Slashdot Mirror

As far as desktop apps go, I can only discuss Windows apps, since I don't use X at all. Linux = command line as far as I'm concerned.

• Windows Only
• AVG - Antivirus, free if you don't live in Europe.
• Spybot - Antispyware, freeware.
• Winamp - Nice for playing those mp3 collections.
• Kazaa Lite - Nice for getting those mp3 collections. For the legal-minded, substitute a good cd ripping program (I don't know of a good free one, I use a pay app).
• MAME - Bring back the memories.
• Trillian - Save them from the AIM/MSN/ICQ mix and match hell.

• Cross Platform
• Tight VNC - Install it so you can remote-admin their computer easily when they screw it up.
• Mozilla - Either Moz itself or one of it's 'light' siblings Firebird and Thunderbird for email and web browsing.

• Shareware Worth Trying

• Audiograbber: It's free to try, easy to rip with, and only $20 to register.
• GetRight - Assists in downloading all those patches and apps.

Browser: Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 (or 0.7 nightly build)

Email: Thunderbird 0.2 (or 0.3 nightly build)

Office Suite: Open Office 1.1

SSH Client: Putty 0.53b

Graphics: Irfan View 3.85 or GIMP 1.2.5

Music: Winamp 2.91

Virus Scanner: AVG 7.0

Instant Messenger: Psi 0.9 or Trillian Basic 0.74E or gaim 0.70

Non-Copywrited Music downloads :P : WinMX 3.31

Video Player (paired with an ATI Video card): ATI MMC 7.6

FTP : LeapFTP 2.7.4

ok so that was 11 .. sorry ;)

2. Firewall (I use Zonealarm)

3. Mozilla or Firebird and Thunderbird

4. Openoffice

5. Winamp

6. Ad-aware

7. Nero Burning ROM if you have a CD-R or CD-RW

8. Kazaa Lite K++

9. A PDF Viewer (such as Acrobat Reader)

10. A install disk for your favorite Linux Distro. Windows Sucks!

Really, it's hard to pinpoint withoug knowing what you're going to be using it for, however, for basic needs, I utilize the following (win32. I have a pair of RH boxes, but they are both servers without KDE/Gnome, so I don't use Linux desktops much):

Mozilla 1.4

(The whole suite) mail/browser with additional functionlity provided by a couple of plugins (EasySearch bar, Optimoz Mouse Gestures and the Calendar). Been playing with Firebird/Thunderbird, but thunderbird has a bit to go before it's up to the level ot the regular Mozilla mail client.

AntiVIR free Antivirus.
Updates every 2 weeks (or more if you're paranoid). Used AVG (Grisoft's product) for a while, but had issues with its W2k/XP compatibility. That was over a year ago, however.

EnZip Freeware Zip Utility

Explorer-like interface, with shell extensions and all. No nag screens!

FileZillaOpen-source FTP utility

Includes queuing and scheduling functions. Better than WsFTP lite.

Putty freeware SSH client

Nuf said!

iXplorer Freeware secure FTP client

Transfer files over SSH connections. Useful for transferring files to/from Linux hosts without opening up FTP.

WinAmp free Multimedia Player

With some plugins, can play almost any type of media file.

There's more, but I'm not going to list everything I use. Normally I'd just send you to my website, but I'm not going to /. my own site. It's just a little 486 box on a DSL connection!

Some /.'ers have familiy that all know C++ apparently...anyway

Winamp
Ad-Aware
Sygate Personal Firewall(Zone alarm sucks)
cDex 1.51(CD ripping software)
Mozilla Firebird popup blocker is nice, esp for clueless users and children

Irfanview - hands down the best image viewer out there for Windows. Free. Windows only (but will run under Wine if you want)

Gimp - if you want to edit images. Free. Linux and Windows.

MAME - for games, period. Free. You can buy some ROMs, or *ahem* ask around. Windows and Linux. (Xmame)

CDex - for CD ripping in Windows. Free. Windows only, but several good ripping programs are available for Linux. (search freshmeat)

GNUWin - a collection of free apps for Windows. Worth the download.

Audacity - if you want to create/edit sound files. Free. Linux and Windows.

Winamp - for listening to audio files. Free. Windows only. I like XMMS for Linux over Freeamp.

Opera - web browsing, email. Free. Windows and Linux. I prefer it over Mozilla, but not by much.

My suggestions for the Windows side...

For email I'd definitely recommend Eudora as it can be used free (ad based, but small add window) and isn't suceptible to propagating the many viruses that target Outlook.

