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Free software is more than being available at no monetory cost - to quote the first developer of GCC Richard Stallman at this GNU page:
Hmm... some kinda Gandhian Socialism ...
My home PC runs GNU/Linux (Redhat 7.2 - Linux kernel 2.4.7-10). I made the switch from Win98 in March 2002, and haven't looked back since.
Freedom Software for GNU/Linux
Multimedia
| The Xine Video Player | The best video player for GNU/Linux. |
| X Multimedia System | A great MP3 player. |
| Ogg-Vorbis | An royalty-free (unlike MPEG 1 Layer 3) audio encoding specification, and the encoder/decoder software are free (GNU GPL). I found that a similar audio quality is better compressed in Ogg, but decoding takes a hell of CPU time. |
| Grip | A front-end GUI for easy ripping from CD and RIFF (wav) formats. Supports Mp3/Ogg encoders. |
Open Source Office
| OpenOffice.org | Developed from the Staroffice code which Sun released under its open-source licence. Almost as good as good as MS Office, and correctly opens most MS documents. The legal proper name is Openoffice.org. Only if it took less than a minute to load [sigh] from my 5400 RPM hard-disk. |
| The KDE Office | Uses the QT-based GUI from KDE. KOffice 1.1 was quite decent, though MSOffice format filters were not as good as OO.org. |
Some useful free or open source tools for Windoze that can slowly wean you away from The Evil Company (until you take the jump) are listed below:
Open Source Productivity Tools (Windoze ports of Unix software)
| The Vim Editor | My favourite editor - I use version 6 on Win98 at home and version 5.3 on Solaris at office. Just get it here! |
| WinVi | A lean but powerful GNU GPL Vi clone for Win32. |
| Virtually Unix | Many Unix tools ported natively to Win32, a GNU project now. Expecially useful tools! |
| Unix Utilities | More Unix tools ported natively to Win32. |
| Desktopian | A page similar to this one! |
| TC Shell Windows Port | The only working TC Shell Windows port I found on the Net - now I can work at home the way I do at office. A Z Shell port and source code for both are also available. |
| Midnight Commander | A very good shell (reminds me of the ancient DOSSHELL under DOS 5.0, only better ), also available for Windows. It is not fool-proof though, and crashes sometimes. See also YTree. |
| Dia Diagrammer | A replacement for the expensive Visio bloatware, based on GTK+; a Win32 binary running on the libraries ported as Windows DLLs is also available. I use this all the time for drawing technical diagrams on my Home PC. Can't rotate images by 90°, though, and won't run with the GTK DLLs for GTKWave. |
| Abiword Word Processor | A promising replacement for Microsoft Word. Reads and writes Word 97 files, but crashes with Word 2000 format. I have not used this word processor much. |
Open Source Math Tools
| Scilab | Scilab is a Matlab-like interactive program that can handle matrices as well as control systems, has an interpreted script language, can interface with C and Fortran programs and is very strong on graphics. I like this better than the Cygwin-based port of Octave for Windows. |
| The R Language | "R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues." I haven't played around much with R, but it seems quite competent. An R FAQ. And the comprehensive R site. A Windows binary of version 1.4.0 is available. |
| Maxima | A Common Lisp implementation of the famed Macsyma , the computer-based symbolic algebra system developd at MIT. Just terrific, though the user-interface on Windows looks a bit clumsy. Under the Gnu GPL. |
| R-Lab | Not to be confused with R, RLab is 'our lab' - an open source Matlab-like computing environment. Around 5MB for the full installation with a lot of example code. Further development has stopped, but Ian Searle still provides 'minimalist support'. |
Open Source EDA Tools
| Icarus Verilog | The closest to a freely available complete Verilog compiler on the Net. There are bugs, but compiles small designs, and is under active development. |
| Makes use of GTK DLLs (Win ports of GTK libraries). I use it frequently. Won't run with the DLLs that came Dia :-( (shows the non-standard non-cooperative nature of the development of each Gnu component.) The new Dia homepage is at Amulet. |
Open Source Compilers
| The GCC MingW32 Compiler version 2.95 | Minimalist GNU for Windows 32 - MingW32 - a native port of GCC 2.95 to Win32 at Mumit Khan's FTP site. Has version 3.0 been released? |
| DevC++ | Not a compiler per se, but a GUI front-end that works with MingW32 and the Cygwin GCC port. The package comes with a slimmed-down version of MingW32. Allows simple push-button compile-debug-run with the downloadable Cygnus Insight debugger. I HATE - the domain name :-) |
Interesting Web Sites
| The GNU Home | It's not Unix, originally set up to create a Unix-like system by Richard Stallman "someone who loves to program and enjoys being clever about it." |
| The OpenCores Web Site | Lots of free real-world designs here. |
| Slashdot | "News for nerds. Stuff that matters" |
Various Proprietary Software, but Gratis
These are software that come with no warranty - because they are given away for no money - nevertheless are quite useful.
Editors
| HTML Kit | A very capable HTML editor. Completely free of cost, documentation is web-based only:-( For those who don't like WYSIWIG shit like M$ FrontPage ( even the FP Express that comes with Windows). I used this a lot, until I switched to GVim on GNU/Linux! |
Math Tools
| MuPad | MuPad is a symbolic math package which can do symbolic algebra and calculus, as well as numerical analyses. The Light version is free of cost, the Pro version is shareware. The Light version is powerful, but the command editor sucks (history commands cannot be edited, so you have to type them again :-( Get it here. |
| MathViews | MathViews is a low-cost MATLAB compatible interactive math interpreter; a trimmed-down version is available, this is officially deemed a shareware. |
