Software

How a WindowsXP user can live off the land

If you have windows XP and want to live free and legal, then these are the pieces of software that will let you do everything you’re likely to want to do and more. My DVD of these files is around 2.5GB and if you add the WindowsXP installer CD into the mix you have everything you need when installing a new system.

Although some of these are the basic version from a company that sells commercial versions, none of these programs are crippleware, nagware or spyware. They are free (as in beer) and legal (as in eagle). Many of the programs are GPL and so free as in antifreeze. When multiple licenses are indicated this sometimes means that different parts have different licenses, and sometimes that there are multiple licenses available.

The links are either links to the homepage or the download as it takes my fancy. I’ve tried to make the links version independant, if they obviously aren’t, I’ve said (check for later version). I couldn’t find the home pages for some programs, so I’ve just included places that they can be downloaded from.

There are overlaps, so you probably won’t want to install all of these blindly.

Comments welcome.

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Antivirus

• AVG Free Edition
• ClamWin (GPL)

CD

• DAEMON Tools CD Emulator
• CDBurnerXP Pro CD and DVD burner
• Iso Buster Recover CD/DVDs. Convert and extract images.
• FileDisk Generic image file disk filing system.

CygWin

• Cygwin All those unix things for windows. (GPL)

Editors

• Notepad 2 Very lightweight, but with features.
• Notepad++ Another lightweight but good editor
• Nvu An HTML editor that isn’t rubbish!
• Jedit Powerful, extensible editor.
• XVI32 A hex editor that doesn’t die with big files.

Files

• 7z For all your archiving needs. 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB. (GPL)
• Adobe Reader
• Foxit Reader reads pdfs, but does it fast and small.
• Azureus A popular bittorrent client. Supports plugins, including RSS. (GPL)
• PC Inspector File Recovery Undelete.
• WinSCP (GPL)
• DiskTools ImageMaker Free
• eMule you should always use open source p2p software. Emule is a popular one. (GPL)
• Partition Logic a free partition manager, not actually a windows program – you need to make a boot disk, but useful to windows folks nevertheless.
• Shareaza is another open source p2p program that’s pretty good these days. Includes bittorrent.

Fun (check also abandonia, reloaded and wikipedia)

• FreeCIV “Because civilisation should be free!” (GPL)
• Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory class based fps.
• Nexuiz another fps.
• LinCity (GPL)
• Risk (GPL)
• TA: Spring a total annihilation inspired RTS.
• Tower Toppler Nebulus (GPL)
• igowin and arimaa Arimaa and Go are both good human board games.
• Americas Army A free multiplayer FPS from the US ARMY with an emphasis on realism.
• Jellyfish light a strong backgammon player.
• Battle of Survival An RTS (GPL)
• BilliardGL (GPL)
• Bontago Tower construction
• CGoban2 Go client and file editor. No Singleplayer.
• Dink Smallwood Zelda like iso adventure/RPG.
• Egoboo 3d dungeon adventure. (GPL)
• FlightGear Flightsim (GPL)
• Frozen Bubble (GPL)
• GLTron (GPL)
• GNU Chess (GPL)
• Gunbound
• Nethack – Falcons Eye with a graphical interface for the non-diehards.
• Torcs a racing game. (GPL)
• Sokoban YASC (GPL)
• Settlers3d
• Trackballs A marble madness type game.
• Battle For Wesnoth Fantasy turn based strategy.

Image

• Blender 3d modelling. (GPL)
• Gimp (GPL)
• Paint.net A small, fast, paint replacement, with plenty of features.
• Dia A Visio like diagramming program. (GPL)
• Inkscape Scalable Vector Graphics. (GPL)
• Picasa Digital photo organiser.
• Sodipodi More SVG (GPL)
• Truespace 3 intuitive 3d. Now free because of newer versions. (check for later version)

Science

• World Wind Nasa viewer for many different kinds of satellite image.
• Celestia Space simulator (GPL)
• Google Earth More fantastic satellite photography, better coverage and faster than World Wind.

Maths

• Maxima Algebra manipulation. (GPL)
• wxMaxima A nice GUI for maxima. (GPL)
• R Language and environment for statistical computing. (GPL)
• Mathamatic An algebraic calculator. (LGPL)
• Frink a calculator/programming language perfect for the kind of things you’d normally use the back of an envelope for.

Network

• Aircrack 802.11 sniffer and WEP cracker.

