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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!)
Gnucleus! Open Source gnutella file sharing. For once you can be REALLY sure that there isn't any spyware in your filesharing software!
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.
FreeeCiv
OpenOffice
and WinGimp
I would love to hear more from everyone else.
Is this thing on?
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.
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...
X-Chat is available as windows builds, works great.
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.
virtualdub
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.
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.
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)
The home page is at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/
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 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.
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.
I see thy doubts, friend, and they ex-POSE thee! Get thee behind me, SATAN, thou foul open grave of proprietary FILTH! I banish thee in the name of TUX! Let not thy infidelity and obfuscation be a stumblin' block to the newly converted, CAN I GET AN AMEN-A!
Friends, ig-NORE the sireen call of the pay-to-play heathen that lurk in the hedgerows, clinging to the darkness, roaring like a lion, SEEKING WHOM THEY MAY DEVOUR! Open thy hearts, OPEN THY SOURCE! Come to the cleansing fountain of forgiveness from closed-sources. Do not let these Philistines halt thy progress! Come into the LIGHT! COME INTO THE LIIIIIGHT!
I neeed a nap.
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
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!
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.
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.
Open Source Software for Windows
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
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
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.
It isn't. Well, not for most people (even Slashdot people). I can't speak for others, but I find it mildly offensive that many people are convinced that Windows is the only way, that with software you get what you pay for, and that if a person cannot afford photoshop or MS Office that they simply cannot edit photos or create documents/presentations/spreadsheets. It is more a matter of educating people, showing them, "See, there is ANOTHER way, and it's better in many respects."
Others, to a degree myself, are offended by Microsoft's (and other) commercial software company's moral bankruptsy and their screwing of users, and feel morally compelled to at least let others know that they do not have to put up with it. That nobody has to use Microsoft, and that for the most part to not do so involves very little loss and significant gain.
Some people are just cheap, or truly low on money, and think they must choose between rent and important software. These people can also benefit greatly from OSS if they only knew about it.
Still other people, such as aspiring programmers, often have a tough time doing any real programming in Windows because it's so damn complex and crufty, and some eventually lose interest and leave for a different interest. Some of these people would also benefit greatly from being able to see the source to their programming tools--how they actually work--rather than reading unnavigable gigabytes of MSDN documentation to find info on how to work around some obscure bug or "feature" in their tools.
It isn't a religion, it's philanthropy.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
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?
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
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.
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
A great little multiplatform Postscript and PDF (Acrobat) viewer.
Here's the Ghostscript, home page, and the GSview-specific page.
-- Alastair
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."
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!
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
And if they don't run screaming from the room you know you've got some future geeks on your hand. :)
KFG
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
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
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.
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.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
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.
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?
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.
It may not be for you but do you consider your computer skills average? If you spend some time teaching computer skills to Normal People, you'll notice how even the concept of a file or directory structure is difficult.
People are lazy. They don't bother learning things unless they have to. Most people will gladly learn and use AbiWord instead of WordStar. Not because AbiWord has more features. It's just easier.
Vim will take over the world when most people stop using elevators and opt for climbing the stairs.
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.
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.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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.
I believe VirtualDub can read MPEG-1 now, but I don't think it can write them.
MPEG is sort of outside VirtualDub's scope; it is first and foremost an *AVI* editing program (not a general video editing program).
To my knowledge there is no single software package that can handle AVI, Quicktime, and MPEG equally well. (Premiere claims to handle all three, but its Quicktime and MPEG support have serious problems; Apple's Quicktime also claims to handle all three, but its AVI support is severely lacking).
Plus, I don't think it is possible to distribute a free MPEG-2 codec since there are active patents on it... (Apple distributes Quicktime 6 without MPEG-2 support, and makes you pay $20 or $30 extra for it)
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.