running MSIE 6.01 WindowsXP, 1600x1200 24bit color.. eh? :)

XP is better as an emoticon anyways.

Here's teh offtopic part, and a shameless plug for a really awesome Window Manager. Try XPde out. It's really awesome at the look and feel of windows, especially when you want to move someone over to Linux without telling them.

Now I know that sounds evil, but hear this story out. My sister wanted me one day to fix her "slow" computer. Turns out that she has 100's of spyware, literally, running on her computer. Not to mention trojans and viruses. I did a backup of her documents, put them on a zip disk and virus scanned that on my comp, just to make sure. Then I installed Slackware Linux, and used XPde (quite successfully I might add) as the WM. Installed Gaim, OO.org, Mozilla, software firewall, gimp, and misc games (frozen bubble rocks!) Total install in just around 250mb. No crashes, no viruses, nothing and it's locked behind a NAT that allows no incoming/outgoing ports except what's specified for IM services and outbound httpd traffic.

She didn't know she was running linux for a few months until she went to install a program! (Insert WineX installation at this point. Went well too!)

My point. Most people dont care what they use, and if the conversion is successful (I do many like this, only with people I really *KNOW* and trust me), they'll learn to champion linux to people who are easily intimidated by "techies" and zealots who want to install linux for you because MS is "7!^3" (evil)

To summarize this success story by my sisters quote: "Windows SUCKS!, where's my cute penguin?"

----zoloto

Stop complaining and report some bugs already. If 5% of the photoshop trolls on this site reported bugs and stopped spreading FUD Adobe would of gone out of business.

That Troll link you posted applies to the mac version only, which a poor port. The native linux version is a lot better.

So stop trolling and start bug reporting and Helping

Stop complaining and report some bugs already. If 5% of the photoshop trolls on this site reported bugs and stopped spreading FUD Adobe would of gone out of business.

That Troll link you posted applies to the mac version only, which a poor port. The native linux version is a lot better.

So stop trolling and start bug reporting and Helping

Technology is not the problem it is the illiterate educators and the lackidasical students who have been taught no better than to (go to class/take notes/ study notes/take test) system for umpteen years when it should look like (go online with an educational matrix designed for you/have access to expert systems backed by databases of already asked questions and live mentors to help with understanding/discuss with your peers in forums issues pertinent to you/get graded on particpation in helping others and convincing an expert system that you have grasp of the material and than move on to another self actualized education area/have lunch/go get some coffee/still be connected wirelessly so others may get help from you/etcetera). Accreditation as it currently stands is unbearably quaint but does not involve any personalization or have the ability to do so without a massive expenditure in new teaching talent. More teachers are not the answer, holding students responsible for their own education is like we as professionals are.

This sane Mike Shuttleworth offered, about 2 months ago, some funding for The Gimp, and two of the current developers made a deal with him to be paid to further GEGL (Generic Graphical Library) development and integration with the GIMP.

GEGL, once fully implemented, and integrated to The GIMP core, will finally allow it to use images with higher color depths than 8 bit per plane.

• Abiword - Word processor, supports .doc, .rtf, GPL.
• Open Office - Whole Office suite, including a database frontend and BASIC macro language.
• Perl - Scripting language
• Python - Scripting language
• Cygwin - UNIX emulator. Can create Windows programs, reliant on a cygwin1.dll.
• MinGW - Port of some of the UNIX utilities (BASH, gcc, vi...) to Windows.
• djgpp - UNIX emulator for DOS.
• Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird - Web browser, e-mail client, IRC client, lots more.
• Filezilla - FTP client.
• xchat - IRC client.
• putty, pscp, psftp and others - Telnet/SSH clients.
• Gaim - Client for IRC/Yahoo/MSN/ICQ/AIM and more.
• gzip - Compression (usually better than .zip).
• tar - Extracts/Makes tar archives.
• bzip2 - Totally ace compression (usually better than gzip).
• Info-ZIP - Support for .zip. Good free substitute for Winzip.
• 7-zip - Support for multiple compression formats.
• frhed - Hex editor
• Ext2fs - Several programs for doing Ext2 under Windows.
• Antiword - Converts documents out of the proprietary .doc format.
• MySQL - RDBMS.
• Apache - Web/Proxy server
• sendmail - Mail server
• squid - Proxy server
• freeamp - Audio player
• winlame - MP3 encoder
• cd-ex - MP3/OGG encoder?
• gimp - Very detailed graphics program.
• imagemagick - Graphic manipulation. Provides the 'convert' utility under UNIX.
• freeciv - Civilisation clone.
• gnuplot - Plotting package.
• TightVNC - A fork of VNC, with enhancements.
• RealVNC - The original VNC.
• rdesktop - Access Windows Terminal Services and Remote Desktops.
• Nmap - Well known port scanner.
• John the Ripper - Password cracker. Does NT and MD5.

