Thursday, April 24, 2008

OSS Extravaganza

I decided to take a short break between coding and paper writing tonight, and work on setting up my "new" laptop (I bought Christian's old Alienware off of him after he mistakenly thought his cat destroyed it and bought a new one). I have both Windows and Ubuntu installed, though at the moment I am spending more time in Windows. I had some of my basic favorite programs installed already, so I went on an open source software rampage.

Some of the packages I downloaded I've used before (such as Inkscape, of course). But I also picked up some that I always wanted to try but never got around to, like Blender and Scribus. Just for fun, here's a full list of what I've got so far. Let me know if I've missed anything you deem to be essential.
I have to say that the world of free and open source software was pretty foreign to me before last year's Google Summer of Code. I didn't realize how high the quality of the software was! I also had a somewhat poor impression of the community from a few fanatics I ran into at school. It's nice to have learned that most people are pretty nice and normal -- as far as geeks go at least ;).

10 comments:

Christian Muise said...

OSS for windows or ubuntu?

Anonymous said...

Notepad2 is Win only afaic.
Of course I have no idea what you want and need, but here are some OSS tools I use in addition:

7-zip
GCC
Firefox/Thunderbird (I guess you installed that already)
FFDShow (all in one codec solution)
Subversion / tortoiseSVN
Xming (X-Server for Windows)
Aften (AC3 encoder)
Maxima (computer algebra system)
CDex (CD-ripper)
Paint.Net (I like it more than gimp, not as powerfull but good, but written in C#.net)
Virtualbox (PC-Virtualisation)
WinSCP (secure file transfer)
Autohotkey (Windows automatisation and macros and hotkeys)
Avisynth (Video frameserver)
Java (as I know open source now)
Python
ScummVM (for playing Monkey Island 1 and such stuff :)

If you search for something specific, you can try
http://www.osalt.com/

Gail Carmichael said...

Both Windows and Ubuntu - I am planning on using both eventually ;)

Yes, I do believe Notepad2 is Windows only (I have only been installing the Windows stuff so far, actually... Ubuntu is next).

I forgot about 7-zip, good catch. Do have Mozilla stuff, and WinSCP. I've heard great things about Paint.NET, guess I will have to give it a try! I definitely wanted to see what GIMP looks like these days, since I think it's had its interface done up by now. I also have ToirtoiseSVN on my old computer, will have to install here...

Some names there I didn't know about, and will definitely check them out!

Christian Muise said...

If you haven't done too much with ubuntu yet, then i'd recommend putting ubuntu studio on it...it comes with a slew of apps you'd like...

Gail Carmichael said...

Cool, I will definitely check that out. After installing a bunch of windows stuff, I went into Ubuntu to update to Hardy Heron. After that's done, I will start getting all the packages I want there.

Gail Carmichael said...

Darn, didn't clue in soon enough that this studio thing was a flavour of Ubuntu and not just a software package for it. Well, I probably won't bother reinstalling now, but I guess I can look to see what software I'm missing from my list ;)

Chris said...

I am curious how easily ubuntu went on the laptop. I am looking at a new one and have bene partial to the MacBook Pro because of its ease with dual-OS. If Alienware's laptop is as easy I may have another alternative.

Gail Carmichael said...

I didn't have any problems, though I don't know whether everything works (like the camera etc). It's all fine on Windows, of course.

Anonymous said...

a few fanatics eh? :/

Gail Carmichael said...

If it makes you feel better, it wasn't you ;)

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