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The Best of Windows Open Source Software?
Boiotos asks: "I'm cooking up a CD-ROM image of excellent Win32 Open Source software to give to friends and family who are intrigued by the whole OSS movement but don't know where to start. I figure once they're used to Mozilla and AbiWord under WinXP, a Linux partition would be less daunting. So fellow Slashdotters, how about it: what Win32 OSS projects deserve a place on the 650 Mb of Solid Gold? Remember, this is for non-geeks and families, so Cygwin is out (even though I love it) and games are in. Extra points, as always, to the obscure but beautiful. Finally, projects targeting only Win32 -- with no Free Unix crossover -- may apply, but will be subject to a strenuous physical test."
Can you say Tux Racer?
CDex -> for converting their CDs to MP3...
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
www.openoffice.org
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
Free CD Ripper/MP3 Encoder
http://www.cdex.n3.net/
If you can't figure out my address, just drop me an e-mail and I will explain.
to include XBill!!!
a ^= b; b ^= a; a ^= b;
Gnucleus! Open Source gnutella file sharing. For once you can be REALLY sure that there isn't any spyware in your filesharing software!
phoenix, openoffice, oggdrop, for making oggs, the GIMP of course, the list could go on and on and on
I hate sigs.
Does anybody else got the Microsoft add with this article? Are they specially asigned to articles about M$FT or what? That's pretty interesting...
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I cannot imagine anyone using a Windows machine without the magnificent PuTTY ssh, telnet, and rlogin client. It is probably the best ssh programme I have ever had the pleasure of using, and its terminal emulator is superior to most xterms in many ways. Your CD collection would be incomplete without it.
How about a really superb graphics program?
FreeeCiv
OpenOffice
and WinGimp
I would love to hear more from everyone else.
Is this thing on?
(n/t)
Isn't it ironic that these two, umm, articles, hit the same night?
Good lord use 700/80 disks!
Celestia has to be some of the most awesome software Ive ever used. You can navigate the cosmos and it looks absolutely incredible! This would be a program I would use to show people how cool OSS is.
As someone who uses Photoshop now and then, I can't get the GIMP. It all just feels wrong. I'm sure it contains almost all the functionality ('the hard part') of Photoshop, but the UI is so completely different.
Photoshop's UI is very standard - a single MDI window. How hard would it be to create a GIMP addon/port that replicated Photoshop's interface principles (without going so far that Adobe can sue) - things like having floating toolbars over a background window. Some people might like the GIMP's multiple-parent-window architecture, I'm sure, but most I know are repulsed about it. (It reminds me of Visual Basic 2.0.)
If you give Windows people GIMP, they will either be used to MS Paint get confused, or be used to Photoshop and get confused. Some people will say "Well, they should be willing to learn something new", but I think that the Windows graphics program paradigm is better, and it's GIMP that needs the change.
Jedit is pretty amazing.
The required ROMS make it kind of a gray app. But the full source IS available...
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
that is my idea. I own it. I sue you now.
under the DMCA biatch. its mine. cease and desist!
Have a look at the U of Washington Biostat StatCD which puts Xemacs, R, Ghostscript, a LaTeX implementation and a ton of other things, incl. Cygwin, onto two cds.
Don't forget good old Apache/Perl/PHP. Just in case they want to publish their own website or whatever.
A good way to convince them not to install Microsoft IBS(Internet Bug Server).
Certainly you should go all out and use a 700MB/80Minute CD and get them all the software they can handle!! ;)
libertarianswag.com
X-Chat is available as windows builds, works great.
I'm pretty sure there's a FreeCiv client for Windoze. That way, when they make the switch (we can hope, right?), they'll have a little something familiar to jump into and play with...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
I don't think the fact that it's open source is what's going to keep your family away from Linux. It probably has more to do with the fact that, for the unititiated, Linux can be confusing as hell.
My computer usage is pretty much limited to games, web browsing, office work, and some image and video editing for school. I'm all for the idea of open source-- Mozilla's my browser of choice-- but installing and configuring Linux is beyond me. And I'm 20, so I've been using computers for about half my life.
In short, open source isn't the roadblock to Linus usage. Just a thought.
Also a very addictive game called crack attack, which runs on windows and linux, and is under the GPL:
Crack Attack
Other things that you should consider include Python and PyGame (don't forget SDL as well!).
[x]Chat runs under windows (native), and is the only irc I'd consider using (beats the hell out of mirc).
Putty is an open source ssh/telnet client. Its possibly the best telnet client for use under windows. Then again, could anything be worse than C:\Windows\Telnet.exe ?
I've probably missed quite a few good ones, but these are things I seriously like.
A little overkill never hurt anybody.
Kmeleon http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/ the 0.65 beta is really nice.
when you've got Audacity!
"Don't worry, it's not loaded." --Terry Kath
Can't say enough about this gem! My all-time favorite Solitaire package. MUST be included!
virtualdub
Hi, I'm putting together a cd of free software that I plan on selling on ebay. I'm lazy and I don't want to actually do any leg work, so please slashdot, make me a quick dollar and tell me about some good *free* software that I can sell on my 10,000 programs for windows for 99 cents.
Oh and if you're interesed you can find the listing at . . .
hehe
Aggie is an open source news aggregator. Basically, you give it the URL to your favorite RSS feeds, it downloads and parses them, and then builds a web page with the headlines. The really nice thing about it is that it supports RSS autodiscovery, so in many cases, you can simply provide the URL to the site itself, and it will find the RSS feed for you.
It does not use the GPL, but its license is considered open source by the OSI definition.
Another caveat is that it is written in C# and thus requires the .NET framework to run, so it isn't portable to other operating systems (not yet, at least). The upside is that the C# source code is fairly easy to follow, even for a dunce like me.
FreeAmp plays MP3 and Ogg.
FileZilla is a fantastic opensource FTP client. There is also a FTP server component, which is just as good. It's much better than any shareware client out there.
Donald Roeber
Generating 2048 Bits of Randomness...
PuTTy
OpenSSH
Snort
nmapnt
OpenOffice
OpenOffice
Its not specific for Win32 but O'Reilly Networks has created a Open Source Java Directory. Java runs fine on Windows :D
http://www.onjava.com/pub/q/java_os_directory
Now if there was just a good open source jvm...
Win their porn viewing win their hearts
Blender can now go on your list, as they've reached their 100k. It is my impression that the sources should be opened Pretty Soon now. They whole 3d graphics system or game engine may not appeal to Joe Average, but his kids will eat it up. Face it, how many of us originally got into programing so that we could make our own games?
For the "Windows Only" Software:
jzip (http://www.bytamin-c.com/Source/) - this is an unzipper, and a great replacement for WinZIP.
For the Windows and Unix world try:
Gimp for windows (http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/)
And don't forget the games!
The game of Go for windows (http://www.public32.com/games/go/)
The Windows GNU gaming zone: (http://wggz.sourceforge.net/)
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
I'm not criticizing here...I'm just curious. Why do so many people think of Open Source Software, namely Linux, as some kind of religion that they have to "convert" people to?
Gotta give 'em GIMP. Better than Photoshop - FREE!
www.sjbaker.org
http://www.virtuawin.com/
Fast, free, and source code is available. Kicks butt.
Don't get me wrong: I loooooooooooooooooooooove Mozilla (use it on FreeBSD, got 2002090017 build -- latest I could find) and was really hoping to convert him to Mozilla (and then to LInux....mwuahahahahah!) I'm just wondering if anyone else has had similar problems.
I know this is pretty damned useless as a diagnosis: I work on helpdesk for an ISP, and I always hate it when someone calls and says "My thing doesn't work with my other thing. Why?" I'm just wondering if Mozilla + Printers + Win98 == Kaboom! is a common thing, or just One Of Those Things.
Anyhow, maybe throw in a copy of K-Meleon, or Ethereal if they want to see what browser everyone else is using :-).
Carousel is a lie!
CDex is the best damn CD ripper I've ever used. Period. It's better than all of the commercial, shareware, freeware, EVERYTHING I've tried.
It's open source, it doesn't have a *nix version, but it gets even more open source points for having integrated Vorbis encoding (1.0 baby, YEAH!!)
It gets my vote.
Cygwin.
An excellent 'free' dvd player VideoLAN.
The download page is here.
The win32 binaries (Latest Windows self-installing packages) are here.
DC++
I like filezilla and filezilla server, ZSNES (okay, maybe they don't count... oh, well), VirtualDub, CDex, Dev-C++, UPX (although the last two probably won't apply in this case)... there are a few others but I can't remember right now. Open Office, except they have some pretty annoying bugs.
Danish != nationality
Text-based interactive fiction contains some of the most amazing games ever made, and most are free.
There are several different IF environments -- TADS and Inform are the most popular, playable by TADS and Frotz, respectively.
There are many incredible games for both, but two of my favorites are Babel and Toonesia. This type of game loses most of its value if you cheat -- most of the value of the game is in gameplay.
Give it a shot, and rack your brains...and don't get eaten by a grue.
May we never see th
Sorry for being a discompassionate b****d, but what does this have to do with OSS?
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
How about Cygwin? X for Cygwin?
gcc or djgcc or something to let people do free development for windows - kdevelop ported to Win32?
vim!!! (though that may not be a good idea for people who have never seen VI
Does Blender have a win port?
Apache - how to have a safer web server.
VNC - for people who want to do work from home (or abuse works high speed connection)
I hadn't been a GAIM fan before, but there is a Win32 port out (not perfect), but it does have the tabbed conversation window thing going on, which may impress those used to standard AIM interface. If you've got a couple spare meg, toss it on. :)
creation science book
The last three or four betas (don't blame me for the versioning) have been rock solid. CDex 1.50 beta 7 is the best CD ripper Windows has, by a long chalk.
- Chris
...throwing in the SUSE demo that runs from CD. This way they can do more than just wonder, and it won't involve reworking their HD in the process. After all, the goal is to get them off Windows, not make them so comfortable they'll stay.
Or is this some ploy from another MS shill, looking for ideas, and/or converts to drink yet more of the kookaid....
The home page is at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/
Anyone who's ever used it has got to agree. It's just that simple.
I know you mentioned getting them used to Mozilla, but Opera's a damned good browser too (personally, I think it's better, but hey, that's just me). And the Win32 version and linux version are damned near identical.
I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting, but that's a good start. Hopefully other posters will list their faves...
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
Even though it isn't for linux - it is GPL and therefor OSS.
http://www.phpedit.net/
Quite a good prog - even though I dont use windows anymore.
Beyond that Quanta is a great program that does the same stuff - but for linux.
Derek
I propose a CD with stuff like Photoshop, Premiere, Visual Studio...oh, you said free...sorry...
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Virtual Dub rules. If you do any work with video on Windows, it is essential.
Virtual Dub is much more stable and its interface is much more streamlined than most other free software. Plus it has probably the most robust AVI read/write code ever offered. Out-of-spec files that crash other video programs, Virtual Dub chews 'em up and spits 'em out.
K-Meleon is a nice little Win32 web browser that uses the Gecko rendering engine from the Mozilla project. Though still just a bit rough around the edges, it is an impressive piece of work; it is quite fast, and very customizable. The latest beta versions include tabbed browsing, a feature I can't live without. If they add URL autocomplete, the browser will be very suitable for day-to-day use.
The development team appears to be rather small, and they release infrequently. I recommend grabbing the last beta release, and not the last public release, which is old.
I believe that K-Meleon is released under the GPL.
Virtualdub is excellent video editing software. Easy to get started with and *very* powerful. I use it to back up all of my DVDs. Give it a try.
Space may be the final frontier, but it's made in a Hollywood basement. --Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication
Oh right. Just send us the source then and it can go on the disk.
What's that Lassie? The troll forgot to hit Post Anonymously before that one?
- Chris
One word. Pysol.
Greatest solitaire card game(s) ever.
Aragorn
Its certainly great that id has come out with their source code time after time. With projects such as Doomsday,Tenebrae Quake, and Legacy, id has given their old games eternal life even for their old M$ operating system base. If anything should be on your list, put the 4 released source games because they might be some of the most influential open source games for the windows platform even today.
I wrote a little utility that allows you to have window transparency under Windows 2000 and XP. It's called Vitrite, and it's licensed under the GPL.
It certainly isn't in the same league as Mozilla and OpenOffice, but you'll definately have room for it on your CD (only 85 KB).
And yes it's the same utility I've been pimping in my sig for months now.
They've already got a demo version out for linux for client AND server. Even though the FAQ site doesn't say it, one would THINK that would mean that UT2003 will be released with the windows version (or shortly thereafter).
The Windows port of the Vim editor is a sine qua non. Except for not being able to use interesting pipe commands, the PC port will do anything in the world one might want to do with a text document, and it has just enough GUI functionality to be useful without being intrusive.
Libcurl available here
http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/
If you create Windows apps and you don't want to rely on windows tranfer/internet protocals Curl is the way to go.
shadash
VNC is the greatest remote administration suite to date IMHO, and is cross platform...
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Okay, so I might be narrowing it down a bit too much but don't non-geeks and family members simply want to be able to surf the net, read their emails and write documents and possibly use a speadsheet.
If this is so then Open Office and Mozilla satisfy those needs.