No manual for the GIMP? WTF? I studied and used GIMP at least four or five years ago (and did some advanced scripting-based things then that even Photoshop couldn't come near!), and there was a large and extensive User's Manual even back then! I even printed it out. I would be quite surprised if the manual no longer exists now.

Gee, let's try some Google: GIMP User's Manual, there that wasn't so hard was it.

And you call this an "overall problem with OpenSource software"? You blatantly lie, then generalise the lie to all OSS? That's extreme FUD, and seriously makes me contemplate that Adobe has sponsored this "review".

Yes, the author of this "review" claims that there is no manual for the GIMP. I guess it would have been too difficult to hit gimp.org and click on the link labeled "Documentation". Heck, the author couldn't even be bothered to look up the fact that GIMP is capitalized as I am doing and is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. That information is the first sentence on gimp.org, for pity's sake.

I call BS on those who say this review is more than just OSS bashing. Apparently the reviewer is some professional graphics bigshot. Good for them: given the quality of this review, I wouldn't hire them. There are plenty of professional graphics designers in my hometown with ethics and a brain as well as good artistic skills. I'll hire one of them instead, thanks much---and yes, they're welcome to use whatever tool they find effective.

I do a lot of graphics work. I've also used a large number of the true graphics programs (3d, 2d, vector, etc... not MSPaint) out there at one point or another. In addition to this, I also do freelance development from time to time. It is the user interface alone that makes or breaks the program, in my opinion. Without a good interface, it doesn't matter what the rest of the code does.

Here are my remarks on a few of the ones I've used at one time or another:

Photoshop - Easy to use interface. Provides an easy introduction for those unfamiliar with the program and provides the power necessary for advanced users.

GraphicsConverter - Another easy to use interface. Though it lacks the power photoshop has, it makes up for it in the large number of image formats it can read and write.

Paint Shop Pro - I am not overly fond of this interface. For one, I think there are far too many icons used. Drowning out interface buttons and such with icons is very irritating for a novice user as they generally have to hover the mouse and wait for the tooltip to figure out what something is. Further, it has the "too much help" syndrome that seems a standard on windows. I much prefer that the help system be delegated to something else and not be built into the program.

Poser - This is definitely a unique interface, but it still provides simplicity for novice users and control for advanced users. The largest downside is that by not using default system-provided user interface widgets, some of the details you would expect are not there whereas they would be there if the system versions were used.

Bryce - Bryce is extremely easy to use. It was my first 3d program and is still one of my favorites due to its simplicity. I have yet to find another 3d program with an object placement system that I like more than bryce's.

Blender - Not a big fan. Though it is quite powerful, the learning curve is very steep. On Macs, the interface text is quite small in some places and hard to read. The interface is also a bit clunky. Sections are not as clearly divided as I would like.

Carrara - I have not used this one for some time (and as such, newer versions may be different than what I remember), but I found it quite user-friendly when I did. All tools were placed in a context-sensible place and it had the camera system that I liked from bryce.

The Gimp - I don't like it. The user interface is extremely clunky by my standards. Consolidating a number of the windows into one and reorganizing the tools would go a long way towards helping it. There is also the fact that I am used to my nice Aqua interface and it has the drab sharp bevels and general lack of detail that is natural to most x86 OS's under default configurations.

Illustrator - I do not use this program frequently, but being from adobe, it has a very similar interface to photoshop that makes it very easy to use.

Fireworks - I'm apathetic about this one. It provides no real functionality that I cannot get in a program whose interface I like better and has more stuff I can use.

Freehand - Pretty much the same as Fireworks. I've only mostly toyed with this one as I found Illustrator more appealing.

One other feature I like about photoshop is that it is extremely easy to do image versioning. When doing web designs, I will

maybe because there are more important things for programmers to be doing with regards to GIMP development, 2.2 is in the works...

you may want to investigate this "thing"http://registry.gimp.org/plugin?id=3892
does nothing for me personally, but i'm sure some of you lot will enjoy it.

Have you read this?

And I almost forgot. The Obligatory link for the google impaired. :) Hinted, Kerned, and Anti-Aliased to your hearts content.. fully buzzword compliant!

Here's my top 10 list.

