What are some of the software programs you use?

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by uRwhatUr

I use Windows. Not a complete list of course and in no particular order, but some of the programs I use are:
...
Fences (desktop organization)
http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/

- very useful application.

[uRwhatUr]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

- very useful application.

I am glad you found it useful.

[hidari]

Windowblinds is a nice product as well if you like to skin your OS

[DMcCunney]

The long answer is "everything including the kitchen sink".

The desktop multiboots Win XP Pro SP3, Win 2K SP4, and Ubuntu Linix 9.10.

But in no particular order:

MS Office 2007 Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook, Publisher (Mostly here for compatibility reasons, though I do use Publisher for occasional DTP projects. I can't justify InDesign for my limited usage, and know how to make Publisher do what I want.)

Open Office 3.2 RC1 Free open source office suite, compatible with MS Office.

Firefox 3.6 (though IE 8, Opera 10.10, Safari 4, and Chrome 4.X dev branch are also installed.

Thunderbird 3.0 (as a newsreader. I handle email with GMail in Firefox.)

Cygwin A port of the Gnu toolchain to Windows. Includes the Gnu compiler suite and all of the standard Linux utilties including the bash shell. It provides a POSIX compatible development environment in Windows, and targets compatibility with Red Hat Linux. Rather than rewrite every tool to use Windows system calls, the developers implemented a subset of standard Unix system calls encapsulated in a DLL. Code meant for Linux links against the DLL, sees what it expects, and most stuff builds "out of the box".

PuTTY A free, open source, telnet/ssh client for Windows.

FileZilla A free, open source FTP client for Windows.

Google Desktop An index into the hundreds of thousands of files spread ober five hard drives in my system. Handy for locating things by content. For finding actual files by name, I use Locate32.

Notepad++ A free, open source text editor intended as a Notepad replacement among other things. A tabbed interface, based on the Scintilla edit control, with code folding and syntax highlighting for programming languages some folks have never heard of.

Eclipse IBM's free, open source programmer's IDE, cross platform and written in Java.

Active State Perl, Python, and Tcl-Tk Free, open source scripting languages.

Symantec Corporate A/V automatically updated weekly with virus signatures.

Sygate Personal Firewall Bought and killed off by Symantec, but the last freeware version is widely available and works fine. Low reaource usage, and the best interface I've seen on a firewall.

7zip Free, open source archive utility. Opens 7z, xz, zip, gzip, bzip2, tar, lzma, rar, cab, arj, z, cpio, rpm, deb. lzh, split, chm, iso, udf, compound, wim, drg, xar, nsts, fat, vhd and mir files. Creates 7z, xz, zip, gzip, bzip2, and tar archives. I have several other archivers to handle formats 7zip doesn't support, but it handles the most common ones, and the engine it uses has been ported to Linux as well.

TightVNC A fork of the original Virtual Network Computing software released as open source by AT&T's no longer extant Cambridge UK labs. It's a remote control solution similat to Windows Remote Desktop, but available for things that aren't Windows. (I had it up on Solaris servers at a former employer to be able to use a GUI without having to install an X-server package on my desktop.)

Process Explorer A free replacement for Microsoft's Task Manager in Windows, with a lot more power and features. the author, Mark Russinovich, is a noted writer and lecturer on Windows programming topics, and I've sometimes suspected he knows more about what goes on inside Windows than Microsoft. Microsoft seems to think he knows something: they bought his company, and he and his partner now work in MS's Core Architecture group.

Paint.NET A free, open source replacement for the standard Windows Paint program, based on the .NET libraries. I have an older version of Photoshop, but PAint.NET does the stuff I normally need to do.

Audacity A free, open source audio editor, also available for MAc OS/X and Linux.

Vim Bram Moolenar's "Vi Improved", a powerful editor based on the design of the Unix vi editor, with many enhancements. Vim ships as vi in most Linux distributions.

Emacs Richard M. Stallman's famous editor, originally implemented in the TECO language on a DEC-10 at MIT, and subsequently rewritten in Lisp. Emacs is essentially an interpreter for a flavor of Lisp, and most of it is written in the flavor of lisp it implements. If you are fluent in elisp, you can make emacs do pretty much anything, and the are emacs "major modes" for editing most programming languages, reading and replying to email, reading and replying in newsgroups, talking to the system from a command line, and playing games. Old time Unix users would start emacs when they logged in, and do everything from within it.

There's an awful lot more. This just covers some high spots.
______
Dennis
Why yes, I am a geek. Why do you ask?

[uRwhatUr]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Process Explorer A free replacement for Microsoft's Task Manager in Windows, with a lot more power and features.

I like it! Thanks

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Symantec Corporate A/V automatically updated weekly with virus signatures.

