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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."
www.openoffice.org
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.
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.
...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....
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Mod parent up. VNC is very useful. I used it to shut down all the computers in the house at night right from my computer, no need to walk around to each one.
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
Check it out
http://dcplusplus.sourceforge.net/
Uh, no. Rather:
CDex -> for converting their CDs to Ogg...
ogg is free as in beer and speech, winamp plays them, and they sound great!
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
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
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.
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.
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).
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...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!