1. Sleipnir - Greatest tab browser, made by a Japanese guy, there's an English translation, if you haven't tried it and been using other IE based tab browser, you should give it a try. It's IE engine only. (For those who'll have trouble navigating Japanese web page, here's the download link to English version)

2. PuTTY - Just like others

3. Exact Audio Copy - Very good audio ripper for CCCD.

4. Adobe Reader - Though getting like a bloated software with Printme ad, I encounter PDF just about everyday...

5. GIMP - I thank GIMP team for such a great freeware tool.

6. VideoLAN (VLC) - Great media player + rich network functions, can play DVD (with libdvdcss, check your own law) without any commercial licensed softwares.

7. EmEditor - This is the best text editor I've found to date (tried, textpad, editplus, ultraedit what have you...but I'm not a emacs/vim guy). For what's better, it's free for academic use! It's got regular expression search/find, keyboard mapping, document tabs and all the feature you'd expect on a good text editor. I used to use EditPlus(registered) before this, but I switched.

8. ffdshow - Codecs for DivX, Xvid. No more need for official ad-full DivX codec installation.

From here, I don't have them installed, but these are worth mentioning.

9. burnatonce - A great tool for writing CD/DVD media. It's actually a Windows frontend for cdrecord and ProDVD, small and efficient.

10. DVD Shrink - To extract DVD data and back it up, no writing function, but good for storing it on HDD.

I could go on...but I've reached ten =)

Some of it comes with the base debian install:

GCC,G++
<flamewar>vim/emacs</flamewar>
links-ssl/curl-ssl-wget
ssh
Perl

Then a whole lotta debs for Gnome/KDE...

Then the actual desktop GUI:
GDM
IceWM
Idesk
Endeavour 2


Then the base apps
Anjuta (C++ IDE)
Gedit Notepad
Mplayer + plugins
XMMS + plugins
ALSA framework
Frozen Bubble!
the GIMP
Open Office
Thunderbird+Firefox
GAIM
Gnome-meeting

And the latest 2.6.x kernel

I've created a CD which will give you all the above in one disk. Automatic installations. Just create a linux/swap partition, and it will install to the largest available 'nix partition, also adding any windows partitions to the lilo.conf

ALSA Sound support is ready (though you must edit /etc/modules with whatever soundcard module you have)

X GUI starts in SVGA mode (best to xf86config and choose your GUI)
USB mouse support through /dev/input/mice

I'm considering putting it up online, but at about 620MB for the ISO I'd need some decent hosting space for that. So far we're using it at work to convert windows desktops to dual-boot... it's XP themes so the windows lusers can figure it out rather easily.

It's also configured to build the base menu structure when a user logs in... and idesk will mount a CD+browse with endeavour on doubleclick, or unmount+eject on a right-click.

are all y'all nuts? Reinstalling the OS once a month or even once a year? Holy shit! My current box is 4 years old and I've never reinstalled the OS and hope I never have to.

Once a month I consider rather excessive, but for a Windows box, reinstalling at least once a year greatly reduces the kruft. After a clean install, you can feel the improved responsiveness.

Anyway, my list of the first ten (+1 x2):

0) Turn off half of the default Windows crap (services, the recycle bin, CD autostart, etc), and perform assorted registry tweaks to stop Windows from acting like a crippled DOS-box-with-GUI (ala Win95) with only 64MB of RAM (such as LargeSystemCache, NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate, CompletionChar, and DisablePagingExecutive).
1) PageDefrag, which keeps your registry and pagefile in a single contiguous file (though you should always have your min and max pagefile the same, so that doesn't get fragmented in the first place).
2) AntiVir. No sane person goes without an AV program, and IMO, this counts as the best of the free ones (for that matter, I consider it better than Norton as well - Slightly more awkward autoupdates, but it doesn't hog system resources). Best of all, as a non-USian program, it doesn't deliberately ignore "official" virii such as the FBI's Magic Lantern.
3) AdAware. We all know what it does.
4) SpyBot. Ditto, and it catches some things that AdAware doesn't (and vice-versa).
5) Mozilla, of course.
6) Winamp. I still prefer the v2.x series, but, gotta have at least one of them.
7) TeraTerm Pro and TeraTerm SSH. Technically two installs, but only a moron would use unencrypted telnet these days.
8) Calypso, a really nice (and free-as-in-beer) email program. Want the latest, greatest features in your email program, making it all but indistinguishable from a full-featured web browser and media player? Don't use this. Want a safe medium for text communication, with fairly powerful regexp filtering? You'll consider Calypso a godsend.
9) The GIMP. 'nuff said.
10) Finally, a compiler (or three... The next dozen installs after this one would include various other dev tools). Currently I still prefer Borland C 5.02, sadly not free. Although advancing technoology has already made it basically obsolete, it has what I consider the most straightforward IDE of any development suite out there.
0, part 2) Repeat step 0, since by this point Windows will have tried to undo half of my changes from the first time.