Some will want to rip and listen to MP3s in which case throw CDEX on but as a player it is not up to the Winamp/MusicMatch quality.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
PGP International offers a nice, friendly, easy to use set of encryption tools. This includes a VPN (for a secure network layer) and nifty things like a quick encrypt for clipboard contents.
PGP for Windows
GNU unix utilities for Windows is very useful. You get stuff like tar, gunzip, and md5sum. Sometimes the simpleness of command-line programs is preferrable to shareware GUIs.
Many open source Jabber clients are available, so maybe you can get your friends to use open source software with an open instant messaging protocol!
Personally, I use PSI when using Windows, but there are others out there that may be just as good. I do believe, though, that Psi is cross-platform, which may be a plus.
I can see it now...
Me: Okay Grandma here's Putty, it's for connecting to my servers via ssh/sftp/ftp or telnet.
Grandma: [confusion on face] what was that honey?
Me: Oh come on now Grandma don't be coy. You know you've been secretly sshing into my servers to check your AOL mail via Pine.
Grandma: [with a look on her face like she just smoked a QP of weed] huh?
Me: Grandma? You still in there?
I can see it now Putty for the family, everyone huddled around the PC roasting chestnuts, securing their linux boxes, checking top to see current system utilization, running ps to see if there are any runaway processes...
lol, great post, PuTTY. I've got tears man, tears!
My own project - A chess client</shameless plug>
Well, there's always Amaya, W3C's HTML editor/browser. I think they have a Win32 build.
Amaya's been around for a long time, but not many people know about it, which is a real shame. It's a nice HTML editor, and produces very clean, HTML 4.0 compliant code. It supports CSS, and many other related web technologies. Check it out.
OpenOffice.org
Miranda ICQ
Mozilla
Putty
XNview
Audacity
TuxRacer
GLTron
Povray
FreeCiv
Kakepad
FileZilla
Xchat
CDex
All GPL (I believe), and hopefully I didn't include anything too geeky.
Win32 ONLY. GPL'd. Skinable. Been using it for about a month.
Coolplayer Hompage
CDex was the first OS project for windows (besides mozilla) that popped into mind. But if the idea is to make a CD to "educate" people into using OSS, then it would be a good idea to advocate the use of OGG/Vorbis - with CDex in this case.
Most Windows users start out with MS Paint{,brush}. Compare this to the GIMP. Then compare it to Photoshop.
Paint has the right idea in my Book of UI Design for Image Editors - a 'full screen' workspace for your image, tools that are kept outside the image, and menus that are accessed from the top of the screen.
Photoshop take that one step further with tabbed palletes (as this comment says, perhaps that can't be replicated exactly without infringing copyright laws) - however, I expect with a few hours of work, someone familar with the GIMP could write a more usable (in this case, yes I mean more Windows-friendly) UI for it, moving all the menus to a MDI style application. Take THAT app and package it on your Windows OSS CD.
GIMP has all the hard work done - the image tools are great, and wingimp claim to have 90% of PS's functionality. And you can't complain about 0% of the price.
Windows people would only get confused by The GIMP. It looks like crap so normal users don't bother figuring out how to use it. Sure, some learning is always a good thing, but the interface is not only (IMO) counter-intuitive, it goes against the established norm, in a way that could be very easily fixed.
You basically need these :
For browsing : Mozilla - install the calendar plugin too and modify the start HTML page so people are directed to www.mozdev.org and encouraged to install plugins like multizilla and optimoz - the point is to PROVE it's better than IE.
Office : OpenOffice
Imaging : The Gimp
Also,
Bookmark Priest - It's not OSS, but it's free and will help migrate bookmarks from Opera and IE to Mozilla.
You also have the "War FTP Daemon" server which is an excellent server for the slightly adventurous.
Gnucleus - for file sharing - I couldn't recommend a better or more stable program.
What we REALLY need though is open-source Anti-virus.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net
This is one of the best deinterlacers around. It makes the output from my video capture card just amazing. I hear that when paired with an SDI input card and an appropriate DVD player, the quality beats just about everything out there.
Someday someone will port it, or at least more of their algorithms, back to linux.
www.virtualdub.org
VirtualDub is one of the most impressive pieces of free, open-source Windows software I have ever come across...I haven't found any commercial product that comes close to replacing it's overall feature set, robustness, and just general utility.
"VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (98/NT/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters."
Open Source Software for Windows
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
Though I don't think that's quite the niche you are going for...
sic transit gloria mundi
During the summer, I suggested to my local Unix Users Group that we put together a campaign on campus dubbed "Software for Starving Students." The idea is that we would advocate the use of Free Software among the student body at BYU.
The ball got rolling, and we put together a CD image that we burned and handed out to students from a booth in the student center. We selected OpenOffice, Mozilla, The Gimp, BZFlag, and AbiWord in the most recent incarnation.
Last week, we gave out 400 copies of the CD from the booth. I mentioned to the group that if we did the math the way Microsoft does math, with each disc, we saved a student around $1,300. The 400 copies from last week combined with the 180 copies we gave out during the summer comes to around 3/4 of a million dollars with of savings to the student body! :-)
I, of course, took every opportunity to explain to passerby who accepted the disc about the multiple meanings of the word "free." The club president was making people promise to copy the software and give it to their friends in exchange for receiving the disc. Our Linux Install Fest last Saturday kept the classroom packed with students who heard about Linux and wanted us to install it on their computers for them.
I'm happy to say that we're doing our part to keep Linux from getting "stomped."
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
ncftp is a must have.
I'd like to nominate Anna the Chatbot, licensed under the GPL. Sure, it requires Java 2 1.4 to run, but it can be quite the way to kill some time.
And there are some lonely evenings when - waaaait....Let's not go there......
The last time I checked (which was several months ago) Egoboo wasn't quite ready for prime time, but it's fun enough that I doubt anybody will care and the installation and setup was painless. It's certainly a project to keep an eye on.
VNC for several platforms.
In the same vein, isn't Limewire open source?
May we never see th
Someone with the skills (unlike myself) and looking for something that people will appreciate your work for if you port it, this is the project of the decade. Ok, maybe not the decade, but certainly this year! :-)
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
It's witty, addictive, great fun and runs on pretty much on all specs.
I'm still waiting for the OS X port, though.
GLTron is one of the coolest free games out there.
SetupWeasel
How dare you call Angband the best when everybody know there is only Dungeon Crawl and it's name is NetHack, amen!
May the RNG (praise be upon they name) smite thee, infidel!
I will name the next purple worm after you before I slay it.
And NetHack is of course available for Win32 on www.nethack.org for downloading.
GUI Secure CoPy
Train those friends and family to use a secure method of transfering files.
Aonther excelent example of good OSS for windows is TortoiseCVS. From its site:
I wish Konqueror/Nautilus had something similar.... really a shame that such a god CVS client has no similar in the linux world.
Here is a link for a win32 port of Xine, a nice video player
http://www.matthewgrooms.net/
Limewire and Jedit are two very nice programs that are GPLed. The programs run pretty fast and run on most popular platforms (being Java). Pretty cool when your P2P software has the same interface on Linux, Solaris, and Windows. Having the same interface makes answering your families' questions rather easy.
Space may be the final frontier, but it's made in a Hollywood basement. --Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication
Please note that there is already a project currently working on this. You may want to combine forces since they've been working on this since this last spring.
Check out the OpenCD project at
http://www.theopencd.org/
You are free to work on your on project of course, but I HATE to see duplication of effort.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
the best of all possible worlds?
Gltron and audacity are the ones that spring instantly to mind
Star Control Timewarp is open source and works on both Windows and Linux
It seems like a great flight sim, but you apparently need a pretty fast computer (either that or I don't have opengl set up where it can find it)
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
Dude, the last few versions of CDex are just dandy under XP. I suugest you pay a visit to SourceForge and download the latest build. Then you can off MusicMatch to /dev/null (yeah, I KNOW it doesn't exist in Win. That's 'cos Win IS /dev/null).
I have CDex dancing like Gene Kelly on my XP notebook. It's one of the few things on my checklist keeping using Windows (although our in-house Linux guru almost has me convinced...)
If you need help, contact me off the boards.
Trib
I understand that the GIMP has a decidedly different UI from what Windows users are accustomed to...heck, different from GNOME.
However, I simply cannot agree on the MDI modification.
First, GIMP's current UI is very good for multiple viewports, where you can spread it out across multiple desktops. MDI would take that away. Even on a single viewport you can put some palletes in the back if you don't need them.
Second, one common complaint about GIMP is its complete and utter lack of modality. There are no dialog boxes that come up and prevent you from doing things. In the middle of setting some plugin settings? Just flip to another window and do some other work. This can get confusing to people that are used to Photoshop -- but I'm quite certain that while this approach is unfamiliar, it's much better. You're never locked in to doing a particular step.
Finally, it would be nice to have "palette" style windows, but unfortunately X11 doesn't support a palette (or in Mac OS UI terms, a "windoid") window style. It would be incredibly nifty if it did...
May we never see th
The Windows Toolbox:3 2/the-software.htm
www.thegoldenear.connectfree.co.uk/gg/toolbox/win
"...a compilation of fundamental software and information for Windows (95,98,Me,NT4,2K,XP):
a comprehensive tool set to enable you to work with the diverse and popular media of a modern personal computer system; patch holes in such systems to enhance stability and security; & diagnose software & hardware environments so as to help in their repair. using as few resources as possible
The tools, organised by subject area, include software & documentation; chosen both for their superior functionality & by a moral bias toward the fairer means of production, distribution & use, namely Free Software, Open Source, Freeware, Shareware, etcetera. For example, in a food context this might roughly translate to one or more of the following: locally produced, seasonal, organic, free from animal cruelty and fairly traded, by people working co-operatively"
...meeting the "non-geek" challenge is harder. Most OSS I use on Windows is command-line. I've got to have InfoZIP's CLI zip utilities or my Windows box just isn't complete. Note, they have a GUI client called "Wize" or something like that, but unless it's improved a lot within the past few months I can't recommend it. Of course gzip and bzip2 or important too, but that's even more geeky than the CLI zip.
Then of course there is Gifsicle for making animated GIFs. I like it so much I'm willing to hold my nose on the GPL.
I wouldn't be afraid to recommend Apache for Windows at this point either. I actually found it *easier* to deal with than any "personal webserver" put out by MSFT. Maybe that's just me.
Of course, these are all CLI (or non-gui config for Apache). If you are serious about doing a commercial OSS for Windows CD, you need to include a 90-10 tutorial for your CLI software. By this, I mean giving the users examples that show the 10% of CLI options that provide 90% of the functionality. Gifsicle has at least 15 options (probably more), and I think I used about 3 of them to produce some killer animated GIFs.
Then of course there are the browser, office tools, GIMP etc. that others have suggested. However, none of that GUI OSS has lasted long on my machine. ABIword is the exception. I think I put it to actual use *once* to bang out a simple letter for my Dad. Nothing against ABIword; it's just that for some strange reason no GUI OSS has really worked its way into my heart.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Miranda of course. It's an open-source IM client that currently supports ICQ, and MSN, a Yahoo plugin is also in the works. It's lightweight, incredibly customizable and no stupid ad anywhere.
You might want to include VirtualDub, in case they want to do some simple encoding or audio ripping from videos, or just to find out what damn codec a video file uses.
Lastly, there's Litestep for those who want a prettier and more customizable shell.
I'm suprised to see that no one talked about the OpenCD project... http://www.theopencd.org/ I always use the list as reference to get most (free) Win32 applications i need... Even if the project looks dead now (not much messages on the developpement mailing list), it's a good start for that "650 megs of solid gold"
I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
...ISO available? Just curious as I'd like to have such thing myself. ER .
TheOpenCD project's ambitious mission statement was "To compile and distribute A CD-ROM containing a selection of high quality open source software for use on proprietary operating systems." They got so far as coming up with a great list of open source software. Since then, the project seems to have died completely. I think it is very important to the open source community that a project like this is completed. Who's up for getting it going again?
Make sure to include .url files to freshmeat and SourceForge so when they feel more comfortable with open source, they can go here for more.
I thought you only trolled! What's with the good suggestions?
Getting his karma up. A fellow who has negative karma can't post more than 2 comments per 24 hours, right?
If you like text editors, JEdit is great and it crosses over because it is java. Another java app is LimeWire, a gnutella client.
I'm surprised nobody meantioned Apache. A web server is a usefull thing to somebody with broadband.
A good game is freeciv, a Civilization knock off.
There's an identical project under way at TheOpenCD.org, where they already voted for applications to be included, and have a categorized list, with links and reviews, including rating for documentation, ease-of-use, appearance...
And don't forget to check out GNU Software for Windows
perl -pi -e "s/.*(vfat|ntfs|msdos).*\n//g" /etc/fstab
and a little bit of resize2fs or growe2fs magic ( it was growe2fs, wasn't it? i'm sitting on a rh7.3 box right now )....
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
Did anyone actually read the article?
This is a Family with non-developers.
They were not interested in running webservers, developing apps with gcc or writing PHP code.
