Good FOSS Win32 apps (was: Writing FOSS for Win32...)

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Wed Mar 19 10:52:57 EDT 2008


On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 10:26 AM, Tech Writer <TechWtr at handspun.com> wrote:
> Right away, we set up Firefox as the default browser,
>  and added OpenOffice for her school work.

  Good choices, both.

>   * Last week, she needed to remove red eye from one of her photos.  We installed
>  GIMP, but couldn't figure out how to use the redeye reduction feature (kept
>  changing the color of the whole face.)

  I believe you have to use the "Select" tool to select the general
area of the photo the eyes are in.  You don't have to be super-exact,
but you have to give it a hint.  Google found this:

http://www.simplehelp.net/2007/12/04/how-to-remove-red-eye-from-your-digital-photos-using-gimp/

> Even though the machine came with a DVD/RW drive, there was no DVD writing
> software.  I was initially going to add RecordNow, which is on the other Win
> machines, but then found a product called DVD Flick that did the job just fine.

  FYI, I've also used "CDBurnerXP" with good success, although that's
not a movie-maker, just a data recorder tool.  And it's not FOSS --
just free, not Free.  But the 3.x versions are reasonably lightweight,
and useful.

> survey of software to add onto a Windows machine so that all
>  you've paid for is the OS.

  Of the following are FOSS and work on Win32:

  Inkscape (vector graphics) is extremely capable.  I've been told it
beats Adobe Illustrator in some ways.

  Scribus (page layout) gets good reviews.  It's not InDesign or
QuarkXPress, but it is certainly adequate for amateur use.

  7-Zip is an all-around good archive manager program.  It does PKZip,
RAR, MS CAB, MSI, and a bunch of other formats.  I use it all the time
to extract the contents of EXE which embed files for installation.

  PDFCreator is a "virtual printer" which generates PDFs from any
program that can print.  They're pretty good PDFs, too, with
selectable text and such (not just a raster image of a printed page).

  WinDirStat is a disk space usage analysis tool which is handy to
have.  It's "tree map" is surprisingly helpful to me.

  Notepad++ is a capable and extensible text-editor that's great when
you want something better than Windows Notepad, but still want
something Windows-like in nature (and not just Emacs for Windows (not
that there is anything wrong with Emacs for Windows (I've used it
myself), but culture-shock can be a problem for newbies)).

  FileZilla is a great FTP/SFTP client.

  WireShark (network packet sniffer) is an indispensable element in
any tech geek's diagnostic toolkit.

-- Ben


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