Generally useful computer links

Free stuff!

Some is for Windows, some is for *nix, and some is even for both. Html and css resources have their own page.

Serious

RealVNC for viewing your desktop from somewhere else. See also x11vnc.
PuTTy for secure ssh login and port forwarding. See also TeraTerm.
MindTerm is an ssh client written in Java.
WinSCP for secure file transfer.
freessh.org for more ssh links.
IMAP Spam Begone works with SpamAssassin to get rid of spam in a remote imap INBOX.
Cygwin for a unix-like environment within Windows. Includes XFree86 and an ssh server and L^AT_EX and everything!
VirtualBox lets you run one x86 operating system on top of another.
For L^AT_EX on Windows there is also T_EXnicCenter and MiKT_EX.
For converters between L^AT_EX and PC Textprocessors: http://www.tug.org/utilities/texconv/.
For conversion from L^AT_EX to html there's L^AT_EX2HTML and H^EV^EA and see also bibtex2html.
Kile is an integrated L^AT_EX environment for KDE.
Lilypond for creating lovely printed music. (This is also included in Cygwin).
Pine and Mutt, a couple of e-mail clients. There are Windows versions of both Pine and Mutt but frankly the Pine one is easier to get started with. I use the Fancy Thread patch for Pine, and also the Accented Characters one.
Alpine is Pine's replacement. It already does fancy threading and there's a patch for Accented Characters.
GnuPG and PGP for privacy in your communications. And WinPT means Windows users need not feel left out.
There is a PGP plug-in ("filter") for Pine. My key ID is 0x428B936F. Maybe Chuck Bridgeland's page will help you get set up. I seem to have managed to set up pgp4pine (compiled with Cygwin) to work with PC-Pine via WinPT but (a) I don't know why and (b) I don't know if I could do it again...
Firefox is a browser. There are extensions for it, including an ad blocker (here are some filters), a web developer toolbar, a proxy switcher, and a thingy for splitting the browser window.
Zotero is an extension for Firefox which can save bibliography information off journal websites into a database which you can then use within MS W ord (although writing scientific documents in Word is a crime and also a punishment) or Open Office via plugins.
Open Office, a cross-platform office suite, now in version 3.
Star Office is part of the Google Pack.
the GIMP, for image manipulation, for which there is a Windows version.
FastStone have a freeware image viewer thingy.
Ghostscript, Ghostview and GSview for viewing postscript and encapsulated postscript, and for converting them to other things (including pdf). Get the postscript printer driver from Adobe to create postscript files in the first place.
The Foxit PDF Reader is free, fast and small.
Programmer's File Editor, a text editor, but see also Vim and Notepad2.
BitTorrent, for better downloads. Azureus is a Java BitTorrent Client, μTorrent is a very light windows one.
MetaProducts make Download Express, which is nice.
Comodo Personal Firewall blocks dangerous network traffic coming in or out of your desktop PC.
Grisoft have a free version of their anti-virus software.
SpyBot is for removing spyware and uninvited advertising.
Clam AntiVirus is a GPL anti-virus toolkit for UNIX, with Windows and OS X ports.
Grace is for plotting graphs, and so is QtiPlot.
I use KDE as my Linux desktop, here are some KDE Applications.
Nonags is a site for more free stuff.

Games

Flightgear is a free, open-source, cross-platform flight simulator. And so is Targetware.

Last updated: 24^th October 2008

Email: danny at chrastina dot net