They probably want office-suits, webbrowsers, mp3 players, games, dvd-players. The common "family computer tools".
i do a lot of trading of taper/trader friendly bands. furthurnet is definitely cool. it's a p2p app that allows for searching of bands, show dates, sources, etc, etc, etc. it's pretty cool. it's open source too. it's ported to both linux and windows (not hard since it was written in java, which is the only bad thing about it). it also uses pcp (packet chain protocol) so users can piggy-back off each other. it's pretty cool. i wish more people with the shows i want used it though.
please me, have no regrets.
virtual dub video editor
all the sysinternals programs useful system utilities
miranda icq clone
well since i was looking for freeamp the other day and i noticed it wasn't around any more, i found another free as in both speech and beer open source mp3 player. it's called zinf
freeamp is good just wish the website was still around. zinf seems to be the exact same thing tho just with a name change.
I have a feeling that most Windows folks would roll their eyes at Nethack's ASCII graphics. I know, I speak sacrilege, but we can win over the infidels with the delights of the Falcon's Eye Nethack wrapper.
One tip though, if you are trying to run the latest CVS version in linux, edit the gui/run file and change all the semicolons to colons in order for limewire to run on Linux.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this one yet. DScaler is a fine GPL'ed BT8x8 tuner and video deinterlacer for Win32. It certainly beats the pants off of the ATI crap that came with my card, and looks and performs better than xawtv for me. All in all, a 10/10 in my book.
I place the blame squarely upon tight pants.
I used CDex last year in a production project: large batches of interviews on CD and MD had to be converted (or recorded into the computer for the MD files) to MP3, cleaned and edited.
CDex never showed a single glitch. It was fast, clean and easy to use. CoolEdit, the proprietary program used to treat the sound files, on the other hand, had problems saving MP3 (it would cut the last few seconds of a file).
The Open CD Project
Psi, the Jabber client
A good music player - how's freeamp doing these days?
Don't forget the emulators!
The Best http://lgames.sourceforge.net/index.php?project=LB reakout2
I just installed mandrake 6.0 (yeah i know 9.0 is out, just a coincidence.)
SOrry for being Offtopic, but how do I change resolutions in mandrake 6.0? I have like a 3xx by 3xx resolution so can't figure anything out! I need to have at least 1024 going then I will be able to figure out the gui because right now I can't see the whole screen.
Thank you guys!
Cover your eyes and click this link!
so, ummm, there.
- Chris
Tux Racer is on Windows, too. And ZSNES is perhaps the finest, most user-friendly emulator available.
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
Here is a list of software I install on all my company laptops.
h am/putty/
/
r g
trillian (multi-IM client)
http://www.trillian.cc/
metapad (text editor)
http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/
opera (web browser, email client...)
http://www.opera.com
putty (ssh client)
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtat
phoenix (web browser)
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix
xxcopy (better than xcopy) I use it in my backup batch files.
http://www.xxcopy.com
Here is a list of a few websites that I frequent for free windows software.
http://www.shellcity.net
http://www.tinyapps.o
http://www.freewarehome.com
-- Andy
ffdshow is an open-source MPEG-4 video decoder that handles all of the various DivX :-) variants as well as XVid and MPEG4v1/2/3. The big upside of it is that it's easy to install and is far more reliable and less intrusive than the poorly-assembled codec packs floating around out there. If you only want to view movies made with those codecs, then it's by far the best choice.
I'm trying to figure out what I started with, and I wonder if I differed significantly from everybody else, though I'm probably a more recent learner than most people who post her. I basically started with a terminal and a non-working video card. After that worked and X was up, I stuck to ssh, pico, and a browser. Mozilla's the way to go there.
Also, I think about the functions I wanted when I switched to GNU/Linux. Basically, for the normal user that i was, I wanted an AIM client (gaim and AIM both work in windows and linux), a media player (mplayer became it, though there are many others), an office program/suite (staroffice works, I hear openoffice also rocks), an email program (mozilla has one, but there are others), and an mp3 player (winamp now works in Linux, and who can leave out xmms).
In the games area, UT, UT2003, and Quake3 all work in Linux. If the target audience is not into FPS games, then Tuxracer also has a working windows port demo, and GLTron is cool. That's pretty much what I started with, and all but mplayer really have ports to both. That's all I can think of offhand, though I'm sure I missed something.
(You'll have to wait until the code source is actually free, though, which should be Oct. 12th.)
We've always been at war with Eurasia.
Miranda ICQ....... biznatch!h
http://notesbydave.com/toolbar/doc.htm - one tool worth its space on the taskbar, and open source too.
HexEdit is pretty handy, there's a free version:
http://www.expertcomsoft.com/
____
Zig!
-----
For great justice!
nt
Are they casual bussiness users, or they programmers, gamers, artists, or hobbests?
The reason why I am asking this, is because their is so much software that is designed for so many different things. If your friend is an artist, would he or she like Perl? I think not. However, that person might love learning the gimp or blender.
For hobbiests, I recommend litestep because the gui looks cool and they like to tinker with things, as well as apache and the gimp. Apache is cool for those hobbiests who run their own web servers. If you have high speed internet access try SuSe's live-cd. It boots suse linux from the cd and does not install anything on the hard drive. This makes it safe for newbies to goof around.
For programmers, I would recommend perl, python, ruby, gvim, jtext, and netbeans. Gvim for win32 comes with an easy-mode so that even your mother can use it. Basically it always stays in edit mode. Of course without learning the special commands it may seem simplistic and outdated to a newbie. Emacs users please do not start a flame war. I am sorry but their is no easy-mode that I am aware of for the win-32 version of Xemacs. If their is then feel free to flame me and I will recommend Xemacs be included as well to make things fair. Jtext might be a better solution because its all point and click. Also Win-32 developers would feel right at home with the Netbeans ide. Support for other langages besides java is now being included. This makes this ide hot! You may want to include the win-32 version of gcc if its mature enough. Last I heard it still was quite far behind the unix version but it sure beats paying for an ms compiler. Last but not least their is free database software like mysql which would be great for any newbie programmer who wants to learn sql but can not afford SQL-server or Oracle.
For office users, the only thing I could recommend is openoffice. Of course he/she probably already has ms-office so this might not appeal. Windows is designed from the ground up as an office OS. THey would probably prefer windows over linux untill paladium and product activation per pc becomes the norm.
Gamers would not be interested in any free software I can think of unless they are interested in game development. Where they would like all the things I mentioned above for "programmers".
Artists would like blender, and the gimp.
Last but not least, for computer professionals I would recommend cygwin from redhat's website. It really is a unix in windows and included bash, gcc, apache, vim, emacs, mysql,postgresql, etc. Great to learn unix and have a taste of unix. Of course I recommend to actually use linux if you need to do any unix related work because linux is a native environment. Some packages do not compile properly under cygwin like they do in a native unix environment and unix and windows have different models for threads and processes causing some cygwin compilied apps ( cough cough apache) to perform poorly. However the new native win-32 version of apache2 is more Windows friendly.
Oh, I found a few cool free mp3/ogg rippers from tucows. I believe its called FreeRip.
So basically to sum it up its FreeRip, jtext, gvim, netbeans, apache, mysql, cygwin, Perl, Python, Ruby, openoffice, mozilla, blender and the gimp.
http://saveie6.com/
So is AMP going to go after WinAmp next? Friggin Tyco anyway, bastards. If they don't soon fire all the thieves at the top, their whole little empire will go belly up, then AMP will be available again.
You should definately take a look at the OpenCD project
http://www.theopencd.org/thelist/
All software to be included in the CD must be Open Source (OSI approved license).
The CD does not include Cygwin only programs or programs that require an XServer.
Don't know if it would be considered open source but the best email that I have found is Pegasus Mail.
Hope he's not planning on putting this cd together quickly... just /.'d all the mirrors for these pacakages real good.
- Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
This has probably got to be one of the most addicting games I've ever played, Crack Attack! It's open source, works in windows and linux, uses open gl, and it's a game based on tetris attack. The score to beat on the site (4135 I think) is actually from one of my friends, we play this game all the time. It has very nice multiplayer support and a game browser is in the works (although probably in the distant future.
You'll spend weeks playing to get the highest score on the list, then you spend even more time trying to get 1000. The game is sure to keep anyone entertained for hours.
Dev-C++ is a very nifty development environment.
And for AbiWord / OpenOffice - take both! I use primarily AbiWord 'cause it's so light, and OpenOffice when I need something more advanced.
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
http://virtualdub.sf.net
It's an excellent tool for manipulating video files. It has the ability to do batch conversions, and for some tasks, is faster then Ulead MediaStudio Pro or Adobe Premiere. While the amount of things you can do with it is limited, if it does what you need, it's a great tool to do it with. Plus it's not squimish about using any codecs you have on your system.
SSL Certificate
Probably not much call for remote control software for most end-users, but MS is promoting it in XP for consumers to use when calling up helpdesks, so VNC is a great GPLed solution.
http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/
Politas
Armagetron is a great 3D version of tron! I love it! Slick graphics and awesome sound effects and gameplay. I recommend the latest beta version, since the stable one doesn't have a good AI.
Any Windows machine would be useless without a copy of solitaire, although you will need Python.
http://jedit.org The best free, open-source, cross-platform, programmer's text editor available!!! I switched from UltraEdit and TextPad to jEdit about 2 years ago. I code for a living. jEdit is awesome! Customizable to the extreme baby!
Meh.
...is WINE.
Too bad there's no port of WINE to Windows.
On a more serious note, the word processors and office-productivity software of the OSS world need exposure to the unwashed masses. It's here that there is the greatest dependence on Microsoft among average users. If you go by the theory that joe user wants a computer for applications and not operating systems (my personal theory, and I think MS's as well, which I think is why they are always trying to conflate the OS and its applications), then what one should do is get them hooked onto the applications they use. It's just a tiny leap from there to running the same application over a different OS.
Seriously, sometimes I doubt why OS's matter at all if one simply wants to use a computer for ordinary work. It seems totally irrelevant what OS is being run, as long as it meets some basic criterion for stability and performance. Only serious applications need careful choice of OS.
basically it spent more time crashing than working. Maybe it has improved dramatically in that department
What version did you try? On Windows 98se, Windows ME, and Windows 2000, GIMP 1.2.3 mostly WORKSFORME. I haven't tried the new version 1.2.4 however.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Snes9x is a great Super Nintendo emulator, and is open source. Although you'll have to find some roms, but they're out there.
-----
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for making Gimp for windows possible.
I eagerly await the day when i can include GoBe Productive on this list, it is really 'suite' (if you will forgive the pun).
A great little multiplatform Postscript and PDF (Acrobat) viewer.
Here's the Ghostscript, home page, and the GSview-specific page.
-- Alastair
Since when? Did aliens kidnap Gates and Balmer and replace them with clones?
This space left intentionally blank.
Seriously -- if the idea is to make a Linux partition seem less daunting, put the Win32 version of Vim on there. It won't take up too much room (about 3.7 MB or so as of version 6.1) and it's a very straightforward install. Reasons for including vim? Well:
1) Every UNIX machine in the world has vi on there somewhere. Emacs may or may not be installed, depending on the preference of the sysadmin. But if you at least know four or five basic editing & navigation commands in vi, then you'll be fine if you wind up trying to use a strange UNIX system somewhere.
2) You can actually describe it in a way that won't be horrifically intimidating. Tell them it's a replacement for Notepad with a lot more features. And you can use the mouse if you want, but there's keyboard shortcuts for everything: once you learn them, you'll be twice as fast with Vim as with any other editor.
3) Vim's built-in tutorial (":help tutor") -- I wouldn't even mention it as a possibility without this one.
Yeah, a lot of people will hate Vim and run back to Notepad. But if they try it and get at least as far as finishing the tutorial, they won't be COMPLETELY lost when they first try Linux and have to edit a text file.
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
until the next time dubbya (or indeed any subsequent president) needs an excuse to distract the masses from the fact that theres an election coming up.
history can be useful sometimes.
I just searched my one Win2K system and realized that all of the software on there is crap. Except for Putty, WinSCP, and HTML-Kit.
http://jedit.org
Try it out.
Meh.
my LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql PHP) box cost me exactly the price of the hardware.
can you do me a quote for an equivalent IIS/ASP/ODBC box?
cheers.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
http://tuxracer.sourceforge.net/
Politas
RocksnDiamonds, excellent game for younger (and older) people. http://artsoft.org/rocksndiamonds/
Dave
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You are limited to only 24 bits
That's a problem for some, but not for me. I work in mostly web graphics and video game graphics, which are often dithered down to 16 or 256 colors anyway.
If there is color management or matching in this
No. The good algorithms for doing that are patented in the United States, and the Free Software Foundation is headquartered in the United States.
or any other program available on Linux I'd like to know about it.
If you buy Codeweavers products, perhaps they could improve Wine to the point where it can run most of Adobe Photoshop.
I'm not sure if the gamma and curve control is adequate, although given the first two limitations, it doesn't really matter.
Gamma (Image > Colors > Levels...) and curves (Image > Colors > Curves...) work for me.
BTW, is anybody working on a deep color rewrite of the gimp?
A rewrite of GIMP based on GEGL (a more generic graphics library) is in the works. I don't know whether or not GEGL supports deep color.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's a little rough, but Fwink is a great replacement for webcam32 that runs on Windows. It's even packaged in a nicely polished msi installer.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
VirtualDub and TMPEG! Those two programs are awe-inspiringly cool. Especially the plugins for VD. Good stuff!