Okay. Ego-post of the day done.

• Putty - A free (GPL) SSH terminal emulator
• Winzip - Yeah, you know what this is
• VLC - Free media player
• OpenOffice.org - I should stop doing these descriptions, its not as if youve heard of these things before!
• GIMP for windows - Yup, the infernal/eternal image editor
• Sharpdevelop - Free (GPL) .net IDE, requires the .net framework and SDK
• Bloodshed Dev-C++ - Excellent free (GPL) C and C++ IDE, using the Windows GCC port
• Thunderbird - Mail client
• Firefox - Web browser
• Adobe Acrobat Reader - PDF Reader
• PDFcreator - GPL PDF print driver for windows
• MessengerPro (Clickatell) - Non free SMS sender for windows, company does good bulk buy sms rates, i buy 500 at a time for less than $5
• Lavasoft Adaware and Spybot SS - For the essentials in life
• Topstyle - Free version of the excellent CSS editor for webdevelopment, if anyone knows a good free alternative, im open to suggestions :)
• SmartFTP - Great free for personal use FTP client, not found a better one yet! (I have, Filezilla it is excellent AND fully GPL, none of this non free shit, bub. :-) )
• MySQL-Front - Old version of the MySQL windows front end, much much better than the new one you pay for. Source isnt open and the old developer discontinued development, possibly one of the best advertisements for why OSS is good :(
• Editplus - Possibly the best editor ive found, not free im afraid, costs around $25

VLC -, like you mentioned, Free media player is a great media player, it blew me away. Better then Window's media player, and I know that my porno viewing habits are not going straight to Bill Gates.

One you didn't mention is Filezilla which is a good GPL ftp program instead of SmartFTP if you want to try another one out. (I must confess I use LeechFTP since I haven't gotten use to Filezilla just yet, although if you are into hosting files Filezilla is even better).

1. PuTTY (secure client)
2. Cygwin (Linux emulation layer)
3. Gaim (instant messaging)
4. Scite (editor)
5. Firefox (browser)
6. TortoiseCVS (version control)
7. Spybot S&D (malware detector)
   
8. Privoxy (filtering web proxy)
9. Gimp (graphics)
   
10. CacheSentry (to fix IE's cache, in case I use it)

• gentoo linux
• FreeBSD
• bash
• vim
• perl
• ruby
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Apache
• PHP
• links www browser
• wget
• K Desktop Environment
• Mozilla Firefox
• xchat
• gimp
• Openoffice.org

Why would I want to run win32 programs? I can't think of one Windows program that doesn't have a better equivalent for Linux.

OpenOffice, LaTeX + emacs, eclipse, blender, gimp, mozilla, maple, mathematica, ut2004, etc. What do _you_ need Windows for?

Speaking of The GIMP, and logos... I wonder how your prudish friends would like this sucker.

I say that seagull needs a big reefer too.

GIMP is a Free program with most of the functionality of Photoshop. Much more legal than pirating Photoshop.

fish://yourname@yourserver/path/to/website (or ftp://yourname@yourserver/path/to/website) plus drag and drop. Fabulous! The MS Windows version ain't as smooth or up to date, but it is a great deal safer than IE. (-:

For images, GIMP 2 doesn't have an image-chopper-upper by default, and while there are plugins to do that, I often prefer to do it (with GIMP, set some guides and then crop to that; you can make some sections of an image JPEG and others PNG (or omit them and replace that piece with flat colour) to suit the content) "by hand". It does have all manner of other nice features, more than enough to keep the average punter occupied for weeks.

To test things with IE 'coz "everyone" uses it, I could maybe-illegally run it under WINE (someone's even done an RPM, but I can't be bothered finding it) but as it turns out, I have a friend with a Windows2003 box exposed to the internet, so I aim rdesktop at that when I want IE-testing.

There are a bunch of books on using the GIMP.

I really didn't understand this complaint from the article at all to be honest. The author is looking for reasons to get upset but not able to any good ones.

"Open source doesn't have any documentation, project X does, but normally it doesn't and I'm upset by that.

Also the Project X documentation uses technical terms. I can understand it perfectly, but some people probably couldn't. I'm upset by that too.

If I couldn't understand the documentation then I would just use the email support but what about if I didn't know how to access email? What would you do for me in that case? Plus I don't like email because no one searches the archives, instead they just ask the same questions over and over and rely on pity for the answer!!! I'm really getting my panties in a knot now aren't I!!!"

The fact is Project X had documentation, she understood it fine and she was also aware of the email support list. She should find something real to complain about instead.

The "closing" of sites only means putting a new index page, with link to the normal one. You can still access the site.
For instance, look at gimp.org