As someone previously mentioned, I'd also recommend Opera, again, ad based, but a solid browser and mouse gestures rule!

Someone else also mentioned AVG for antivirus, probably the best option for free antivirus.

CDEX is a great MP3 ripping program that I've always used.

We can't forget Sonique and WinAmp for playing your MP3's. I prefer Sonique but that's just me.

Then of course there's Winzip, Adobe Acrobat, QuickTime, VNC, and ZoneAlarm or BlackIce (all available at download.com). These are all (except perhaps VNC) must have utilities for a Windows box.

• OpenOffice to cover word processing and other office utilities.
• Pegasus for email.
• Mozilla Firebird for the browser.
• PuTTY to connect to your linux server (you do have one of those, right?).
• Winamp to play your music.
• ActivePerl because Perl scripts are so damn handy, regardless of the platform.

Here are my most favorite windows apps. Some are free. All at least have trials. They are in no particular order.

Firewall: BlackIce
Virus Scanner: AVG Anti-Virus
Instant Messaging: Trillian
Movie Player: BSPlayer
Web Browser: Slim Browser
Mail Client: The Bat!
Taskbar Improvement: True Launcher Bar
SpyWare Protection: Spybot Search & Destroy
File Compression: Win Rar
Hex Editor: Hex Workshop
Audio Player: Winamp
Ternimal Emulator (telnet/ssh/etc): SecureCRT

Firewall - Kerio Personal Firewall - bloat-free firewall, very small memory footprint, extremely powerful, and it's free.

Compression - 7zip - compression utility that handles virtually every format, integrated into UI, and it's free.

Imaging - Irfanview - image viewer handles virtually all image formats, plays Flash and video, plus can thumbnail, batch-convert, retouch, and it's free.

Music - Winamp - Plays virtually all music formats (including WMA without the DRM annoyances), plus 2.91 now plays video and streaming video, and it's free.

The key here is these programs are capable replacements for a lot of more expensive pay programs. For example, Norton Firewall, Winzip, ACDsee together come to about $200 retail.

My Personal Opinions (Apps I can think of):

Mozilla Thunderbird: Email client that's still in Alpha but has never given me one problem.

Mozilla Firebird: Greatest web browser around today. Here are some reasons why.

Krusader/Windows Commander: Great file managers. Windows Commander is (obviously) the windows original and Krusader is the KDE based *nix one.

Open Office: You already mentioned this one

GAIM: Best IM client avaliable (I know this isn't exactly productivity software).

AVG Anti-Virus : Free non-commerical use anti-virus.

PuTTY: Telnet/SSH/Rlogin, everything you need for remote access.

XMMS/Winamp: Media Players

I am still looking for good financial software. Microsoft Money is the best I've found so far.
cuban

Here's a good list of the more common apps I have in there:

AbiWord, AstroGrep, Audacity, BitTorrent, CDex, Cygwin, Enzip, Filezilla, Gaim, Gimp, GSview, LAME, mIRC, Mozilla, Mplayer, Nero 5.5, QuickTime, TweakUI, WinAmp, winLAME

I completely agree with the above poster's advice. Add in:
OpenOffice 1.1
and
Winamp 2.x for audio/video usage in Windows, or
XMMS 1.8 for audio/video usage in Linux.

The best Ad-ware / Spyware removal tool I've found is
SpyBot Search & Destroy

There is also Ad-Aware though.

Other stuff (non spyware related):
Winamp(2x is best)
Trillian/Gaim
Browsers (and mail): IE6, Mozilla, Opera are all fine

I've found both SlickRun and PopupPopper from Bayden Software to be useful as well.

AVG Free edition

Zonealarm

Winamp Classic

..they are the first things I install.

Such as Message Notification for Trillian and nice blinky light plugin for music in winamp.

Like I'll believe it has a use other than those...pfft.

It had some potentially good uses. However the price for using it, and trying to use it for the wrong things are what killed it off.

Of course they always want to use technology for the wrong things so that isn't suprising at all.

Yes.

Half-Life (with Counter-Strike)
Winamp
Internet Explorer

hth

Here's my small collection I was able to dig off my hard drive real quick. Hopefully my cable modem can keep up as this article is past it's prime.

mancubus.wav is from doom2

ironman.wav is from war craft 2 I believe? Maybe waybe warcraft 1 since the date is 1997 on it, not sure when WC2 came out...

godlike.wav, rampage.wav, and monsterkill.wav are all from Unreal Tournament, extracted from the data files with quite a bit of effort awhile back. The sounds in the data files were reversed and had something else weird done to em if I remember correctly.