• HTTPTunnel Tunnels TCP over HTTP for going through proxies (GPL)
• MIRC
• Trillian The basic version is free and supports Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, IRC, etc…
• UltraVNC fast VNC for remote control (GPL)
• weplab WEP key analyzer and breaker. (GPL)
• Filezilla server FTP server (GPL)
• Firefox excellent web browser (MPL)
• HTTrack Website copier and offline browser. (GPL)
• Netstumbler WLAN detector.
• PuTTY terminal program, ssh client, ssh tunnels.
• Thunderbird email software (MPL)
• XFire Messaging while in games.
• Zebedee A TCP/UDP port tunneller. (GPL)
• httport Proxy tunnelling without a server.
• Shockwave player
• Flash player
• BigApache A preconfigured version of the webserver. (GPL)
• BewareIRCd A simple to configure irc server. (GPL)

Office

• Abiword cross platform word processor. (GPL)
• OpenOffice a complete office suite. Good MS compatibility. (GPL/LGPL)
• Gnumeric spreedsheet. Currently considered more accurate than excel for statistical functions. (GPL)
• PDFCreator (GPL)
• PostgreSQL an excellent database server

Phone

• Phone unlock code calcuator
• Floats mobile agent The reason my next phone will be a Sony Ericcson. (GPL)
• Gizmo Project Please don’t use skype – there are a number of open standards based alternatives, for example gizmoproject.

Privacy

• GnuPG Public/private key encryption. (GPL)
• enigmail GnuPG plug in for email clients. (GPL/MPL)
• Spybot Search and Destroy Spyware finder.
• Zonealarm Firewall.
• TrueCrypt encryption for partitions (GPL).
• Cain & Abel many useful decryption tools.
• Password Renew Offline administrator priviledges granter. You’ll need a PE Boot CD.
• X Setup Professional tweak manager for windows. Registry tools.

Programming

• ProcessExplorer superb process management. Finds open file handles easily, can even close them without killing the process.
• Registrar lite a better registry editor.
• Registry monitor
• Dev Pascal Pascal IDE (GPL)
• Dev-C++ C/C++ IDE (GPL)
• DotNet SDK (check for later version)
• Eclipse Java IDE. Check the download site for the Milestone builds of the next release. (EPL/CPL)
• MinGW In case you don’t want to use cygwin. (GPL/Freeware)
• Sharpdevelop IDE for C# and VB.NET (GPL)
• TortoiseCVS CVS functionality in windows explorer. (GPL)
• CVSNT A cvs server for windows. (GPL)
• PE Resource Explorer lots of fun to be had editing the graphics etc, in exe files.
• TinyHexer another hex editor.
• iSQL-viewer a java based SQL query program. Can view image BLOBs etc.

Reference

• e-Sword The bible. Searching and many translations available.
• one day an offline version of wikipedia

Runtimes / Libraries / Emulators

• coLinux run the linux kernel and programs on Windows. Not much activity, but a cool idea.
• DirectX (check for later version)
• DotNet framework (check for later version)
• GTK+ (for GIMP etc). (LGPL)
• Java (check for later version)
• QEmu (3rd party download) multiple architecture emulator. (MIT/BSD/GPL/LGPL)
• SDL (LGPL)
• Windows Service Pack 2
• Xdeep/32 A convenient X server that performs well compared to XFree86 for windows. Sadly, looks like they’ve discontinued the free one, but maybe you can still find a download. Xfree86 has got a lot better though since I put this on. Check out cygnus for the download.
• xming is another free x server – this one has fewer dependencies than the cygwin one, but is pretty much identical otherwise.

Sound

• Audacity very good sound editor. (GPL)
• CDex cd ripping (GPL)
• winLame multiple format encoder (GPL)
• zinf simple music player. (GPL)
• TeamSpeak voice over ip IRC like system.
• AcidExpress (check for later version) create loop based music.

Video

• Graphedit (3rd party download)
• TMPGenc mpg encoder.
• VirtualDub video capture and processing. (GPL)
• DVX
• FFDshow (3rd party download) direct show filter for Xvid, DivX, Mpeg 1 & 2
• Fraunhofer DVD codec (3rd party download) allows your normal media players (eg. Windows media player) to play DVDs with no extra commercial software.
• K-lite mega codec pack (3rd party download) (3rd party download) pretty much every codec you could imagine. Try not to install it over other codecs. Includes most of the other codecs listed here.
• Windows mediaplayer 10 (or later)
• MediaPlayer Classic good lightweight media player.
• Quicktime alternative codec (3rd party download) allows your normal media players (eg. Windows media player) to play quicktime files
• Quicktime
• Realplayer alternative codec (3rd party download) allows your normal media players (eg. Windows media player) to play real media files
• Realplayer
• DVD Decrypter
• Vidomi an Xvid encoder and player
• Video LAN media player a media player with built in DVD and streaming server support.
• Democracy a video player with build in download capabilities. Supports rss feeds of torrents and many more.
• MPlayer media player that supports a lot of formats.