Ick! Anything Symantec is going to make your computer run like a slug. It's nasty stuff. The best speed up to any computer is to get rid of it. It's better then overclocking. We use Comodo here and it runs quite nicely. before that we did run AVG free until they came out with a new version that made it run like a slug too.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Ick! Anything Symantec is going to make your computer run like a slug. It's nasty stuff.

Utterly untrue.

Note that I said "Symantec Corporate A/V". The Corporate version is relatively low resource and has never caused a problem here.

I do not recommend Norton A/V, the consumer product made by Symantec. It has bad cases of "does not play well with others", and is nasty stuff.

(I've been in IT in one fashion or another since the IBM mainframe days, and have done desktop support in corporate settings. I do know a bit about this stuff.)

The best speed up to any computer is to get rid of it. It's better then overclocking. We use Comodo here and it runs quite nicely. before that we did run AVG free until they came out with a new version that made it run like a slug too.

I looked at Comodo's firewall, but dropped it and went back to Sygate Personal Firewall. SPF does what it needed and has a vastly better interface.

I'm aware of Comodo's A/V offering, but passed. Symantec auto-updates on a weekly basis from a very large and well maintained virus signature database. My question about smaller competitors like Comodo is whether they have the resources to keep up effectively on the threats. (They may well. As mentioned, Symantec works fine here, so I've had no reason to investigate alternatives.)

If Comodo works for you, enjoy.
______
Dennis

[devilsadvocate]

And over here in Linux-ville...

My main distro is Arch Linux 64. Straight Compiz WM, no KDE or GNOME bloat; LXpanel and Tint2 systray.

I'm fortunate enough to have two monitors, so I don't have to get into the whole command-line-vs-GUI debate, I have both simultaneously. For CLI stuff I have Terminator, which allows me to split my terminal into multiple windows; in one I have htop as a sysmon, in another I exec

watch sensors

to keep tabs on temps (I OC), in a third term I have centerim for chat, and a fourth term for...well, terminal stuff. With transparency the whole thing looks straight out of Minority Report.

OpenOffice.org has been kind of getting on my nerves lately; I have to keep a copy of MS Office in a VM anyway because school "officially" calls for .docx. Speaking of VMs I primarily use VirtualBox which has really come into its own after Sun took it over from Innotek; I still have VMware Workstation for the rare occasion that it can do something VBox can't.

PCManFM for a file manager, Transmission for a bittorrent client, nano/gedit, FF/TBird but probably switching to Opera, and...umm, that's pretty much it. My VMs have all the usual stuff; Ubuntu does some things better (or easier) than, say, Mandriva, and PCLinuxOS might be better still; since I test all these distros for my site I already have them handy. For the most part I take Linus Torvalds' advice and use the best tool for the job, open-source or otherwise.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by devilsadvocate

And over here in Linux-ville...

My main distro is Arch Linux 64. Straight Compiz WM, no KDE or GNOME bloat; LXpanel and Tint2 systray.

I run Ubuntu on my desktop, and Ubuntu and Puppy on my notebook.

Desktop Ubuntu uses Gnome. Notebook uses Xfce4, as does Puppy. (NB: not Xubuntui. That was painfully slow on the old limited notebook. Ubuntu installed bare bones to a CLI interface from MinimalCD, then Xfce4 and friensd installed via apt-get works a lot better.),

I'm fortunate enough to have two monitors, so I don't have to get into the whole command-line-vs-GUI debate, I have both simultaneously. For CLI stuff I have Terminator, which allows me to split my terminal into multiple windows; in one I have htop as a sysmon, in another I exec

to keep tabs on temps (I OC), in a third term I have centerim for chat, and a fourth term for...well, terminal stuff. With transparency the whole thing looks straight out of Minority Report.

I like Terminal and Sakura, both of which do tabs instead of multiple windows and can do transparency. (Under Windows, I use Console2, which is similar.)

OpenOffice.org has been kind of getting on my nerves lately; I have to keep a copy of MS Office in a VM anyway because school "officially" calls for .docx.

Open Office 3.2 doesn't offer sufficient support for docx?

PCManFM for a file manager, Transmission for a bittorrent client, nano/gedit, FF/TBird but probably switching to Opera, and...umm, that's pretty much it. My VMs have all the usual stuff; Ubuntu does some things better (or easier) than, say, Mandriva, and PCLinuxOS might be better still; since I test all these distros for my site I already have them handy. For the most part I take Linus Torvalds' advice and use the best tool for the job, open-source or otherwise.

I like Xfe for file manager, though I have PCManFM installed. Nano is here, but my preferred editor is Geany, a lightweight IDE based on the Scintilla edit control. It does code folding and syntax highlighting for a host of languages.

