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That MSPower Toy never worked on my computer. I use Virtual Dimension, and IMHO, it's better than VirtuaWin.

I can't think of any developers I want to support. Care to mention the ones you like and for what achievements they should be supported for?
Note: John Carmack, Doom III will not cut it.
John Carmack, He did 1, 2, and 3 in Doom III is better. Also consider http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft &words=engine

The most noticable positive change you can bring to your Windows setup is to install one of the many shells out there that replace the Explorer interface.

Among your choices are the popular Litestep, GeoShell, Aston, bb4win variants, and others.

bblean, a lite variant of bb4win with integrated window skinning, has been my favorite for a long time. Its menu-based customization makes it fairly easy for newbies to configure, while the plugins and scripting options provide for limitless functionality.

If you do not want the bloat of a Cygwin, or want to fall under the radar of sys admins but still need to have Unix command line tools available from MS Command Prompt (aka Werminal), just install Unix Utils - GNU Utilities for win32.

A simple install and just add the wbin directory to your Path env var and presto, you can GNU your little heart out.

Binaries are pretty small and most functionality is there for the pickings (ls, mv, gzip, pwd, touch, grep, cat, tail).

If you don't need any of the Cygwin apps, this is the best way to help you maintain a windoze running various scripts and applications.

Tail is probably the best little app to use on windoze. You can call the app from a shortcut and have a tail window pop up showing you the output of any log file on the server.

Sample shortcut target to tail any log file log `file:~GNUUtil Home dir~\usr\local\wbin\tail.exe -f ~your log file full path and name~`

.:JsD:.

(Note: Not all of these programs are open-source, but they are all free-as-in-beer)

Media Player Classic - while the VLC player is quite portable, I found it to be very slow on Windows. Media Player Classic is a fantastic replacement for Windows Media Player.

QuickTime Alternative and Real Alternative - codecs for Media Player Classic that will play QuickTime .mov and RealPlayer files.... no more need for crappy QuickTime player or RealOne!

WinAmp - still the greatest music player for Windows, IMHO. For those with iPods, you can download a plug-in call ml_ipod, which will allow you to synch your iPod with WinAmp... no more need for bloated iTunes!

Finally, AVG Antivirus, by far the best free antivirus product out there... easy to use, low memory resources.

(Note: Not all of these programs are open-source, but they are all free-as-in-beer)

Media Player Classic - while the VLC player is quite portable, I found it to be very slow on Windows. Media Player Classic is a fantastic replacement for Windows Media Player.

QuickTime Alternative and Real Alternative - codecs for Media Player Classic that will play QuickTime .mov and RealPlayer files.... no more need for crappy QuickTime player or RealOne!

WinAmp - still the greatest music player for Windows, IMHO. For those with iPods, you can download a plug-in call ml_ipod, which will allow you to synch your iPod with WinAmp... no more need for bloated iTunes!

Finally, AVG Antivirus, by far the best free antivirus product out there... easy to use, low memory resources.

Audacity

Where's the open-source sound recording program to replace the Windows sound recording program?

How about Audacity?

audacity

I thought WinDirStat looked cool so I checked it out, and lo and behold it's based on a similar Linux (KDE) application: kdirstat. Downloaded it just now ... very cool.

Dlugar

I have a TextPad license (not free) that I use on my personal machine, but when I need a text editor on another machine that isn't mine, I've installed Notepad++ and felt it was pretty good.

I've never used Virtuawin, but I have been using Virtual Dimension and have been really impressed with it. It integrates almost seamlessly with windows and is decently configurable. Another option to consider if (like me) you feel hindered without virtual desktops.

Microsoft's Virtual Desktop Manager is not a powerful application.

Most of us looking for multiple desktops probably come from the Linux desktop world, and want many of those features: Keyboard navigation, edge flipping, an easy way to move application windows between virtual desktops and sticky windows.

Microsoft's Virtual Desktop Manager does none of this. In addition, it's pretty buggy-- switching between virtual desktops can leave many artificts on the screen, the toolbar for each virtual desktop may actually list applications from another virtual desktop and the toolbar may lose the toolbar icon for items on your current desktop.

And Microsoft hasn't really updated any of the features of this application in 3 years.

VirtuaWin is a pretty good app, and has most of the features listed above. In addition, there are dozens modules to add various features.

  It's a little confusing to configure.

Media Player Classic (open source). Who needs WMP anyway? :)
IrfanView (freeware) for image browsing and very basic manipulation, like gamma correction or applying photoshop filters

I like WinDir Stat. It gives a nice colourful representation of your disk usage by directory and by file allowing you to see ther really big files on your system like .Vob, or clusters of really small ones like .jpg.

It's really a fun little thing to look at and use.

IS this an on topic first post?

Eventually this may help, Evolution for Windows .

Well, I do have a box full of floppies in the basement somewhere under the cobwebs and there should be a floppy drive in the bottom of my junk box...