Oh, and MAME kicks ass.
Yeah, Blender is cool. It does help if you have some kind of manual to get started, though. ("The Blender Book" -- Linux Journal Press/No Starch Press -- worked for me) Blender (nor, I imagine, any similar program) doesn't lend itself well to learning by just playing around with it.
-- Alastair
LAME [mp3dev.org], the MP3 encoder that CDex includes
LAME is good, but it still ain't an MP3 encoder. It's the source code to an MP3 encoder. It won't be an MP3 encoder until Fraunhofer's U.S., German, and Japanese patents expire in the early to mid 2010s. Yes, binaries are available, but downloading those may be just as infringing as downloading proprietary console game ROMs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
GLTron is a EXCELLENT rendition of Tron's light cycle game, for up to 4 players. It uses OpenGL and renders a beautiful arena completely faithful to the movie complete with a recognizer flying overhead. It works with up to 4 players, as well.
Also, did anyone mention the GL Quake2 demo?
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
602Suite. Check http://www.software602.com/
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
How do you explain the plethora of X's and Z's in OSS titles? Is it a Unix related thing?
http://BZFlag.org/ ;-)
Tim Riker - http://rikers.org/
I would be very interested to have a copy... Can you post the ISO somewhere for us to burn? I have some interested family members too, as I guess otheres here will have too!
How about gnutella and freenet these can be used
by everyone and IMO are killer apps.
I myself like LimeWire which is Java so I don't know
if it fits the bill.
There are some lovely people in the world that reverse engineered this old game using OSS. This game won game of the year in 1992. Go to http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/sc2/.
Bomb (http://draves.org/bomb/) - definatly fits into the "beautiful" category. From the site...
"Bomb is a visual-musical instrument. It uses alife, and is alife. It runs on your PC and produces animated organic graphics in response to the keyboard, audio music, or on its own."
I do a bit of VJing at dance parties, and this always goes down a treat. Linux and Mac versions avaliable as well.
The partition editor they will need when they decide to switch to Linux :-)
:-)
Oh, actually, don't bother, they won't want to keep their Windows partition anyway, so they can just use fdisk
VirtualDub is in my opinion the best application of its kind, commercial or otherwise. I use it on a daily basis, and it gives me precise and total control over my video processing. Not to mention the unbelievable assembly-optimized speed! VirtualDub is truly the Photoshop of video capture and linear editing.
Those interested in VirtualDub might want to check out the new Unofficial Virtualdub Support Forums. They're a good place to get tips and help if you're just getting started with VirtualDub. Even though they're not "official" VirtualDub forums, VirtualDub author Avery Lee does drop by every once in a while.
(Disclosure: I am one of the volunteer moderators on the site, in the newly inaugurated and not-yet-very-active VirtualDub Development Forum.)
begin 644
Others Here, which is not maintained by myself... not that you know who anonymous is.
When your target audience has a TV card in their computer, be sure to include dscaler
It is a neat program that takes away those ugly interlace lines you can see while watching moving pictures. Only drawback is that it is Windows only and needs a 400MHz+ x86
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
Open source, small, light, and fast.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Replace IE with Mozilla
Replace Works with OpenOffice.org
Replace Paintbrush with the Gimp
Replace the damned Notepad with Emacs (not sure regular joes will ever use it)
and finally, if the need for a good shell ever arises, be sure to get bash installed so that command line interface doesn't get confounded with lameness
I don't feel like it...
Weird, nobody has pointed to http://www.theopencd.org site which kinda does the exact thing you want....
Maybe you could help there.
I guess my favorite things for Windows users have not been created yet.
Remember, this is for non-geeks and families, so Cygwin is out (even though I love it) and games are in.
First, I think that if someone spent the time to create a decent UI-driven Cygwin-based "ports" or similar system empowering non-geek users to get and install the latest software which is runnable on windows, that would really tap into the power of open source for these users.
Second, if Windows users had a rootless XFree86 available to them that they could use (like on Darwin), they could take a much deeper run at UI-based software and not be limited to just a few like Mozilla or OpenOffice that have spent the time to program to the Windows UI. I realize an X-based UI might not be as thrilling, but it makes much larger inroads for the Windows user.
Ever tried Armagetron??
And of course the legendary BZflag, a cool 3D Tank Shooter...
There are several OSS jabber clients that are worth mentioning (don't use them myself though). Then there's fantastic editors such as JEdit and Jext. Since we are entering the area of development tools, netbeans and eclipse also need to be mentioned.
Warftpd is a fantastic ftp deamon under GPL (use it every day). Jdictionary is a nice dictionary app.
Jilles
Understanding the value of the freedom that OSS gives to users is a good thing.
The next step should be to understand that they are free to program their computers.
Most computer users are good candidates for casual programming, but they have no idea how easy it is to write simple scripts to fit the needs of their daily tasks.
Make sure you include ActiveState Batteries Included distribution of Tcl/Tk and make sure that your users run the demos. It can be a revelation for them. It was for me.
--
os trabalhos e os dias: http://zmoreira.net
Quake!
The Windows version is fine, but I couldn't get it to run on Linux (it just crashes the X server).
Include vlc as a great DVD / VCD player, and maybe MPlayer too.
A great open source C#.net IDE written in c#. Not available on *nix (or does it run on mono?). I've been using it to develop c# projects on win2K and it's pretty good AND saves on the Highway Robbery that is VS.NET. here's the c# homepage
Does anyone know of any GPL page layout programs, a la QuarkXPress, that have a decent, stable Win32 port? I've got a friend who's looking for a cheap solution that works on Windows (so everyone can play with it, I guess).
HEY
theres a whole open source project dedicated to producing this very CD - all with a nice purty installer to keep the punters happy.
find it at:
http://www.theopencd.org/
I keep seeing this idea on various forums (in fact Ive had it myself) - if everyone just contributed to this project we could have a great CD of open source software for windows that gets updated every 3 months or so - think a windows distro minus the kernel & windows managers
AVG 6.0 Free Edition
The only downside is that the data file is updated only about once a week, and you have to be careful about which version of the file you get. But I doubt the typical family PC's virus scanner gets updated more than once or twice a year anyway, if ever.
And if they don't run screaming from the room you know you've got some future geeks on your hand. :)
KFG
I really would inlude the text editor "syn" (http://syn.sourceforge.net/), the ftp client "smartftp" (http://www.smartftp.com/) and the zip utility "7-zip" (http://www.7-zip.org/). Have you ever heard of "Trillian" (http://www.trillian.cc)?
free msn client, written in tcl
not nearly as feature reach as original product, but works anyway
http://msn.compucreations.com/
it is most godlike of you to mention this incredible program that I had not ever used before! I cannot believe how cool this is. Especially since I just a week or two ago went searching for such a program (much lower standards had I) and didn't find it. And the contributer sites with all kinds of spacecraft and moon models etc. etc. I have been wanting this program for years!
btw, in my search I did find another very cool program which renders the sky accurately and beautifully, which is also quite impressive. You might like it.
-pyrrho
for the old DOS nostal-geeks...*g*
Great image viewer, simple changes.
Ethereal, FreeAMP, VirtualDub, OpenOffice, DCPlusPlus, Eraser, freshmeat.net is your friend ;-)
POV-Ray is free (as in beer) and comes with the source but it is not under the GPL and the license doesn't meet the requirements of teh Open Source definition.
Go for it. Use it. But please don't think everything is under the GPL.
Just in case you can't get them away from their computer anymore.
Seriously, it's a OSS-clone of the anti-RSI tool Workpace. It uses GTK2 and comes in a win32 installer package. I'm currently looking at the linux version, and it seems to work. I expect the windows version to do so as well.
See http://workrave.sf.net for more.
Whenever FreeDOOM gets finished, you could pack that with one of the enhanced Windows engine ports of the game such as ZDoom, PrBoom or JDoom.
What about X-Chat, win32 experimental build? It saved many people like me from Mirc (I hate its UI,sorry). Works real fine even though its experimental.
http://www.xchat.org
Dia the diagram drawing program !
http://dia-installer.sourceforge.net/
http://www.httrack.com
Description from the Author:
HTTrack is a free (libre/open source) and easy-to-use offline browser utility.
It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.
http://www.freshmeat.net/newkind/
clone of the 80`s computer game "elite",
which got a lot of us drugged on computing back then....
and make sure you look at the tenebrae quake articles in slashdot.
Check it out
http://dcplusplus.sourceforge.net/
see http://gnuwin.epfl.ch
It's great !!! (version II of the CD available in a few days.)
It's all just bread and circuses...
I found an Open Source c++ compilator that pretty much does the same as Visual C++ 6. (the difference is that it is free, and it is GPL)
Bloodshed software Dev C++.
http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
I can't get ASPI drivers to work for me
so I can't use CDex
EAC installed and ran flawlessly [although I had to find and install LAME binaries myself.]
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
and then your average Windows user melts
and looks like a serious piece of software
gtk on windows looks like the amatureish piece of crud anyone has ever written.
When a Photoshop user sees it and starts laughing the only defence you can come up with is "at least it's free and not warezed"
And then you try and use a 3000x5000 pixel image and watch it die a slow death.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
One of the Frontpage replacements would also be good.
If you are looking for an Open Source program for Windows, download the Programmable Artificial Intelligence, available at the URL: http://utenti.quipo.it/claudioscordino/pai.html Enjoy.
All the guys, who are actively engaged in USENET should try Hamster a local Mail- and newsserver with great filtering capabilities and many other features. For reading newsgroups, there is IIRC no good Open-Source-newsreader, but if freeware is enough, you should try xnews
loading all your settings into memory at boot for programs you might not even use during this session is such a Great Idea.
/$MY_DOCUMENTS/Program Settings/*.ini
and then make it a binary file format
let's make it so you can't back it up with simple file copy operations
Winner!!!
how much better than a bunch of text files in
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
These are handy to have and easy to install:
ATnotes - makes post-it notes on the desktop.
jspager - a virtual desktop manager for windows.
Both freeware.
QCad is very usable 2D CAD system. I doubt it's full-featured enough for professional applications, but a good choice for the common user.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
... and will release it to open source when its done (tomorrow or such).
:)
.byte
with this tool you can, for example, play all lan games over internet, too (duke3d, doom etc., and things like warcraft 3 without proper registration key
and, of course, you can use it for accessing your computer at home, even if its behind a firewall...
tunneling is supported through UDP and TCP.
no encryption / authentification yet.
Opera is not open source. I don't think Trillian is, either.
Fwink ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/fwink ) is great, open source, and for the general mainstream audience of Windows users. Upload video and images from your webcam to the web. And hardly anyone knows of this that I've seen.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
I do not know VirtualDub (because I run Linux only).
But you may check out Cinelerra an advanced compositing and editing system for native Linux at no cost to users.
Yasa
Add The DC++ Open Direct Connect Client
FileZilla is a good FTP client for Windows.
http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/
VirtualDub - a video capture/processing utility. It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.
I'm making just that kind of CD myself!
.ini Files to serious project work. It's my main tool in Windows and Linux! And it can look really cool if you use the skinlf aqua skin :-). You just need a fast box to benefit from it, cuz' it's in Java (www.jedit.org)
But I'm putting on lot's of platform independent stuff on it, so it will actually run anywhere.
JEdit
Best Editor I know. Rulez in everything from
PSI
QT Jabber client. Nice. But there ought to be more out there for Windows. You might want to add a Jabber client, or?
Netbeans
NB rulez all IDEs. Forget JBuilder and it's lock-in APIs. This is the ticket if you're/they're into Programming. It's in Java for Java, C, C++, etc. (www.netbeans.org)
ActivePerl, ActivePython, etc.
There are a lot of *very* cool OSS PL setups for various languages on Windows. WinPython is one that comes to mind, wxPython another. Check out www.activestate.com for all your programming and newbie programming needs under Windows.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I recently discovered that Steven Han's Easy Bridge - quite goodlooking and not so bad playing bridge program is now opensourced.
VirtualDub
XviD
CDEx
OGG Vorbis
DVD2AVI
HuffYUV
SubRip
bbMPEG
DVDx
Audacity is a GPL audio recoder / waveform editor for Windows/*Nix, which I found to be very easy to use, and in some respects superior to windows solutions, when I was doing some audio editing in Linux this summer. Check it out.
The e-toys are great fun for school age children. Squeak for the cognoscenti, and Squeakland for Mum, Dad, and the Kids. Heaps of fun. Good books available from Amazon too.
Gimp might be of some interes. //Pingo
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
Quote from: http://www.r-project.org/
I've been a windows open source addict for some time now.
:D it's on sourceforge, too, just like dscaler.
;D)
:(, much less open source!
Here is what i use almost daily:
http://www.dscaler.org/ (on sourceforge)
for watching tv with a capture card, is the best AVAILABLE program PERIOD, and it's open source!!!
Tenebrae Quake. (on sourceforge)
the most advanced 3d engine available PERIOD and open source.
ZSNES. (sourceforge again)
and yeah, the romz aren't free, but it works perfectly. and i love mario brothers on my desktop.
PJ64. (www.emulation64.com)
again, the rom thing, but this plays 90% of my n64 romz flawless.
FCEultra (sourceforge)
best nes emulator.
