Remus

Free and Open Source Software for Windows

There are times when my work requires Windows, and now I’m kind’ of OK with this, with time I got less and less religious about operating systems, maybe because OS-X is out of my reach and because the multitude of Open Source and Free packages available for Windows are more every day letting me use, pretty much, the same packages both under Linux as under Windows.

So last weekend when I had to reinstall an aged Windows (20 minutes for a shut down among many other little or hugely annoying things)  I decided to make a list of the software I use and cherish, for the next time, because all of us know, there will be one ?

Some of the packages are not pure FLOSS just free as it costs no money, but still I think they are worth including them.

Office

• OpenOffice – I don’t think there is anything to comment here, except maybe that I like it a lot more MS Office, I just find it more intuitive and clean, not to mention about actually owning your documents or many other great features not available in MS Office
• PDF Creator – this is a nifty program that let’s you print any document (not made in OpenOffice where this feature is included) or web page or email as a PDF document.
• NVU – a little HTML editor derived from the old Mozilla Composer for the moments I have to edit clean little HTML documents
• FreeMind – a Java program to edit mind maps for un-tackling complicated issues
  

Internet

• Mozilla Firefox – tabs, security, standard compliance makes that my favorite browser
• Mozilla Thunderbird – I have the nasty habit of carrying all my mails since I had a mail account, and somehow among being secure, having a great spam killer it is the only one that can handle with easy my 20.000+ mails, that’s when I’m not under Linux where I prefer KMail
• Free Download Manager – when torrents are not available, resuming is important or I just want to limit the download speed
• Azureus – bit torrent client
• Putty – hey, Unix is kind of hard to get out of your system, so is SSH
• SSH Sentinel – VPN
• WinSCP – file transfers based on SSH, SFTP or SCP
• W.bloggar – hey I have a blog don’t I
• FileZilla –when I don’t feel like winscp-ing
• Konfabulator – when I have processor cycles and memory to kill, but It looks soo good
• TightVNC – when a command line it’s just not enough
• GAIM – all do I prefer Yahoo Messenger, when I have to be on-line on multiple accounts nothing beats this
  

Multimedia / Design

• Inkscape – excellent vectorial drawing program, I don’t know what is more appealing the fact that it’s good or that it has SVG as it’s default format
• GIMP – no commentaries here, it’s a classic
• DIA  - for diagrams
• Audacity – when I have to record conversations and then make them MP3 or OGG’s
• VLC Media Player – for those little movies I keep getting from friends in my emails 
• PixelRuller – when pixels can not be trusted and have to be measured
• Magnifier – especially when doing graphics and design it’s good to check tings at pixel level
• ColorMania – I have a bad memory with color hexa or rgb strings so It’s handy to just have it at hands
  

Development

• GVIM – well, old habits die hard, it edits anything more quickly
• XEmacs – I am an Eclipse convert but still I pay my respects to the ex-one
• Eclipse – well, the only one which was able to make me quit Emacs
• XAMMP – IIS is good, but nothing beats Apache, PHP, mod_jk, Tomcat, … and after a couple of battles to manually install all of this, I found XAMMP which did all this in 10 minutes, excellent
• MySQL, MySQL Administrator, MySQL Query Browser, MySQLCC (I still don’t like the query browser) – because everybody uses a data base and this one is the quickest to work with
• Postgresql – when MySQL is not good enough
• WinCVS – when Eclipse is not appropriated
• Active State Active Python – just because I’m under Windows doesn’t mean that I can’t do it
• Ruby – I still  hope that one day I will learn it
• Cooktop – excellent for XML transformations
• Tidy – all kind HTML,XML of conversions and validations 
• Gygwin – Windows just isn’t enough, beside that I have a hard time convincing my fingers to write dir instead of ls, or I’m just too lazy to do a Explorer search when I have find and fgrep, did I mentioned gcc, make?
  