On Windoze, Filezilla rulez...

To make Windows disk imaging even faster and more reliable, you can use ntfsclone at http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/status.html#ntfs tools.

Not all of them. And recall that the product in question is predominantly for Windows deployment, which makes these Windows side ports the only thing worth considering as far as this subject is concerned.

I totally disagree that application update is the responsibility of the OS. Updating the OS and its components is the responsibility of the OS. Updating applications is the responsibility of the application. Only the application knows its own quirks---how to update its own configuration files when needed, etc. Blaming the OS for lack of update functionality in an app is ludicrous, particularly in an application whose entire purpose is security.

Not to mention, any admin that needs to update a typical app on 500 desktops by hand is completely worthless anyway, and you would have a lot more security problems than what implementation of SSH you are running.

Care to elaborate on that? I know how to automatically update Mac OS X in bulk using the built-in admin apps. I haven't seen such functionality for Linux without writing custom scripts. About the closest thing I've seen is groupvte, which might work for half a dozen machines, but at the 500 machine level... no prayer. Yes, somebody could write custom scripts to do it, but no matter how you do it, you're still talking about a script ssh'ing to each individual machine, running an update program, and trying to parse the results (to avoid you having to read through 10 pages of spew for each of 500 machines). It isn't an easy problem, and I have yet to see an adequate solution.

Auto-update mechanisms can introduce vulnerabilities as well. So, it's not a given that an auto-update mechanism is a good idea. The cons could very well outweigh the pros.

Doing any update could introduce new vulnerabilities. That's the nature of any update that changes code. That said, there's a 100% chance it will fix a vulnerability and only a small chance it will introduce a new one. It's not hard to weigh those odds.

Unless, of course, you mean that the update mechanism itself could be insecure. That's what package signing is for....

Three-letter answer: LVM.
Four-letter answer: EVMS.

But the initial drop is indeed there. It's nothing extensive, at the moment - the last snapshot of OpenSSH, with a bunch of patches thrown in, but the fork does exist and it is more than just baseline. I'm calling it openssh-folk, as the FOLK project is specifically for the purpose of severely overloaded software (which is the direction I intend to take this fork).

quite simply arts is dead

http://www.arts-project.org/doc/arts-maintenance.h tml

It was good - but now even the maintainer has jumped ship.

If you have audio syncing issues, use kaffeine ( http://kaffeine.sourceforge.net/ - it a really nice kde wrapper for xine, you can easily record streams, minimize to the tray, it has a real nice OSD, I really can't give enough props to the kaffeine project ), configure the xine engine's audio output to be either ALSA or OSS (ie direct to the audio card), right click on the video that is playing go down to Video Settings, there are 5 sliders.
One of those sliders is Audio/Video Offset, this is a xine feature, you can slide it to make the audio and video perfect.

Persoanlly I dont use arts at all - I have an NFORCE2 sound card and while it's features rock, the intel drivers in alsa seriously suck, the closed source nvidia ones are very good, but arts just wont work with it. So I rename the artsd binary (so it can't be used at all) and for system notifications I use a script I wrote called playsound.sh:
-------------
#!/bin/sh /usr/bin/mplayer -ao oss $1

-------------

Hope I helped you and any others out - arts is dead, but thanks to the massive configurability of the KDE project, you don't really need it anyways :)

Voting with your wallet happens when there are alternatives to a product you want, and you go for the alternatives.

And one of those alternatives is, "none of the above." There are numerous open source games and entertainment options out there.

kbear never got into any official KDE release. The instability of the project is full responsability of its author and the project itself seems dead for almost 2 years now.

Why did you have to mix kbear (as any other independent app) with KDE itself? Just because its made for KDE?

Would this mean that if I, eventually, developed a nice calculator for windows that says 2+2=69 instantly Windows would be so buggy that 2+2=69?

Odd, I believe X to be one of the greatest strength of Unix ; yes, its used in other OSes besides Linux - does the presence of X in Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Irix, and so on make them impossible to use? Millions of X users beg to differ.

To fix something, you need to quantify its brokenness first, something you have not done well at:

X is not supposed to look good, nor is it supposed to be ugly, or have any sort of 'look' at all. Perhaps you are thinking of window managers, desktop environments or similar. Many of which are reasonably attractive, caveat emptor.

Nor do I believe X is slow. What are you comparing it to? I get superior OpenGL performance under X in linux compared to the same hardware running windows with the equivalent version video drivers. X must be doing something right, but it could well be the linux kernel doing a lot better than the windows one at managing the hardware, admittedly.

Complaints about compiling code, fighting with drivers, software dependancies, and so on are not really weakness in X, merely a lack of experience in handling code. But not to worry, most *nix distributions are nice enough to ship binary builds of X that are both fast and include all the nice font rendering and antialiasing you might ever care for. Of course, you have the freedom to compile the lot by hand if you really want to, but it is by no means necessary. If your distribution of choice is not being cooperative, then investigate better alternatives.