Mozilla. nuff said.
and the others mentioned previously:
gnucleus
gimp
abiword (who needs openoffice bloatware?)
virtualdub
cdex
ogg (look out for theora soon!!
ok, that's my top 10. i use all of these almost daily.
as for IM, the only other app i use on THIS box, it just ain't there for me. trillian 1.0 pro is the best i've seen/used, and it's now at a price
crhylove
PS if you're a windows user and you haven't used any of these, go do so immediately!!!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
There's tons of Java OSS on sourceforge. It all runs on Windows as well.
The GNU Privacy Project provides gpg and gpa for Windows. It integrates with Mozilla using the Enigmail plugin.
"Is it friday yet?"
As far as games with working Windows ports, there are quite a few. One great example is an open source project called "Vega Strike" (http://vegastrike.sf.net), which is like a Wing Commander clone. It's currently in development, but the latest version is quite playable.
2 /), and ongoing development by third parties (http://icculus.org/freespace2/)(http://www.3dap.c om/hlp/hosted/fsscp/) has produced some rather nice results. While the game itself is not free, the fact that it's source has been opened and it's such a spectacular example of a game, it might be something to possibly consider.
There is also FreeCiv (http://www.freeciv.org), a free Civilization clone, which have been very stable for a while. It's mostly compatible with both the Civ 1 and Civ 2 rule sets.
ZAngband (http://www.zangband.org), a free open-source AngBand (which is similar to nethack or rogue) variant is also quite mature, with many features beyond most similar games.
Last, but not *quite* least, is "Freespace 2", 1999's Space Combat Sim of the Year (sequel to the 1998 Space Combat Sim of the Year, Descent: Freespace), while it probably doesn't meet the regular criteria for "open source", it's source was released to the public some time ago (http://www.freespace-2.com/ddn/sources/freespace
There are numerous others that I haven't mentioned because I haven't used personally, but there are many linux-based Open-Source games that have native Win32 ports available that would be simple enough to use.
A very useful and tiny multiple desktop manager. Required to make Windows a little bit usable.
No's seemed to mention this one yet, but it's just as important
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
The Ultimate Server currently contains Apache 2.0.40, PHP 4.2.2, MySQL 3.23.52, and PERL 5.6.1.633.
All of this for a very small download and an extremely easy install. I recommend you get the latest PHP from php.net as I found the original (PhpUniform) would GPF upon certain API calls.
Upsides:
- They get a free web environment that you can add all sorts of things to (e.g. your favourite Content Management System).
- They can show off the fact that they run a webserver on their Win95 box
;).
Downsides:This signature intentionally has just seven words.
Don't forget OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org), Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net), The Gimp (http://www.gimp.org), Virtual Dub (http://www.virtualdub.org) and possibly Blender3d (http://www.blender3d.com) when it gets released. Although Blender may be a bit above their heads to start with but the others are all easy enough to use.
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
I am currently very keen on keynoted ex.html
http://www.lodz.pdi.net/~eristic/free/in
having previously used similar outliners like treepad and skwyrulpro, I now find that keynote has many great features, plus hard blowfish encryption. Just great for keeping on the fly notes and clippings, and of course those very personal diaries, or training records...
I also keep my VBA sorce code in it too - excel sheets being too big for portability.
Best program for watching/recording TV.
It has many features which I don't even use, so maybe there are more (maybe streaming, I'm not sure..).
It beats my tv-card manufacturer's program...
...as in "Zinf is NOT Freeamp". A great music player that supports both MP3's and OGG's. I use it on my Win98 box to play OGG's from my Linux box across the network.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
WinJab (http://winjab.sourceforge.net) and MAME (http://www.mame.net) although only a few of the ROMs for MAME are free.
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
The best ftp server for win32, bar none! and fully open source. coincidence ... ??
Great free programs I always install on windows boxes:
TclockEX A genuinely useful enhancement to the taskbar clock. It can show the date and has a resource monitor option, so you can tell at a glance if it's getting to be time for a pre-emptive strike (reboot). Very useful for all versions of windows.
Whisper Whisper is a password manager for windows. It's convenient to have all your passwords stored in one place, and the program itself is intuitive to use.
Transparent Makes icon text backgrounds transparent on the desktop. It's a small thing, but it really improves the look of windows. I've used it on 98 and 2000 and it works well.
Programmer's File Editor For people who need more power than notepad but are unwilling to learn vim, there's PFE, a very nice text editor. It's not vim, but it sure beats the hell out of notepad.
oh yeah, I forgot to menation all the other stuff I use daily without even thinkingy scripting / object language
zinf
CDex
2xExplorer - a must have if you ever download anything from Uncle Bill that messes up your windoze
Gnucleus
Trillian
Opera
Ad-aware
Rub
Scite
Gimp
Wordweb - connects nicely to keynote and MS Word
bfacs - blowifsh/twofish encryption
BeOS - or soemthing close coming soon - i have (but seldom use sdaly due to work environment) GoBE Productive - not free, but nice!
It seems that specifically open source items were requested but since everyone is posting non-open source but free programs, I guess I will too.
Trillian has been great for me. They just introduced a pay version but a free version is still available. It is great.
Also Pop-Up Stopper FREE Edition is quite awesome for those who want to be communist and not support the Mozilla engine.
of the CD, post a list to /. so we can also reap the benefits. i know a few people who would love a cd full of free os windows software.
cheers
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
Some WICKED Windows OpenGL screensavers (best fireworks sim I've ever seen among others.) All source code under GPL.
http://www.reallyslick.com/
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
Since it is for families and non-geek types you will probably find ebay to be one of the most visited destinations. I myself have used bidwatcher on ebay, and I found jbidwatcher to be handy when I'm not on a Linux box. Some times even when I am since it has a few features the Linux native version doesn't have. Some people say sniping is wrong, I'm part of the party that says use your truemax bid to begin with. I've made my to begin with to be the last few seconds of the auction since most people don't know how to make a truemax. The ebay moms of the world will thank you, assuming they know how to make it work in a JVM.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
OpenOffice 1.0 on Windows is excellent. It is not perfect, but it does not crash nearly as much as Office XP does, and StarCalc can be like crack to spreadsheet users.
and what's in your Documents and Settings directory is obfuscated
[as many settings were in 9x iirc - see Outlook Express as an example - you can't get to the files through Explorer Navigation, you need to do a file find on "Inbox" and then transfer the path into the address bar]
If you've ever transferred multiple users from a 9x to NT you'll know the nightmare.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
> Remember, this is for non-geeks and families
I look forward to introducing the basics of SSH to my Mum in that case...
Sigh... geeks will be geeks I suppose.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Don't forget to put on a good B.S.O.D. program. It will make them feel at home while they are adjusting with the new applications.
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
First and foremost, have a directory for all those required DLLs ;) That way, they don't have to go hunting for them.
Next, there are a few neet-o utilities out there, in various forms. One that I use a fair bit, is a "Universal Converter". Weight, Mass, Distance. It converts Metric, to Imperial, or simply to another unit of the same. Ounces in a Bushel, for example. Then there's a handy utility I use all the time called "Say The Time". Simple little thing that can be set to announce Verbally, what time it is, so you will be less likely to loose track of the time. Alarms can also be set as well as reminders.
Just a few simple things to add. Feel free to e-mail me should you wish the actual files. Say The Time is out there on the web, but I haven't found the converter in Ages. I think it used to be a simple VBasic excercise, or something.
Good luck!
- XNView- pictureviewer, similar to Irfan, but I like it better (www.xnview.com)
- Ultimatezip Fine *free* Zipprogram
- Fixklez (just in case)
Perhaps cathy (http://rvas.webzdarma.cz), a tool for acchiving directorystructures (if you want to show someone all the MP3s you have or so)
They are all free, but only avaiable as binaries.
Micha !
GAIM and the port of Gkrellm, WKrellm.
Greg
There\'s no place like ~
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Don't forget the emulators...
MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator)
Pin MAME (Pinball)
Nostalgia (Intellivision Emulator)
I don't have time to make it pretty, but check these sites as well for emulator ideas:
http://www.effinspam.com/
http://www.tombstones.org.uk/burners.php?us
Knowing how much Windows users like their Solitaire, I recommend PySol. Written in Python and Tk, it has over 200 unique soliatire games. My mother-in-law is addicted to Spider solitaire and absolutely loves PySol.
Unfortunately, the site doesn't have an up-to-date py2exe package of it (for non-Windows Python programmers, py2exe allows you to make a Windows EXE of a Python program, including the interpreter). You'll have to Google it to find it.
Nethack.
I'm so *Daft* for forgetting these...
.WAV files, for example. Oh, and Screensavers, and Wallpaper and a few Fonts...
Make sure you have an assortment of Simple Things for allowing them to change the appearance and behaviour of the GUI, too! Try and include some sort of Theme Management tools as well.
Different Cursors, Icons and
And maybe a few (dozen)links to add to their Favorites (or Bookmarks) lists that allow them to go to various sites with such content!
mumblestoopidmorninglackofcaffenemumble...
WinPenguins is a great little ap that will have tiny little Tux characters crawling all over a Windows desktop. Not only is it great Linux brand placement, but its a huge hit with the kids.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
...in my eyes is stil LiteStep.
Liquid War is addictive, fast-paced, and easy to learn. Perhaps best of all, there's no installation routine. Unzip it and run it, and watch your cat disappear under a pile of laundry as everything outside the game ceases to be interesting.
Freeciv is cool
Out of Cheese Error:
Please reboot universe
Why not smack on a few IF interpreters for playing some of the excellent (and free) text adventures out there? I particuarly recommend (Win)Frotz.
Also, MAME and ZSNES are excellent arcade and SNES emulators.
For eye candy, I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Xaos. Mmm. Fractal zooming. So pretty. Plus, a good introduction to the mathematics of fractals.
For the general public, include Jabber or similar. The point is that people (especially teens) love instant messaging (particularly AIM), and an IM client that is compatible with AIM would be understandable to a large audience.
Not a coward, just lazy but Persistence Of Vision makes incredible ray traced pictures on both Linux and Windows.
I really dig this, man. It's a good cause and it helps your family realise that they have choices, lots of them. Noticing that alot of people are recommending office productivity suites (which is cool, but you can only recommend Open Office/AbiWord/Gimp so many times =P) or server/high-end programs (very commendable, but...very time-consuming if anything like what I had to do to teach my parents), I wanted to include a list of games I figured might brighten their day.
First off, glTron. GPLed and very very addicting. Great to show off the fact that 3D Gaming and Linux are not mutually exclusive. (I would mention TuxRacer here, but it has been said before)
Secondly I want to go old-school with Nethack. I mean, it's Nethack. If someone in your family thinks they are cool because they can survive a Zerg-rush, let them play this and see how tough they are. ;)
Thirdly I would mention anything old by Id. They have a ton of free mods and maps for Quake or Quake II and with the new Tenebrae mod it's not your Mom's old Quake. Plus if you compile it for their PC on their PC, it might get them interested in Programming.
Which brings me to my last addition, Dev-C++. For the Casual Programmer (i.e. takes a few courses, kinda C-curious) This is the perfect IDE. Based on GCC it has a good-looking front-end, great support, and takes up ALOT less space than Visual Studio. I know at least one teacher that recommends the students run this, and rightly so. It really puts the brain-strain on the appropriate part of programming, the actual program.
Zech Harvey, MCSE, MCDBA, CCNA
Once the average windows user sees how much better abi word is than word...
Think about it, dipshit. They'll see NO reason to switch.
Why don't you show them what they can use instead of Quicken. That Kmoney or whatever from the Kompany. I tried it. It's great if you like segfaults. In other words it Krashes.
And how about Apache 2.0, nobody wants it because ito won't run php. Good job coordinating the php and apache camps. There is a definite plus to a proprietary company. Apache not being able to run php, the most popular module, is akin to IIS not running asp.
The only application I use for a non-hobby purpose outside of work. I'm not sure it's so easy to run it on windows, though.
Working for necessity's mother.
This is based on what is in the PuTTY FAQ.
/e etc\putty.reg HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY
Throw this in a batchfile, for instance puttystore.bat. Edit to store the registry patch where you want.
%HOMEDRIVE%
cd %HOMEPATH%
regedit
Run the batch file every time you make a change to your settings, put put something in your login script to reload the registry settings.
-- [ta]
Don't forget screen savers. For some people, that's all they have to let them know their 3D video card actually works.
My favorites, especially skyrocket (OpenGL, GPL): Really Slick.
I haven't seen anyone port these to linux yet, but that would be great to see (knowwhatImean knowwhatImean, nudge nudge, wink wink).
I figure once they're used to Mozilla and AbiWord under WinXP, a Linux partition would be less daunting.
I am running courses in security using the excellent Knoppix Live Linux-on-CD, which requires no installation, you just boot on the CD into a smooth KDE 3 interface, OpenOffice, XMMS, Xine media player, Mozilla, Konqueror, Galeon and another approximately 2 GB worth of OS software. At first, Windows users are impressed by the feat itself, then they discover they can reach data on the Windows partition. Then they start questioning what Windows gives them that Linux cannot give them on the desktop. IT WORKS!
Bodø community site
If you can add a second CD, just add Knoppix. Let them try Linux without loosing any info!
