h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I know that “Open Source” tends to be associated with geeks & nerds running Linux & *bds's & other Unix variants but what about Open Source products on a commercial operating system (i.e. Microsoft Windows™)?

On my PC (winXP) I have the following
Mozilla Firefox, a standards compliant web browser which unlike Internet Explorer offers tabbed browsing making it perfect for h2g2
OpenOffice.org, a very nice Office type package which once I figured out how to install the “British English” dictionaries & thesaurus does pretty much everything I would expect from an office package.
The Gimp (version 2.0), don't laugh despite its name this is a very good graphics editing programme.
Gaim, an instant messaging programme that supports a number of protocols (Aim, ICQ, MSN, Jabber, IRC plus a few others). I really like this as unlike other multi-protocol IM programmes (e.g the free version of Trillion) it has a spell checker

I've got quite a bit of other Open Source software too, now two questions.
1: Is there any Open Source software you would recommend?
&
2: Is making Open Source software available for commercial operating systems a good idea (are there any ethical conflicts)?

The only IM system I use is IRC, and the current ChatZilla plugin for FireFox is more than adequate. It doesn't spellcheck (yet) but it does give me a CSS that I can edit to suit my own display preferences...

There are not any ethical problems which I am aware of, but there are a number of practical ones.

in particular, open source software relies on open standards, file formats and api's. Propriatory operating systems tend to be slow at openin up things for interoperability. Also they are vulnerable to the supplier deliberately changing something in order to break software which is competing too well with their own efforts.

However both of these are vulnerabilities which non open source software also has.

http://happy.sdf-eu.org/stuff/scrshots/gimp.jpg
http://happy.sdf-eu.org/stuff/scrshots/gimp-gaim.jpg

the gimp in action on a win32(XP) machine

I've just had to reinstall so my current program file menu is a little light, but I'm using Mozilla for my browser and email client. I also use Open Office from time to time, and I have installed (and uninstalled) Red Hat 7.0 Linux

Whenever I need a piece of software to do something I usually go to Sourceforge first

Part of Windows itself was inadvertently made Open Source recently too .. I think it was Windows 2k and NT4 that were leaked from someone Microsoft licensed the source to.

What is 'tab browsing'? and is it possible to have two internet whatsits on one system, like IE, with a different one? I've used CDripper2 in the past, as it was simple to use bit of freeware; is that the same as 'open sorce'?

You get tabs along the top of your page which go to different pages, instead of having loads of windows, one for each page. Can be quite useful sometimes to organise the webbrowsing.

More than one brand of browser can run concurrently, but only one will be associated with html pages and http urls.

I've got 5 different web-browsers on my windows box (MS Internet Exporer, Mozilla Firfox, Opera, Links2, Elinks) so no problems with more than one. Tabbed browsing is very good for h2g2 (and other dna sites) because when you log in you can just go through your conversation list opening up threads in new tabs, two advantages to this (1) most users find it quicker to switch between tabs than between windows (yeah we are all lazy moving the mouse all the way to the taskbar takes so much effort) and (2) it uses less of your system resources so you can have more tabs open than you could have windows.

The two best tabbed browsers (for windows) are (IMHO) "Mozilla Firfox" & "Opera"
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ (Opensource)
http://www.opera.com/ (Adware)

I'm also a big fan of Elinks which offers tabbed browsing but I'm afaid others might consider that a fetish thing.

As to what Open Source is, there are several types of Open Source Licence but the one thing they have in common is that the source code is freely available - this means two things (1) if you are geeky enough you can change & (2) again if you are geeky enough instead of downloading a self installing executable programme you can download & compile source on your machine (which should give a slight performance advantage ).

Lesse... I use Windows 2000 and Windows XP on my laptop and my main machine respectively.

Mozilla and Firefox for browsers. Lots of non- people I know are actually using Firefox now because of tabbed browsing and popup stopping. I've been tinkering with Nvu (pronounced "En-View") which is a Mozilla based WYSIWYG HTML editor but so far I'd still rather use Notepad.

I use OpenOffice for most of my word processing, though I do occasionally fall back on Office XP on my main machine.

I use The GIMP for most of my graphics work.

I use an excellent little IM client called Miranda IM. It's open source but Windows only. The first IM system I used was ICQ (back in the late 90s) and I'm fond of the way the interface was before they added in all the hundreds of features I don't use like voice messaging. Miranda's interface is very similar to the early ICQ clients and most of the features that got added in to the ICQ client after 2000a are available as plugins so you can install them if you use them.