My favorite are probably the qtest (quake test) sound effects, certain player death and hurt sound effects that were rather commical, and really added to the game I thought, but never made it into the actual game, probably because they didn't want dying to be funny? :)

Check out qtest/quake3.it, with winamp it's a song made purely out of quake1 sfx.

It's sadly true that mp3 has gained such a momentum and support in the market that the chances for another file format to gain a similar status are rather slim and far away.

Support for other formats such as Ogg Vorbis is fortunately slowly growing. For example Winamp which is probably the most popular media player for Windows (apart from Windows' own built-in player) has supported Ogg Vorbis in the standard install since version 2.80. And that version is old, at least over a year IIRC.

So the player support is beginning to be there. It's a question of, as you mentioned, getting people to actually use the other formats when encoding.

If you read the shoutcast user forums, there was a flurry of activity a while ago when AOL bought into Winamp/Shoutcast.

To promote the technology AOL offered free bandwidth, worth tens of thousands of dollars yearly, to the most popular stations (hence most of the Shoutcast top ten originating from AOL IPs).

If they were to offer me a few T3s I would certainly take them, but it dulls all the 'alternative' claims a bit :/ Again, soeone please chime in if I have my wires crossed...

I've been a hardcore netizen since 1998, when I used to dial up from my uncle's home to a text-only shell account with a 1,500 bps modem :-) I remember waiting minutes to download a single JPEG file, then transferring it to my local machine using Kermit, and opening it up in Internet Explorer 3.0 on Windows 95, only to realise that it's the wrong one! Those were the days when I learnt to use Pine and Lynx, my favourite mail/www combo.

Those were the days of Internet success stories: ICQ, Napster, Winamp. Remember ShellSock?

In a perfect geek encounter, I met bluesmoon on comp.lang.java. Google didn't even exist back then.

Now, when I look around, I see "techies" with 5-10 years of experience in the software industry and no clue what All Your Base... means :-) Clearly, these guys have been here for the money. I, however, am here because I love it. The Internet is changing lives, and I want to be responsible for some of it. Somebody give me that perfect job! :-D

My guess is that sun lacks a mascot who stands for liberty, love and the pursuit of happiness all the while standing up for the little guy.

A mascot should enjoy being a super hero, fragging, and sports and should appeal to the geek, the freak, the n00b and those corporate types.

And no! Duke is not cool. Duke thinks that he is cool. But he only reaches cute. And cute is for sissies.

Good... Maybe someone else will have better luck convincing Nullsoft that ipv6 actually IS desired:

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?s=3b5228a9 5119a267d91817195a9ad715&threadid=125475&highlight =ipv6

Btw, same goes for ipv6 support in Mozilla for windows... the *nix versions have had ipv6 support for a while now, right?
Are there any other ipv6 alternatives for windows? IE and Windows Media Player both have ipv6 support for win2k sp3 and up as well as XP, but I'd rather not use those if possible.

The WinAMP playlist isn't part of the main program window -- it's a seprate window you have to manage or attach and drag around. The UI widgets are not standard windows controls, and at 1280x1024 or larger they are too small to comfortably read. On top of that, the little abbreviations and symbols used on the various controls aren't intuitive, so you have to try things out to figure our what they do and how it works.

These issues are one the main reasons Winamp is totally skinable. 27,613 skins for the Winamp 2 branch at last count. If you can't read the widgets on the default skin, then change it to one you like better, or make your own.

Last I saw, the playback controls all looked like those on a regular stereo, even with the wierd-ass skins I use, so i'm not really sure where you're coming from on that. Even at 1280x1024, i've never had trouble navigating, but if you can't read a button for some reason, there's keyboard shortcuts for everything that stay consistent accross different skins.

The Windows Media Player Media Library is even more obnoxious, because it requires you to enter, maintain, and store metadata in the Media Library database that isn't correspondingly present on the filesystem, and you can't pick up that metadata inside other programs.

I won't argue with you on this point, mainly because WMP is so fux0red on my system at the moment that it won't even start :):P

The main complaint I had wasn't with the usability as much as it is with the bloatiness of the programs. WinAMP has degraded through the major releases into a giant bloated "let's skin everything, fuck performance" mess. It eats up memory and causes song playback to suffer when you've got numerous other programs running (which I almost always do when listening to music files on my PC).