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
http://www.tortoisecvs.org
A small but powerful util. Conforms to the principle of doing one thing and doing it well. It's got a whole office of normal Windows using people (read: non-geeks) commited to CVS version control. Integrates into the Explorer Shell. Right-click and commit, update, checkout. Thanks tortoise dev team.
fanny. It's a different word in the united kingdom.
http://www.7-zip.org/ great packager, GNU GPLed. Supports many formats (apart from its own..) Perhaps not for the average computer user but still very practical are the win32 ports of all those nifty unix tools (egrep, sed, patch, wc...; just search for unix tools windows on google)
This is a good idea.
Most folks I know need a good Open solution for:
Outlook
Word
Excel
Power Point
Access
Quicken or MS Money
So what would you recommend has substitutes for these applications?
The best Jabber client for Windows... WinJab
Freshmeat lists the Win32 projects by popularity and by rating. You can probably find more download sites that let you filter by license.
~~ What's stopping you?
How about something to take the place of Acrobat? I use Ghostscript and it's GUI frontend GhostView, both of which can be found here. Not only are they capable of reading PDF files, but they do Postscript as well (actually, that's their primary purpose). Better still, they can help you convert one format to the other. For a companion, I also recomend RedMon, which is a port redirecter that allow you to print to Postscript or PDF files.
After using Linux for the past few years, the biggest problem I have with Windows free software is that none of it is free. Every time I download something from Download.com or other sites, it's always a trial version, or a demo version. Almost nobody seems to be releasing free software, everyone wants to make a buck. That said, Cygwin is my favorite Windows OSS project!
FreeCraft is a free RTS engine and RTS game.
http://FreeCraft.Org
How can we forget cygwin?
A new project called TheOpenCD had this very thing in mind. Create a CD with tons of great open source software for win32. However, they seemed to have gotten stuck at the installer phase and I've not heard anything from them in about 2 months.
Anyway, you can still get the list of software they proposed to put on the CD at:
http://theopencd.org/thelist/
Good luck!
hise
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
nobody has mentioned LiteStep!
LiteStep is a replacement desktop environment released under the GPL.
I have nine desktops, can drag windows between them, I have cpu and ram meters, quick-launch buttons and shortcuts, and can even drag windows from other destkops anywhere (don't think you can do that in most desktop envs).
with litestep and mozilla, unless I have a windows [file] explorer open, there's no MS except the system (kernel, services) running - which means with the multiple-instances-of-explorer option, I need not worry about [i]explore[r].exe crashing.
and (obviously) there is theming
other GPL windows projects of interest:
FreeCiv Civilization (one and/or two+) clone
Gaim AIM/yahooim/msnim/icq/jabber/... client
and the already mentioned cygwin, vim, gimp, mozilla.
if you hunt for it, there's a cygwin version of gvim that allows unix paths, etc. but uses X.
Xfree86 for cygwin is now prime-time (in installer) and works really well with windowmaker and openbox, but lacks integration with ms windows as the wm (the way eXceed, winaXe, XwinPro, and Xthin do). please, please contribute to that somebody!
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Audacity: A good, and I mean good audio editor, I use this at work.
Miranda ICQ: Small, fast ICQ client with lots of features and no ads
OpenOffice: It was said before and it should be said again
Mozilla: It is good as far as I am concerned
Freeshade: Will roll the window up into a neat little title bar just by double clicking the title bar.
CDEx: Good for ripping MP3
Winamp: Well you will want a way to play those MP3
A free version of some unzip program
Litestep/or some other shell replacement
Dr. Suess: 'Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring! I am too small to carry this thing!' 'I can not, will not hold the One.
For zip files i have been using a great GPL program called 7-zip. It integrates into the Explorer Shell and also handles tar.gz as well. It's a pretty cool little program.
I found this very addictive Tetris game last year on SourceForge, and I've been playing it ever since. I even made my own CD with the Win32 installer and a huge collection of Tetris music to run in the background while playing.
Anything they may be using shareware for is a good candidate. For example, 7-Zip (http://www.7-zip.org/) for compressed file operations. I have yet to find a good opensource replacement for download accelerators, which are often shareware.
Don't forget to include some opensource games such as BZFlag and VegaStrike, both on SourceForge.
BTW, Freeciv is great, but its interface on Win32 frankly stinks. It's not likely to win converts.
Let Nethack + graphical interface for Windows suck away all their time! Here is the Windows download page
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
There is an open source build of the NT Kernel,it doesnt work very well now but it has a good future. it is called ReactOS You Can get it here
Seriously, wake up. I don't want to offend you but you really have to wake up. Reasons for not including vi:
1) Its user interface is horribly old and horribly cryptic. The idea of a command mode and a separate input mode is difficult to understand and to learn. Believe me. It took over 10 years before I went through the trouble of learning the basics of vi and even now I only use it for basic text file editing. And I'm not a newbie. 2) They will ask you why a simple text editor has to be so difficult. If you try to convince them that it isn't, they may wonder how "easy" that Linux thing is after this "easy" editor. IMHO it's all right to like vi. Expecially if you're used to it. However, vi, sendmail configurations and everything not-usual cryptic stuff has to be hidden deep where it can't intimidate people. Teaching vi as first editor is like having a Windows beginners course where everything is configured through regedit.
Wget - wget.sunsite.dk I use it almost every day.
Analog - www.analog.cx Web server log parser. An absolutely essential tool for a webmaster.
www.christopherlewis.com
I know this isn't news per se but what a great post. I'm a real advocate of OSS but have always found it quite difficult to find _the_ oss tool that does what it says on the tin without downloading 10 others that just don't - this post has highlighted tons of high quality, useful OSS software, it's also kept my broadband connection busy for the last hour :o)
A very good Windows port of Gkrellm.
oh, one more that I forgot to mention b/c litestep eliminates my need for it (and winxp integrated the idea): TraySaver (i can't find the license but the code is on sourceforge). ... VERY handy esp. at low resolution.
stash systemtray icons in a second tray available with a click, add an option to the alt+space pulldown that says 'minimize to tray'
the author's StartupCPL (closed source, puts in a control panel section to manage what starts up with windows) and WindowSizer (resize ANY window) are put on every windows machine I touch.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
There is not such thing as a standard interface. There is such a thing like the interface *you* are used to work with.
Some programs become more popular and then some ideas are copied. That does not make the original idea an standard. An expert body lying guidelines for development does.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
http://www.imagemagick.org/
Not sure if it's GNU but the download is free.
Software for modifying graphic files. Resizing, changing formats, displaying, morphing...
A GUI interface as well as a rich command line interface (great for scripting resizes on multiple scans!)
Also APIs for Java, Perl, MS COM...
I downloaded it 3 days ago and I'm already in love with it!
=Shreak
... "not for geeks" you don't understand? ;-P
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Really, this has nothing whatsoever to do with open source, other than that you're claiming that you want it.
For a disk of crossover apps, you're limiting yourself by only including open source software. How about stuff that's just free? How about demos of software that's actually commercial, closed-source, but available on both platforms?
Weaning someone off of Windows for Linux is one thing. Weaning someone off of all non-open-source (and by whose definition?) software is entirely something else. Make sure you're clear on what you want to do.
Having said that, the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo (and soon game) is available in Windows and Linux versions. Why not throw that on?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
How about WinVI? It is agoodie?
I use it with W98 (reluctantly, I run mostly Linux nowadays). No problems so far.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I've been using glass2k (and have switched).
please add its features
specifically the settings:
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Bloodshed Dev-C++! It's the best free IDE for Windows that I know. Includes GCC 2.95.3.
FileZilla is an excellent FTP client.
I can't imagine why Flight Gear (www.flightgear.org) hasn't been mentioned. Who doesn't like a flight simulator?
Win32 and Linux versions are available for free at :
http://www.lynxlabs.com/phobiaIII/
Guess what, I got you this OSS based source code editing component.
Nooo! Nooo, pleassse. Don't thank me.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Gotta have Nethack. And the Falcons Eye graphical version is excellent.
Get your fix here : http://falconseye.sourceforge.net/
Dont exclude cygwin entirely, just include the cygwin1.dll (and possible bash) and throw all the Open Source available for cygwin in. If need be, compile these and distribute that way... Its how I run X and ssh at the office on my NT machine to tunnel home. Even if you had to use a full cygwin install, you could just do a "bash --login -c " and you can run whatever program from batch files in windows.... although there are some really good OSS that you can run that are Windows based, Mozilla, Openoffice.. and Im not to sure but I believe GTK is open to windows (or is that Qt... damned Linux standards, why dont you just combine!!) so some GTK based apps should work as well. Anyway, dont just limit yourself, the cygwin apps can be made to work with a little batch file...
LOL - we should have this article every month :)
:)
"Everyone post links to all the cool stuff they use" - I've downloaded 4 or 5 already
You might be kidding about including fdisk, but there is a free (GPL) version of fdisk out there: Free FDISK. It acts like regular MS fdisk, but has more features, such as support for non-DOS partition types. I think it was this feature that brought me to Free FDISK; regular fdisk just wasn't getting the job done.
Duh. The Xemacs port to Win32 is pretty good, heck, it's much better than the native Mac port.
Fullfills all my editing needs.
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction
The R Project
A statistical programming language. If some of your friends get burned in Excel by having data over 64K or whatever their limit is, try this. Grandma my not "get it", but Josh College will. Try it.
VirtuaWin, a GPL'ed virtual desktop for Win32.
I use it extensively when GIMP'ing too (take that you nay-sayers!) :-)
I can see that you might not care about exposing people to the CLI toolchain, but ... X runs under cygwin, and there's a growing library of X app ports on cygwin -- including KDE.
/winOSS/powertools/suck
Even in CLI land, there's some CLI tools that power users will love, like wget. If you have room on the CD, I suggest a "power users" section, that includes cygwin. Here's a suggestion:
cat >>
#!/bin/sh
wget --continue --timestamping --recursive --level=inf --convert-links --dont-remove-listing --no-parent $*
^D
(I call it 'suck', perhaps you want a more genteel name). These are just standard options to wget that I use to suck down a site from the command line. It's trivial enough to integrate this with some sort of clipboard monitor, and you have a web site downloader that unlike most of their brethren for windows, actually *works*.
The clincher for including cygwin is: you want to distribute an open source CD. How about a compiler to make that source actually useful? gcc perhaps? Welcome to cygwin (or mingw if you use -mno-cygwin)
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
XNap. (Look it up on freshmeat.net)
It is the best OpenNap client I've seen. Open source. Written in Java. I've used it on Linux, MacOS X, and... Win XP.
Try it, you'll like it -- especially if you've been using a Gnutella client. Just download the ".jar" file, and double click it. You'll never go back to gnutella.
(Requires Java to be installed. Use either Microsoft's or Sun's -- both are free as in beer. If you're not running XP, then you almost certianly already have Java installed. If not just download Sun's JRE 1.4 and run setup.exe.)
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
Best carmageddon/gta3 ripoff you'll find for windoze. . .
You are not the customer.
jMusic
For games, the demos that come with the Clean programming language held my kid's interest longer than any other demo games that come with other languages.
Treeline is a very usable outliner/PIM/simple database that runs on both Windows and Linux. It's author, Doug Bell also has several other programs including a very nice calculator, a unit conversion utility, and a route planner for pilots.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
less daunting AND less usefull
Well if the GPL was good enough for ID...
And armagetron has gltron beat hands down.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
I'm totally shocked that no one has mentioned this yet! Check JS Pager Virtual Desktop
This falls under the category of win32 only software, but it will pass the physical tests.
This is a great transition tool from windows to linux, as most window managers under X have a concept of virtual desktops.
This is one of those things I really missed on a windows machine (yes I have ONE of the four machines on my desktop at work. Necessary for testing, Lotus Notes, network printing (NO FLAME), and a few other things). I am one of those people that has 30+ applications running (between putty sessions, wait, there's another good app...) and I don't like to be minimizing and maximizing every five seconds. I found JS Pager while searching for a virtual desktop on windows and fell in love with it. I've got everyone else here at work hooked and it's helped people to get use to gnome and KDE desktop environments.
even if it's not oss, if u put putty u have to put
inside winscp
and about people and their mom
my mother usually upload files with winscp from her
home pc to mine (we do not live together) and then
it upload the files to a ssl - web server (with frame) using w3m-ssl on my home-linux box through putty
i explained her how to use it in just two hours.
[Windoids are] possible with any window manager that supports either MWM hints, or properly supports the _NET spec.
I thought only Microsoft Windows supported the .NET spec. What am I thinking of?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Your last line is completely wrong: a user does not have to get familiar with vim to avoid being completely lost when they have to edit a text file on Linux. The fact that you believe otherwise means that I ask you to stay away from potential Linux converts.
No person coming from the Windows or Mac world has ever seen a moded editor in the style of vi. Every other editor in the world, from Notepad to Emacs, lets the user just start typing and the text gets entered correctly. Like everyone who's been in the Unix world a long time, I can use vi if I must, but I'd rather not. Emacs has many flaws as well; its choice of keybindings is rather antique, but at least they are changeable. Better still to give new users a decent text-editing widget.
If the user you inflict vim on thinks that she'll have to put up with such things on Linux, you're not going to get a convert.
vi/vim should be available for those who explicitly want it, but we don't need any new converts to the cult.