I use CDEX for ripping CDs to MP3. It's open source and pretty fast.

I have the Cygwin Linux emulation layer on both my Windows computers for applications that only work on Unix. In particular it's useful for running programs remotely from my school's Solaris labs using SSH and X Windows. Okay, this one is really .

I use DC++ to connect to the Direct Connect Peer to Peer network.

Doomsday is an open source Doom engine (Doom, the game). Doom is one of my favorite games. Doomsday supports true 3D which is neat.

I use Ghostscript and Ghostview to view PDFs and PostScript files.

And finally I'm tinkering with RealVNC for Remote Desktop (aka Terminal Services). Been having some trouble getting it to work though.

Whew. I have a lot more OSS than I thought.

"but so far I'd still rather use Notepad"... wot no vi (well at least GVIM )

I also have to give a thumbs up to Ghostscript and Ghostview and Cygwin/Xfree is another defiante tool (could not run Elinks without it)
NB. have you looked at mysys?

Sorry Milchflasche, but you are wrong when you say "Part of Windows itself was inadvertently made Open Source recently too".

It doesn't matter who owns a microsoft "shared source" license, they don't have the rght to open source microsoft code, only microsoft do.

in fact, microsoft's shared source license is the worst I have every seen, because not only don't you get to see all of the source code, only some of it (so a security audit is impossible), but you agree to the included non-disclosure agreement, so even if you spot a massive problem with the code, you can't tell anyone but microsoft.

vi makes me twitch. I can use it but it makes things difficult for no good reason. At least it's better than ed. All in all on a Unix box I'd rather use Pico or Nano.

I think Milchflasche was having a bit of fun with the facr some MS Windows code was "accidently" released http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/technology/3491887.stm

help required - see F615?thread=405659&post=5149496#p5149224

Happy, I'm pretty certain the release was both deliberate and ordered by Microsoft. The two versions of Windows that were suddenly "security-compromised" were, by sheer chance, the two versions that were still in regular use by big corporations who were holding out from moving on to an XP based platform because of XP's perpetually-renewable licence policy... By having their code released, M$ will get a huge cash influx from all the companies who now have no option but to "upgrade", and a rolling revenue stream from the annual corporate licence renewals that weren't required with NT and 2K.

Haha nice conspiracy theory.

All jesting aside though, I've found the source code leaks to be very useful. As part of my job I write software for Windows and having the source code available for the API is excellent for gaining a thoughrough understanding of what it does, especially when the MSDN documentation is incomplete, ambiguous or just too terse.

which is why a lot of us write programs on top of open source systems like linux and bsd.

I just had a really crappy day trying to get *any* of the open source Groupware projects from Sourceforge to run on my machine. None of the three candidates liked my PHP setup, and the most irritating thing was that the last one was only insisting on one point release newer than what I had.

My PHP4.0 came with the rather nifty "Merlin" bundle from Abriasoft (Apache, PHP, MySQL et al, in a single Win32 installer, free for personal use) but I ended up spending the late afternoon and whole of the evening trying to get the latest PHP 4.3 Windows installer to update it, as yet still unsuccessfully.

"Merlin" is a great bundle, with stable installers and nice configuration tools. It's a mix of open source, freeware and proprietary licences. The Win32 installer for PHP, on the other hand, gave a nice front end asking what web server I was using and whether I wanted the "Easy install"... I told it I wanted the "Easy install" for Apache 1.3, and set it on its way. Partway through the install, it popped up a dialog saying "Oops, we haven't written the Apache 1.3 auto-installer yet, but if you do the following it should work..."

The dialog had about 4 lines it wanted you to insert in your Apache config file. It gave incomplete examples, showing about the first dozen or so characters and tailing off in a row of dots, assuming that you already knew what to do and where to find the file to do it to. It did it in a modal dialog, so you couldn't copy and paste the text into Notepad for later reference. It stopped the install until you dismissed it, so you couldn't keep it on screen for reference.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the biggest drawback of open source software is the installation documentation. Things that are billed as "automatic" aren't, and the help messages are often so cryptic and misleading I doubt they mean anything to anyone outside the team who wrote the software.

Rant over. Go on about your business. Nothing to see here.