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The Best of Windows Open Source Software?

Posted by Cliff on from the not-just-for-penguins-anymore dept.

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."

5 of 889 comments (clear)

  1. Open Office by 403Forbidden · · Score: 5, Interesting

    www.openoffice.org

  2. A few.... by FPhlyer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  3. The BYU UUG by omnirealm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  4. Egoboo by Skwirl · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Egoboo is a top-down dungeon crawler written with the Quake 2 engine. The authors cite Nethack as a major influence but it plays a lot more like Zelda64.

    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.

  5. Re:VNC by kalislashdot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.