My little DirecTV Apache server wouldn't have a prayer.
Download.com lets you search on free but not Free.
Freshmeat.net sort of gets you there for cross OS stuff, but not for pure WinOS plays.
I know it isn't open sourced, but there is a clone of Winamp 2.x called XMMS on Linux, so if they make the transition, at least some things are familiar.
"sylpheed-claws" for email has been ported to windows.
"gaim" for instant messenging is in alpha, but its getting better.
"xchat" for irc is great.
"mozilla" of course.
Some people may not consider it a program, but every job that I have had I have been able to use Perl and it always has been useful. It is open source, documentation is readily available, and I don't have to tie myself to its only real alternative on the windows platform, VB Script.
Just a question, because there's a reason that everyone in professional editing uses Photoshop, and that's not because Adobe is a BEEG EVAL MONONOPOLY, but because the UI and features are the -best- in the buisness.
I really really like The GIMP, but Christ, the UI sucks. Don't feed me that crap about virtual desktops either, because MDI inferfaces work just as well as virtual desktops for certain kinds of programs, if not better.
Please put the CD image somewhere when you have created it and post a link here. I'm very much interessted in taking a glance at whatever you are going to collect and would love to give it a try.
Regards, Tobias
The problem with the vi UI is that it is modal. There is insert mode and command mode. Modality is somethign required by text only interfaces and which is generally deprecated for GUIs. For this reason, most naive users will find the Windows Notepad superior to vi for this reason. In fact, I'd recommend the Win32 emacs editor over vi for non-programmers doing simple text editing. Really -- try approaching it as a naive user and you'll find you can do simple things like edit, insert, delete text, opening, saving and renaming files using pure GUI commands.
However, programs like vi and emacs only really show their superiority over programs like Notepad for editing very long text files, or complex structured text files (data files and programs). In fact, I'd say as a philosophical point this means they ARE only superior to Notepad for these purposes.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
.... the original poster asked us to do so perhaps?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If the OSS/free software you use attracts more users, it attracts more developers, and it gets better.
Just because you don't pay doesn't mean there isn't a quid pro quo. Developers want their work used. By advocating for free software, you are helping the developers, as they are helping you.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Can anybody recommend a personal finance manager for Win32 that's free/GPL? Gnucash is the obvious answer... but I can NOT find a Win32 port of it...
As far as text editors go, jEdit is by far the best IMO.
And as for browsers, although it's only 0.1, Phoenix is the best I've ever used, I only got it yesterday, after having mozilla and never quite feeling right, always using IE except for testing. However, I'm an instant convert, I'm in Phoenix as we speak, it hasn't had any noticible bugs and the tabs were the main reason I even considered Moz, so now I have 12 sites in 1 window, it's just mozilla with any annoyances taken out, i love it.
Freecraft is an excellent replacement for warcraft2, especially if you have the warcraft2 cd to grab the graphics off of.
You're right -- heck, look at Red Hat. If that isn't commercial, I don't know what is.
I got caught up in a specific use of the word when writing my response -- specifically to:
With regard to that sentence, I stand by my comment: Gnucleus isn't commercial. It has no paid developers, it doesn't sell a product or push advertising, and (as far as I can tell) it exists 'just for the fun of it.'Perhaps it would have made you happier if I'd started that sentence "And it isn't commercial...", though that would have been rather poor grammar, and the Grammar Nazi would have been on my case instead of you.
Damned if I do, damned if I don't... Ah Slashdot, at least you're consistent.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
People are into video games but not into the complexity of modern games.
As for being a "gray" app, there are plenty of freely availabe ROMs at Classic Gaming[classicgaming.com].
MAME belongs on the CD.
The only drawback--like most OSS programs--is that it requires a scope of seemingly unrelated skills to get started.
M$ codes for morons. OS Developers code for their peers. Until "coding for morons" becomes the mantra of the movement, the CD will remain simply a demo and not a tool for revolution.
--Chris Uzal, Editor, Cyberista
Laws are for people with no friends.
SmartFTP and Trillian are not Free Software.
None of the four will work on Linux.
On my XP partition, I regularly use: the Gimp (image manipulation) Dev-C++ (C/C++ IDE) CDex (music ripping software) Python (scripting/programming language) R (statistics and graphics software) OpenOffice (office suite) Mozilla (web browser and mail client) Phoenix (web browser based on gecko) Filezilla (FTP client and server)
MAME - http://www.mame.net - it's open-source, although under a license of its own devising. Giving it out with ROMs that you don't own a license for is definitely a no-no. There are a few public-domain arcade ROMs for MAME users to download from MAME.Net.
VDMSound - http://ntvdm.cjb.net - should your friends/family have old 16-bit games that they can't run in Windows XP, it's the shizzat. Never mind Windows XP's "preliminary at best" sound card emulation, VDMSound blows it out of the water, what with completely accurate Adlib emulation, Sound Blaster emulation, Disney Sound Source Emulation, Direct-DAC support, etc. - and Roland MT32 emulation coming some point in the future. (They're also always looking for capable Win32 programmers/hackers, and their support forum is at VOGONS - Very Old Games On Newer Systems support forum - http://vogons.zetafleet.com ). VDMSound is released under GPL, I believe.
GLIDOS - http://www.glidos.net - the ultimate Glide Wrapper for those old DOS Glide games (it's really coming along, with Screamer 2, Screamer Rally (Bleifuss 2, Bleifuss Rally), Archimedean Dynasty, Battlecrusier 3000AD, Sentinel Returns,
and (possibly) Descent 1 (3dfx patch) all also beginning to be supported besides those mentioned on the site. The wrapper itself is open-source, but the source as of yet is not freely available from the website. The actual product, Glidos, is more than the wrapper in itself. It includes a nice GUI and configuration system plus other hacks to get DOS Glide games working in WindowsNT/2000/XP for $10.00 USD.
Hmm, let's see... oh, and most emulators out there (for playing legally or illegally copied games) are open-source as well, but with a variety of different licenses. Ask around (http://www.retrogames.com, http://www.zophar.net)
- Anonymous
XaoS is a really fun program to play around with for even on mathmaticly inclide people.
XaoS is a fast portable real-time interactive fractal zoomer. It displays the Mandelbrot set (among other escape time fractals) and allows you zoom smoothly into the fractal. It uses lots of optimization techniques to save about 97% of calculations necessary to calculate next frame to make zooming as fast as possible.
Weighing in at 342kb, Coolplayer is an absolutely killer MP3/OGG/CD player. It supports streams, playlists, skins, and embeds absolutely no cruft in the windows registry. It's just one executable file, and it sounds much better than WinAmp. The only problem that I can see is that because it comes with no install file, or much documentation, people (newbies especially) are often be thrown off by how simple it is to use.
*Recap*
- 342kb of low resource, low cruft programming.
- support for MP3, Ogg, their respective streams, and CDaudio
- Better sound than WinAmp
- Dead easy to use
- GNU General Public License
Download your copy at http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
How about a fractal program. I think fractint is the name of one I used years ago. My fractal program is basically open source - I've given the source away to strangers, but have been to lazy to put it on my site as of yet. It's not as fast as others, but it's easy and fun.
http://skintigh.tripod.com/ff/ff.html
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
The single MDI window scheme may be popular among M$-Windows apps, but it is not a general standard. There was an article on Slashdot earlier this month which brought up this very thing: Mac OS X doesn't use MDI.
IMO, giving each document an independent window makes life much easier, because you can move and size them anywhere on the desktop without the constraints of a parent window, and they can be interleaved with windows from other applications.
Nice OSS for making music
Psi is indeed a wonderful little program. I've been using it since May, and it has never crashed on me. In fact, the only Psi bug that I'm aware of is a minor bug in the Qt GUI library.
Psi's author is security-savvy and has given priority to SSL and PGP support. Unfortunately, this means Psi still does not support file transfer or group chat. The project needs volunteers.
Psi is based on Qt, so above all, it integrates flawlessly with Windows. This is important. I have used GTK+ apps like Dia, and I tried out the Gaim port recently, and while GTK+ isn't terrible, it's like Swing -- it doesn't look or feel like a native program, doesn't integrate with native conventions (clipboard, fonts, window messages, drag/drop etc.).
Psi is indeed cross-platform, and runs flawlessly on Linux and Mac OS X and fully integrate with the GUIs of these platforms, including Aqua, although my Mac-using friends say Qt 3 has problems with window flicker.
Like DDR? Can't find your fav version? Want to make your own song/dance moves? Too shy to make a fool out of yourself in a public arcade.
:)
http://stepmania.com/stepmania/
Use any mp3 and make your own song.
If you think of installing server software like Apache and PHP, you might also consider: the Plone windows installer. It includes all the goodies for Zope and works out of the box.
Plone 1.0 Beta 1
CMF 1.3
Zope 2.5.1
Python 2.1.3
Win32 Extensions
PIL 1.1.2
ReportLab 1.15
Zope Controller 1.0
CMF Collector 0.9b
CMF Wiki 0.1
External Editor 0.5 (Client and Server app)
BackTalk (unknown version)
Zope Book 2.5
KeyNote and CDex to name two.
Egoboo doesn't use the Quake 2 engine. It uses the Quake 2 modeler program. The engine is its own, a top-down tile-based 3D engine.
You know, this website is free, and I doubt the guys appreciate you denying them their needed revenue.
What about blender? It's going to be GPL soon
www.blender3d.com
-- EOF
Flaskmpeg is another must-have for backing up DVDs. It's not updated as frequently and doesn't have the editing features, but it's still one of the best apps for transcoding from MPEG1/2 to other video codecs.
If you *have* to play MP3's on that old 486, though, mpg123 runs on the command line. A Windows port is avaliable here
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I dont know for SURE if it's open source, and it might not be non-geek, but I think it's a good idea to spare 10-15 megas for a good beginners c++ compiler. You can get it here, just follow the links. Good for students, hobbyists, and maybe quake modders too!
NetTime is a BSD-licensed NTP client for Windows. While NTP isn't exactly a high-priority thing for most end users, they (or at least my sisters do) like having their clock give the correct time. It's also pretty small (2MB), so it souldn't exactly be crowding other programs out.
And for those administering Windows desktops on a network, it's great. It can use NTP or just the standard Unix date service. I have it installed on every computer at work.
--Phil (I have to use Windows, but I can make it bearable.)
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
I am intrigued that no one proposed
Kobo Deluxe
(http://olofson.net/skobo/)
yet.
(Or maybe i've been a bit myopic...)
GPL'd, nice, small, Linux and Windows.
Should definitely be in.
Arnie (Yes, yes, account is on the way)
...would be uptime for win32.
There is a OSS tool that does exactly that by a guy called "titus", unfortunately I can't find a download link right now.
Another thing I would miss dearly on such a CD is nmapNT. It requires a patched TCP/IP stack but after that it works just as beautifully as it's *ix counterparts.
+++ath0
Include the GNU utilities for Win32. Put it in the user's path and it won't bother them if they don't use the tools.
If you want to transition folks to Linux, prepare them by familiarizing them with the basic tools. Personally, I've found tools such as grep and sed to be indispensible even when I'm using Windows.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
piece of software.... Also why the heck has no one ported it to linux yet??? This piece of software is one of the main reason i have windows on dual boot..
use google, and find emulators galore, many are open source.
Then, grab some of the front ends out there, and turn your comp into a game machine - even works on older machines. I got an old 486/33 running nintendo games - it's a great second life for the old beast...
On newer machines, run N64 games and PSX games...play supernintendo and genesis games over the internet against other folks...it's great fun (btw, linux is my main os, and there are plenty for it as well).
The games, on the other hand, aren't quite open, but, ah, well, er, nuff said. In any case, there are some half-decent homebrew games, ants for the gameboy, for example.
And of course there is mame. there are also many java games, some quite fun. Stratego and tank games (ala Combat), etc.
Once upon a time, I was looking for a free alternative to CuteFTP. I love Cute, but I was always sick of finding a crack for it whenever I reinstalled it, and I liked using they 2.8 version as their newer version have some annoyances. I am unemployed and money is tight, so even though I would love to pay the $40 for CuteFTP since I use it so much, rent came first. So I went to find an FTP client that had similar features to my favorite version of my favorite FTP program.
What a challenge. There are some truly aweful FTP clients out there for Windows. I downloaded pretty much every FTP client on download.com and thought there was no decent FTP client out there. Finally, I did a search on sourceforge.net. The first hit came up with FileZilla.
FileZilla is a great app, nicely modeled after the GOOD features of CuteFTP with not of the crap. It's free and open source. It's a must have for anyone looking for a decent, free FTP client for Windows.
this is one of the best "ask slashdot"s i have seen (and i lurk a lot ;) ). i am finding new things left and right. thanks!