Granted, nothing is ever 100% easy, but you sound like you are picking the hardest way forward and hence getting unneccessarily frustrated. If X was broken, then like everything else under linux ( driver support, schedulers, scalability, journaled filesystems etc all of which are better now than they have ever been and are still improving ), it _would_ be fixed.

Come to think about it, how about those javascript desktops??

http://www.x-desktop.org/
http://robin.sourceforge.net/

"...oh, I see, its just some stupid acronaming.

This is the sort of thing that I despise. I wish I could hit that guy over the head with a brick."

There's also an Open Source "Todo Lists" application called Tudu Lists.

You can check it out on SourceForge : http://tudu.sourceforge.net.

And you can use the live site : http://tudu.ess.ch.

Everything's free and Open Source (GPL), so you can check out how it works.

Cluster is very easy to implement today because there is a lot of software that can configure itself and connect to cluster nodes like OpenMosix

Weather station and accessories based on the Dallas 1-Wire and iButton components:
http://www.aagelectronica.com/aag/index.html

Linux software:
http://oww.sourceforge.net/index.html

I'll be honest. I bought the kit, got the basics running with the software, couldn't get the wind vane calibrated, and ran out of time (new home, new baby, etc.). However, it all seems to work just fine and lots of people that report into wunderground.org seem to use this kit. I just haven't gotten it fully going myself.

Just saw the the guy that maintains the unix/linux/risc os s/w has it running on a Linksys NSLU2. Cool.

If you're running an SSH server you'll want to use DenyHosts. It will help keep script kiddies and evil doers from having a party on your server. http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/.

KeePass has to be the best password manager around IMO. Free, Open Source, AES encryption, and in addition to a master password for your password database you can also specify a key file needed to open the database that you can carry around on a separate USB key or whatever. http://keepass.sourceforge.net/

Having just broken my PDA, there are solutions.

I use keyring. There is also a tool to read the passwords on windows (See the links in the site). As I understand it, this is integrated into KPilot.

FYI, there is a similar project called KeePass.

http://keepass.sourceforge.net/

Time for a very-carefully planted plug: on linux, you don't need a password to login and can use any USB mass-storage as an auth token, provided you're willing to brave alpha-quality software ;-).

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pampka

I can recommend VDMSound, which has allowed me to enjoy the music on both 2000 and XP.

Sorry 4 my bad english, cheers..

check out wikid: https://sourceforge.net/projects/wikid-twofactor/

open source, two-factor authentication

Keyring for Palm OS

Same here. Not only is the file encrypted with ccrypt, but I store it at home on one of the machines with an obscure filename. Whenever I need it at work I can ssh home and read/change it.

I started using robotron, way too many passwords to type in daily. I have password safe with over 300 passwords, from sites, servers or applications. Crazy.

Then IT thinks its good to change passwords every 30 days on some sites, password management alone takes 1-2 hours a week, not counting the times I have to change passwords for other people.

If anyone knows a opensource robotron replacement that works in both IE and Firefox, reply. As for password safe, been trying a new opensource one called Keepass that looks pretty nice, and ported to multiple platforms.

KeePass Password Safe

http://keepass.sourceforge.net/ Just a master password needed.

I use Password Safe on a USB pen drive. It has a master password that it uses to encrypt all my other passwords in a tidy MFC application. In x86 Linux I access it using Wine, which works fine. For my OS X machine, I use pwsafe, a console app that lets you access Password Safe databases, and dumps the password directly into the X clipboard buffer. (Use the CVS version, the latest regular build can't access the latest Password Safe database format.) I found other unix password safe compatible workalikes to be extremely poor.

This solution works well for me. Just make sure you back up your pen drive.

Password safe - http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/ for those stuck on Windows boxen

You are right, of course. It is about personal preference. I decided to try EVE based on number of positive web reviews but obviously I have been disappointed. However, I am still looking for an excellent 3D, first person perspective, space related game. If you know of any, I'd appreciate hearing about it. Parsec, the one game that looked ideal now appears to be dead.

Wow, I have always thought of bittorrent as just a protocol - I didn't know there was an official client program - If the client has ads, why use it? ctorrent http://ctorrent.sourceforge.net/ work just fine for me. A quick check of ubuntu packages shows a gnome client and two QT based clients as well.

i wouldn't worry about potential ads, drm, etc... there are other, more innovative clients out there...

Evolution port for OSX is already in progress according to Novell
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2005 -March/msg00592.html
working with fink
http://primates.ximian.com/~aaron/doing/evo-osx.ht ml

While Tor Lillqvist and few others works on Windows port
http://evolution-win32.sourceforge.net/newsrss.php
screenshots
http://tml-blog.blogspot.com/2005/06/evolution-lim ps-along-on-windows-and.html

FWIW, I think the clones of Ultima IV that have been made in more recent years have tried to avoid cloning the bugs. Try this and this.