Opensourcing Windows Just A Little Bit

[Vinnie]

I've just made this as sort of a list of recommended applications for making your Windows installation more open source. Of course you could use Linux like I do. But some people have little experience or cannot get their apps to work well under WINE. So I've made this guide so that you can sort of semi Open-Source your installation. So here is my guide to open-sourcing your Windows installation just a little bit:

Firstly I suggest that you run Windows update & make sure that everything is up to date. Remember this is Semi-Open sourcing so you'll need to keep some of the Windows Applications. I strongly Recommend you do the updates. Remember that Internet explorer should be left on your system, unless you N-Lite it out. If you'd like to keep some things in the Explorer working I'd suggest you keep IE. Just remove the shortcuts. So anyhow here's the list of how I'd do things:

Windows Update

Remove IE Shortcuts

Anti-Virus

AVG Anti-Virus (Closed Source But Free) - http://free.grisoft.com/doc/5390/us/frt/0?prd=aff

ClamAV Windows (Opensource) - http://www.clamwin.com/

Anti-Spyware

Spybot S & D (Closed Source But Free) - http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

Internet & Email

Mozilla Firefox - Internet - http://www.getfirefox.com

Mozilla Thunderbird - Email - http://www.getthunderbird.com

Graphics & Photo Editing

The GIMP - http://www.gimp.org/

Instant Messaging

AMSN - http://www.amsn-project.net/

Pidgin - Variety Of IM Networks - http://www.pidgin.im/

Office Suite

OpenOffice.org - http://www.openoffice.org

Media Player

VLC Media Player - http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

As you can see at the moment this is a small list of apps. But If you want to see if theres a open-source app for anything that you do regular ask here & I'll see if I can add it to the list. Hopefully we can get quite a large list going here.

Edited August 13, 2007 by Vinnie