Yeah, if you're using Winamp 3, that's been an issue for just about everyone. It's the main reason development on the Winamp 2 branch is still continuing, and tons of people have backpedaled a bit.

I don't care about or want "pretty". I want efficient, simple, and functional. I want the bare minimum necessary to get the job done. VUPlayer meets those desires perfectly.

That desire is fine, but making other non-bare-bones players out to be junk because they look nicer is just stupid.

Yes, they can -- and a bit more -- but I dont' want or need their extra bells and whistles. I just want something that works reliably and efficiently and offers the functionality I care about.

I have around ~10,000 songs in a playlist most days. Winamp handles that fine, doesn't crash, and doesn't slow my system down - hell, when Windows freezes up sometimes, Winamp is the only program that keeps functioning and playing somehow.

The Winamp 2 branch is still under development and I find it nice as well. :-)

I heard Winamp3 was more of a rushed out alpha/beta labelled as "final" than anthing else.

I just installed Winamp 3.0 because it supports Ogg files and I've been sorely disappointed. Can someone recommend a better Ogg player?

Winamp 2.8x or 2.9x is very nice. Better Ogg support than Winamp 3.
If you like Windows Media Player, try OggDS - it will add Ogg support to that.
There's also a plugin for Real Player in development, but I don't think anyone really uses that beyond watching RM streams.

...by giles, the author of Peercast Click here to get peercast
You also need NSV video plugin for Winamp Click here to get Winamp

Audio and video surfing is already here. It's called Winamp 2.91. Yeah it's got shoutcast built in and now a new thing called Internet TV which is basically Nullsoft Public Acces TV. It's starting to catch on too, there are a number of shows ranging from someone getting drive thru at taco bell to shows like Cartoon Network's Auqa Team Hunger Force. So who needs cable when you have a broadband connection.

Audio and video surfing is already here. It's called Winamp 2.91. Yeah it's got shoutcast built in and now a new thing called Internet TV which is basically Nullsoft Public Acces TV. It's starting to catch on too, there are a number of shows ranging from someone getting drive thru at taco bell to shows like Cartoon Network's Auqa Team Hunger Force. So who needs cable when you have a broadband connection.

Ah yes, the GIF patent. That stopped any free software using GIFs.

The MP3 patent's licensing terms don't even prohibit legal Free Software implementations - you pay a one-off licensing fee, and you're fine. There seem seem to be plenty.

The reality is, those patents haven't killed MP3 or GIFs. If anything, it's Ogg Vorbis and PNGs which are an endangered species - not from litigation, but disuse. (The MP3 patent, by the way, is Fraunhofer's - a German group, not US.) Patents or no patents, MP3 and GIF are still the format for that application, and supported by plenty of free/open source programs.

So the future for free software is (and this would be fine with me, except that it doesn't promote either fair use or interoperability) a ghetto of free formats like Ogg.

Unlikely. As I said, we've had MP3 and GIF patents for years without this result - the former from a German company, not a US one - without the result you predict. Why would Europe adopting the US system have this result, when it hasn't happened in the US?

I have A real problem with what AOL has done to my favorite programs. I used ICQ a few years ago, but lost interest when none of my friends used it. (Have you loked at their user database? There must be a hundred million south east aisans!) But even worse has been WinAMP 3.0.

Nullsoft was purchased by AOL long before the latest release. Now WinAMP is not the simple, friendly, llama approved MP3 player it used to be. Now it has a web browser, video abilities, etc etc. I don't want another Microsoft Windows Media Player! Bloated is the word. All that coding for stuff I don't want and the stuff i do want doesn't work because they don't have the time to fully test it. Argh!

Because in addition to being a great, skin-friendly audio player, Winamp now supports video too. It's allowed me the uninstall Windows Media Player (WIMP), which has pissed me off to no end with their EULA crap, and instead use Kazaa Lite codec packs. And now that they've retrofitted Winamp 2 to support video with the release of v2.91, I've rolled back to using that, since there are a lot of cool plugins for that, and I'd rather have the lower CPU requirements. I still know a lot of people who use WiMP, but most of my friends who know about Microsoft's EULA fiasco have opted to use some version of Winamp instead for their video needs.

Try using the Classic Visualization Component. I installed it on a friend's Winamp 3 using that, and it works fine.

winamp 2 is better (to use, can't comment on architecture) and is still being maintained here

I'm not familiar with their build naming conventions, but when you go to winamp.com the first download link is for Winamp 3.