Utilities

• WinDirStat – in time your free space on your drives tend to disappear, it’s just a handy tool to actually visualize the content of your drive
• 7Zip – archive manager, it knows all what matters, gzip, bzip, zip, and many more
• Free Launch Bar – I hate the start menu, it’s just too slow
• HD Tune – I’d lost a couple of hard drives in my life so checking the temperature and the SMART status it makes a lot of sense to me
• Notepad2 – because notepad it is just plain stupid
• VirtualWin – after you spend so much time under Linux, one desktop won’t really fit you any more. 
• Free Comander – I’m not a big fan of such tools, I’m still the command line guy, but sometime it comes handy

I’m sure there are a couple more I forgot about, but I think the most important ones are above.

December 2nd, 2005

Trolltech Releases Qt 4.0

Well, finally it happen and I hope, will be huge. For those of you not so familiar with Linux, QT is a C++ cross platform (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) development framework which happens to be the foundation of the KDE window manager. KDE was and still is my choice of Window Manager under Linux for it’s maturity, multitude of well integrated applications.

QT is developed by Trolltech an Norwegian company who was smart enough to get involved with the Linux community and dual license they tool kit both GPL and commercial, which basically means you are free to use their tools as long as your application will be free (GPL), otherwise you can alway buy the licenses. Now, Trolltech got famous, had a rock solid and smart toolkit, the only problem was that they dual licensed only the Linux version of their toolkit and recently the OS -X version, which means, free apps but only under Linux and Mac, no Windows. With version 4 of QT also the Windows version is made available under the same terms as the Linux and Mac versions.

Now the big thing is that the road is free for some great Linux/KDE only applications to be ported under Windows. I would love to see my all time favorite applications available for free to the Windows users. What I miss mostly is KMail & Kontact (the best email client I used), Konqueror (the cool/fast/standard web browser), Quanta (the best free editor for PHP, CSS, HTML coding), Koffice (a good and simple enough office suite), I’m sure I miss many other applications.

What Gnome/GTK could offer for a long time (windows binaries) now KDE can too. Let’s not forget the cool: Gimp (Photoshop like graphic application), Inkscape (vectorial, svg graphical application), Gaim (multi protocol IM client) which are some great native Gnome/GTK apps but which also run under Windows.

June 29th, 2005

Windows

Well, I love when my day starts discovering that is Friday instead of Thursday and that Mozilla managed to trash irrecoverably all my recent mails. Those are the signs of a promising day

So, a couple of days ago the WinXP Pro license arrived. I wanted to have a licensed version of Windows on my laptop. After two days of usage I still like it, do sometimes it drives me crazy.

I must tell you that for the last 3 years I used exclusively Linux and I was quite happy :-) Then the normal question would be why are you buying Windows then ? Well, I hove one day to sell some of the tings I make and eventually I have to admit that most peoples use Windows and Word. Linux is just not making any money. That’s a fact, not necessarily a bad one! In this idea it is a bit hard to make windows software under Linux

BTW, the Win thing is not final. Linux got the biggest part of the hardisk for a good reason, I don’t think I will be able to resist to much with Win.

What can I tell you in two days it died as much as my Linux in one year (about 3 or 4 times) and the multitasking is nowhere near the one “Linux” provides, but at least it’s cute. One think I really like is that all my gizmos are working (cell phone, “Visor”) properly. I kind of get used to have minor problems with them under Linux.

It's a bit shocking to see that any software costs money, Linux made me forget that minor aspect, but it's ok, no software is really free. It always costs money, that questions is only whose money? In OS based soft is the money of the developer in the rest is of the client.

Anyway I'm in the process of making it a bit bearable by installing cygwin and XEmacs on it. That thing will be bearable at least. A bit of bash in Win doesn’t hurt. BTW, Xemacs works and looks beautiful.

UNIX Under the Desktop is the OS X review in the new Linux Journal by Brett Simmons and Doc Searls. I have OS X on a second hand old Apple. It is true, "Apple" did it right, Windows is nowhere near OS X, neither in usability neither in stability in nothing. I just wait to make the money so one day I will buy the dream machine, believe me or not it will run OS X and Linux.

BTW, always trust your instincts. Happily the XP came soon enough to make us realize there is some time since somebody tested the applications under Win. Course they didn’t worked, lucky us that we found out in time. So here we are back again. This time I want to buy it (wish I knew how would work that from Romania . Will find the way I'm sure.

March 15th, 2002