I prefer FF/TB, but use Opera 10.10 on the notebook for faster loading and lower resource usage.

(The notebook is an ancient Fijitsu Lifebook with slow IDE 4 HD and 256MB RAM. It technically runs FF 3.6, if I don't mind waiting 30 seconds for it to load...)
______
Dennis

[devilsadvocate]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I run Ubuntu on my desktop, and Ubuntu and Puppy on my notebook.

Desktop Ubuntu uses Gnome. Notebook uses Xfce4, as does Puppy. (NB: not Xubuntui. That was painfully slow on the old limited notebook. Ubuntu installed bare bones to a CLI interface from MinimalCD, then Xfce4 and friensd installed via apt-get works a lot better.),

I agree; tried that with my Acer Aspire One since it has the GMA500 chipset for which there is little-to-no *nix support.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I like Terminal and Sakura, both of which do tabs instead of multiple windows and can do transparency. (Under Windows, I use Console2, which is similar.)

Yes, transparency FTW. Especially if your machine has the horsepower to do direct rendering.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Open Office 3.2 doesn't offer sufficient support for docx?

Open and edit, yes; create/save as, no. Also I've noticed a lot more formatting getting munged when going from MS Office to OO.o, and school are sticklers for APA formatting.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I like Xfe for file manager, though I have PCManFM installed. Nano is here, but my preferred editor is Geany, a lightweight IDE based on the Scintilla edit control. It does code folding and syntax highlighting for a host of languages.

Geany is nice. I kind of miss kwrite, but not enough to install 1.5 GB of bloat and have a bunch of devs cut me off at the knees when it comes to customizing my desktop.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I prefer FF/TB, but use Opera 10.10 on the notebook for faster loading and lower resource usage.

Just installed 10.10-4742, we'll try it again. For some reason some glitch or other keeps sending me back to FF. Better the devil you know...

[dsvick]

Way too many to list all of them, but the most used would be:

Home
Firefox
Open Office
Foobar 2K
Calbre
Sony Reader software
Adobe Digital Editions
Spider Solitaire
a couple of Python scripts ....

Work
Firefox
Open Office
Foobar 2K
IE 7
IE 6
Ultra Edit
MS IIS
MS Exchange
MS SQL Server (enterprise manager and query analyzer)
Linux FTP
bind (DNS stuff in Linux)
Postfix (email stuff in Linux)
irfanview
MS Outlook
Mozilla Thunderbird
putty
winscp
filezilla
ws ftp
nagios and cacti
beyond compare
adobe reader
trillian
malware bytes
spybot
...

That is the short list, like most everyone else I could go on for a while with "everything"

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by devilsadvocate

I agree; tried that with my Acer Aspire One since it has the GMA500 chipset for which there is little-to-no *nix support.

Work well? I just went through the exercise of using ndiswrapper to get some Windoze drivers loaded on the notebook.

Yes, transparency FTW. Especially if your machine has the horsepower to do direct rendering.

It's a nice fringe but not a must have here. I do like the tabbed interface, especially on the notebook with limited screen real estate.

Open and edit, yes; create/save as, no. Also I've noticed a lot more formatting getting munged when going from MS Office to OO.o, and school are sticklers for APA formatting.

Ouch. So compatibility isn't quite there yet. My SO bought a replacement laptop when her old one died horribly, and I was amused to note is came with OO as the productivity suite.

Geany is nice. I kind of miss kwrite, but not enough to install 1.5 GB of bloat and have a bunch of devs cut me off at the knees when it comes to customizing my desktop.

I got introduced to Geany by Puppy Linux, which bundles it as the standard GUI editor, because it's a good combo of features vs small size. (Puppy is intended for older hardware, and the devs place a premium on small size of included apps.)

I was already familiar with the Scintilla edit control, and have several other editors that use it, so Geany was an easy sell. I also recently installed the JASSPA Linux build of their fork of Microemacs. I've been a Microemacs user since the MS-DOS days, and built an earlier Daniel Lawrence version "out of the box" on my old AT&T 3B1 running Unix System V Release 2. It's quite light weight, and the GUI version loads in about 2 seconds, which is about five times as fast as Geany.

Just installed 10.10-4742, we'll try it again. For some reason some glitch or other keeps sending me back to FF. Better the devil you know...

It works well enough here. I prefer the architecture of FF and the ability to extend it with add-ons, but current versions are too big and resource intensive for the old notebook. Once I figure out how to install my preferred ad blocking CSS package, it will be pretty much usable.
______
Dennis

[Sparrow]

One I forgot to mention earlier is Bulk Rename Utility - a great time saver.

"Bulk Rename Utility is a free file renaming software for Windows. Bulk Rename Utility allows you to easily rename files and entire folders based upon extremely flexible criteria."