I have already smacked together an ISO containing excellent Open Source software for Windows. It's called TheBOSS-ISO and goes under the release name Fish'N'Chips. Even if you don't like the ingredients, you may want to look at my recipe for ideas ;)
although your average windows user probably has little use for a terminal emulator, tera term pro (and it's ssh plugin) and putty both spring to my mind immediately when someone mentions open source windows software.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
FCEUltra is a completely open source NES emulator. It beats the shit out of nesticle, and is available for linux, win32, and even DOS. http://fceultra.sourceforge.net
Unix is mysterious, and ancient, and strong. It's made of cast iron and the bones of heroic programmers of old -
and probabbly Quake 3 in a couple monthes.
hey, it's released GPL. granted, not the game data; but the entire engine -- out-dated as it may be right now -- is a damn good rendering engine in its time, and probabbly in the history books as well.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
My father has found zoe from evectors pretty useful. Kind of google for email. He also has found mozilla to be a step up. In addition he has set up a wiki based on Squeak. And, obviously, uses Squeak. He is currenly looking at StarLogo 2.0. My sister has found a wide assortment of VRML tools useful. My mother has a hard time with most things these days, but she likes the idea of Squeak. None of them have used apache, but they are almost ready.
Try WinHTTrack, for Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP
http://www.httrack.com/
They released a new version a week ago.
From the website:
HTTrack is a free (libre/open source) and easy-to-use offline browser utility.
It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.
"Kindness is my religion." The Dalai Lama
I dont recall seeing PC Magazine utilities
mentioned in this discussion. The source is available
for these utilities and they can be
very useful for Win32 users. For instance,
they just came out with the latest version
of RoboType3.
HTML-kit, prolly the best Win32 text editor for the webmaster; not exactly OSS variety of free, but free as in beer. Good solid program. To many features to list here, but some examples: completely customizable, color coding for scripts and scripting langs., built in HTML validator. Rumor has it that the next version will work in Wine
http://www.chami.com/html-kit/
For those interested in trying
a pure Java text editor, also
try J before deciding.
Pure Java Text Editor
None have ported this title over to Unix yet. It is GPL'd and possible to port to Unix, but alas everyone is busy elsewhere. 1964 uses openGL graphics and is faster than the 2nd greatest emulator, UltraHLE.
1964 should be included on this Solid Gold Opensource CDROM alongside MAME.
Solitaire, written in Python. Better than any other solitaire games I've seen (including some commercial). There are something like 200 different solitaire games built in.
It can be found here.
There isn't a windows build on the page, it's python, dude.
They're putting dimes in the hole in my head to see the change in me.
is out there one or two developers?
dont forget:
java development kit
netbeans ide (maybe forte CE)
borland c++ free compiler
jedit!
http://netez.com/2xExplorer
Your password has expired, please login to change it.
Enjoy
She almost kicked my moms ass (they live together, it's like watching a free sitcom every visit) when she switched her from AOL to a LAN connection on her Cox Cable.
I never heard the end of it. AOL was so much easier. I had her show me how it worked and for the life of me it was the most confusing/busy interface I've ever seen. If Grandma can master AOL she could probably use Putty.
How do you expect users to be interested in Open source, look at source, change source and NOT be geeks? Do you really think you will find a grandma type of user (your cd's intended audience) who will be interested in looking at source code but considered not a geek!? Your grandma will be interested ONLY in friendy easy to use software. Best of freeware is what you need to do.
-- http://www.dotnet-hosting.com
Free web hosting. Includes asp.net, php, mysql & sql server.
...but that isn't _windows_ open source software... *sigh*
As business models go it seems to be working.
/etc/rc.conf
It's even got people prepared to promote it with words like "better" and "faster".
Text files are so amazing universal that it's a crime to not utilise their power and the many approaches one can take to the data.
Binary configuration files are the devils spawn.
Pray, which is the quicker way to change the box's ip
vi
or navigate through control panel?
or write a visual basic program to do it for me?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
WinSCP2
l oad:p so/cal ypso33.exe
http://winscp.vse.cz/eng/
An interface to secure file transfer like the ol' WS_FTP we used to know and love so long ago.
Simply a must have for transfering files for website maintenance.
-----
InfoZip as a free alternative to WinZip.
http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/
-----
Calypso Email: an excellent viral resistant alternative to Lookout Express
http://cws.internet.com/mail-calypso.html
Down
http://download.mcsdallas.com/binaries/caly
Cheers.
Is an exelent client of IRC for windows.
The download site is www.solar-opensource.org
But this software dont have an english version, Only Spanish.
Just one word, guys:
EMACS!!!!!!!!
Free Ware Home is a website full of software and components dedicated to just this concept. And here by free he means:
1. No crippleware
2. No demoware
3. No restrictions.
Great site and a lot of really good stuff.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
how about gnuwin32 .
Also, in case it wasn't clear, Microsoft is promoting remote control software, but their own remote control software, not VNC. If you read the Windows 2000/XP EULA, you'll see that it's against the EULA to use VNC from a Linux box to a Windows box:
Good open source games for Windows would be:
:)
Abuse/fRaBs
Wolfenstein 3D
Doom
Quake
Quake II
With all the id games, I believe the levels are still copyrighted. Nothing wrong with running user created levels though.
Also, Mozilla and OpenOffice.org are indispensible.
Let the kikes fight their own wars -- it's not our problem!
from the screenshots, Abiword looks soooo old and outdated and well lame. so why would I want to switch to an inferior product ?
How about Outlook?
What's with the love of floating palettes? Toolbars are supposed to be docked so that the image you are editing isn't topographically identical to a donut!
Seriously, having to scroll or drag stuff because a toolbar is obscuring a rectangular area in the middle of the pic is a pain in the ass.:(
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
How about instead of being replaced, the right-clicking is complemented it with a WIMP interface?:)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
When Photoshop bundles up all it's pallettes into one window, it's a seriously crippling interface. Gimp allows a certain amount of freedom in having all of it's windows totally independant.
This puts some of the GIMP's UI into the hands of your WM. If your WM sucks, then GIMP sucks, too. This is not to say that GIMP's UI is perfect; I'm just saying that a bad WM makes gimp worse. You mention having problems with other apps getting in between GIMPs windows: This is a problem with your WM. Put GIMP on it's own desk, and you will not have this problem. Your WM doesn't have virtual desktops? Then your sucky WM is making GIMP worse than it really is.
On the whole, I agree that GIMP could use some help in the UI department. I read through the enitre "Grokking the GIMP" (which is a great manual BTW) and I still don't know how to draw straight lines with GIMP (there's no "line tool" that I know of). But a good WM will make GIMP that much more bearable.
but I guess Windows users are used to unexpected behavior already, so
This is great! I'd didn't know about a few
of 'em either. Downloaded 'em and WOW! COOL!
a great example of french programming excellence is httrack - a powerful website copier / offline browser released under the GPL
it runs under both windows and linux (both an rpm and a deb exist), and includes both a GUI and a command line operation capability
You don't even know how to change the prompt on a *NIX box.
From the web site you linked to:
"PHPEdit is completely free and is released under the PHPEdit licence."
It's a short, sweet license giving the right to redistribute the code or binaries, but it's not GPL'd.
Nice editor, though.
Textbooks and Open Educational Resources
Parsec is a wonderful simulated space combat game that has been under development for about 6 years. Unfortunately, it is NOT an open-source project, but it is currently not even in its completed form. Who knows what the future holds?
UNIX: Find it, fsck it, forget it.
Amazing open source TV capture software
http://www.dscaler.org/
who says micros~1 standards are bad?
gaim.sourceforge.net
just released a Win32 version Definatly my messanger of choice!
~Mark Riggs
rieperx@hotmail.com
Source code is available for BIRC, the Bisual IRC Client, and a source release for ViRC (available on the same site) is planned sometime in the next few months.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
how about reaper3d or vegastrike --two great opengl games on sourceforge
FreeCraft is gooooood stuff.
ZMatrix -> A pretty cool looking matrix screensaver / desktop enhancement.
ffdshow -> An oss decoder for MPEG-4 movies, much better than divx.com's offering IMHO.
ScummVM -> Play the Lucasarts classics on Windows 2000/XP.
Scilab -> A open-source tool similar to MatLab.
Other great ones already mentioned are VirtualDub, Mozilla, VNC and OpenOffice.
[]s Badaro
My sig became obsolete, and I lack the imagination to create a new one.
For audio, there is FreeAmp.
Free the West Memphis Three!
Add some Cream to that Vim:
http://cream.sourceforge.net/
VIM is extremely powerful. With Cream, VIM is now easy! Cream makes Vim windows shortcut compliant (Control X, C, V for Cut Copy and Paste).
Cream is officially in beta, but it is reliable. Vim with Cream has recently replaced all of my other text, HTML, Perl, and C editors that I've collected over the years. A must include.
Most Windows users won't learn VIM, So add some Cream to that VIM:
http://cream.sourceforge.net/
VIM is extremely powerful. With Cream, Vim is now easy! Cream makes Vim windows shortcut compliant (Control X, C, V for Cut, Copy, Paste).
Cream is officially in beta, but it is reliable. VIM with Cream has recently replaced all of my other text, HTML, Perl, and C editors that I've collected over the years. A must include.
UltimateZip was good, but seems to have gone adware and is now running out of steam. Try FilZip, even though it isn't open source yet. See the bottom of the page and let the guy know that open source matters!
Free the West Memphis Three!
Anyway, free basic PDF functionality can be had using Ghostscript and GSView. Granted, it is a two step process to create PDFs with this method, but it works and it is free.
Free the West Memphis Three!
Never thought you'd hear that?
I guess I didn't notice the transition. It used to be "there's no apps for Linux." Now Linux is showing up Windows since "out of the box" it's actually usable because of all the apps bundled with it.
Whereas with Windows you have to dig for Free instead of just Stolen.
-- jhoger
see SAP The FREE Enterprise Open Source Database look at http://www.sapdb.org/ versions for all_nixes and windoze as well.
Text files are not what's universal, its the text-able API to access them that's universal
That's a tenuous distinction.
I guess one could export the registry to text, perform the manipulations and then import the result back into the registry if one really wanted to.
Its because of an unrelated issue, the user interface.
Text based files enables one to *choose* the user interface. A specialised GUI for editing them can provide all the customization of the process one desires.
Aside from hex-editing, binary configuration files require the program to know the format of the file in order for them to translate it to and from a human readable form.
Binary files don't print too well either.
As long as a system retains its ability to access the configuration by unified API's
We only need one API.
open read seek write close
If its binary, many algorithmic efficiencies can be implemented
That tin god, efficiency.
The only possible saving is file size and that is not compelling.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The standard VNC distribution now includes compression suitable for very low bandwidth connections, ala TightVNC.
You can get it from: RealVNC Ltd.
The http://www.theopencd.org project aims at providing a cd with open source s/w for windows.
IRFANVIEW
IMHO, it should be a nice thing to show the windows users how is the GUI experience on Unix.
:)
So, add as mutch windowmanagers as you can compile (and that can fit in the CD
I have sort of lost touch with what's going on in open source. This thread gave me incentive to try some of the excellent stuff mentioned. As I've flirted with Linux on and off, I was aware of Ghostscript and GIMP, but never thought they'd be ported to x86 machines. Last night I installed both of them and they are absolutely teriffic! (especially Ghostscript which is the only utility I know of that can convert a postscript or EPS image into another format). Let's do this thread again real soon!!
[Insert pretentious and semi-clever sig here: ______ ]
I am now hosting a forum, http://www.cafewire.com, specifically for non-geeks and families who use Microsoft, but are thinking or getting ready to make their move to Linux. I know, I know: we don't need another stinking forum! The intent is to offer forums for current MS Office products, where alternatives can be discussed. It is all so that Microsoft Office users can gain exposure to the world of Linux, Open Source, and that there is help out there to help break free from the trance that those Microsoft advertising campaigns has put us under. Since this is a new forum, I am totally open to ideas. I just wish to make the transition for the average user as painless as possible.
GNU Generation, a student association at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne, proudly announces the release of GNUWin-II,
a collection of free and open source software for Windows, which luckily contains most of the software that was proposed some days ago on slashdot.
It comes on a CD with more than 50 applications, articles, and a four-language (yes it's swiss)
html based interface to help newcomers discover Free Software.
The complete GNUWin-II can be browsed online.
The ISO image of the CD
can be downloaded here or better on Swiss SunSITE mirror ftp or http. It is also possible to order a CD in Europe.
I think saying that people switching to Linux would not want a UI change is questionable.
I switched to Linux because I like the UI better. I use KDE and I love the way it handles things. I like that the middle mouse button opens a link in a new window. I love being able to hit ALT-F2 and then type in a command, open a link or browse a directory, and the tab completion makes this even easier.
I'm willing to learn a new UI as long as it's better.
I use my computer many hours per week, and if 10 minutes of learning pays off as 10 minutes less a week, that learning is definately worth it.
I think if someone is going to try openoffice or mozilla, it shows that their willing to try something different.
I'm not saying Linux is god in terms of usability (a lot of apps admittedly suck on this front), but the way Linux does some things is better and shouldn't be changed just because MS's UI isn't as good. Ex: KDE by default gives me 4 virtual desktops. This is good. I like this. It gives me more space for my programs. It confuses a first time user, but if you explain it to them, it really doesn't take them more than 2 minutes to comprehend. The same thing for the "Group similar tasks" option, it's not the same as windows, and requires a 2 minute explanation, but one you've got it, you don't want to go back to the old way of doing things.
Life is too short to proofread.
I sure hope that licence doesn't apply to 2000 Server+...It would boggle the mind how many licences would need to be purchased to run a large site on IIS. I know, I know, IIS is evil, and I agree, but there are large sites running it.