It may be that the most resent verion of winamp3 is called build 2.91 or that 2.91 is a maintenance release of the 2 series, but clearly 3 exists.

e3609e352afba37683c47ce60f9086bb for the waste-setup.exe

554cfa7350333aa4e6eb3b6e24201d80 for the waste-source.zip
5645d0378b5bca6d2cf337686dca9a4d for the waste-source.tar.gz
115d1a2554db4490bdf97b9862df5 a24 for the waste.zip

The Technical Overview for the W.A.S.T.E. package has been coverted into HTML, courtesy of Mr. Lucas Gonze , and it is available at http://gonze.com/waste/WASTE_Design.html

A sourceforge project site has also been set up for the W.A.S.T.E. package. The project site is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/waste/ . It may be empty for the moment, but something will be cooked up very soon.

Below is just a partial list of mirrors for the W.A.S.T.E. package that are currently in operation:

Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package

Winamp 5 = Winamp 2 + Winamp 3

This version will integrate Winamp 3 skin and script support into the Winamp 2.x platform.
This will allow users who do not wish to have complex freeform skins to use classic
Winamp skin(s), with the full performance of Winamp 2.x. Those who wish to use more
advanced Winamp3 skins can do so as well. The integration will be seamless.

More Info at Winamp Forums

You'll have to register for the WinAmp forums first.

Not sure if the poster hacked/altered them first, but at least something appears to be there. I was unable to grab the installer earlier, but I did grab the .zip for the sources earlier. The .zip I grabbed earlier and the .zip posted in said forum match according to the cmp command.

I'm gonna build from the sources myself rather than run the posted .EXE.

You'll have to register for the WinAmp forums first.

Not sure if the poster hacked/altered them first, but at least something appears to be there. I was unable to grab the installer earlier, but I did grab the .zip for the sources earlier. The .zip I grabbed earlier and the .zip posted in said forum match according to the cmp command.

I'm gonna build from the sources myself rather than run the posted .EXE.

Users who have Winamp because it came bundled with other software usually do not have the Full install. The Netscape 7 package comes with (I believe) Standard.

Winamp.com's own comparisons do not mention which package includes Vorbis.

• Winamp 2.9 package options
• Winamp 3 package options

Users who have Winamp because it came bundled with other software usually do not have the Full install. The Netscape 7 package comes with (I believe) Standard.

Winamp.com's own comparisons do not mention which package includes Vorbis.

• Winamp 2.9 package options
• Winamp 3 package options

Yep, guilty on that count myself; been a licensed HAM since undergraduate.

For people who have never gone to the Dayton Hamvention, you are really missing quite an event. I live close to dayton, and try to go every year. They sell all kinds of radios and such, but they also sell tons of computer equipment, and virtually anything electronic... Need an actual working Cellular base station? There's a guy in the parking lot who will sell you one; put it in your truck and haul it home. You'll find that booth right next to one selling old copies of 2600 magazine. Come to think of it, the Hamvention was the first place I saw the famous Winamp plugin Holiday Dancer... playing on 15 monitors at once. That what I call eye catching...

It's a great place to get extra (insert ANY kind of battery here), diagnostic/test equipment, components, antennas... electronic doodads galore. If you're any kind of hardware hacker (particularly Wifi), I'll bet anything you need can be found there.

I'll be there... oh yes.

• added library (complete with media database, shoutcast listing, playlist editing, CD listing, mass tag editting, plugin API for portable devices, and more!)

has a lousy ripping engine. It's also mega-bloatware.

You'll be better off using Winamp instead if all you do is play MP3s. If you want a very good, easy to use and free ripper for Windows, get CDex. Also check out my CD->MP3 guide to help you get high-quality MP3s.

Users who have Winamp because it came bundled with other software usually do not have the Full install. The Netscape 7 package comes with (I believe) Standard.

Winamp.com's own comparisons do not mention which package includes Vorbis.

• Winamp 2.9 package options
• Winamp 3 package options

Users who have Winamp because it came bundled with other software usually do not have the Full install. The Netscape 7 package comes with (I believe) Standard.

Winamp.com's own comparisons do not mention which package includes Vorbis.

• Winamp 2.9 package options
• Winamp 3 package options

and 'uncouple' it's Media Player audiovisual software from the Windows operating system
I wonder if some of the new 'proprietary information' will include some of the WMP technology so that Winamp et. all can play the files properly. At the moment nullsoft is required to not do anything to WMP files but play them - no visualisation etc.

It's already been done... check out mmd3

The second latest "news" item on the Winamp site is their own recommendation service. Go figure.