Free Software that I Recommend
I list here some of the Free Software that I use on a frequent basis. In fact, I use almost always free software, as I prefer to have my freedom preserved, whenever I produce content.
Operating Systems
- Debian GNU/Linux testing: one of the most carefully crafted Operating Systems made today, with a huge number of packages (including all the software listed below).
Document/Text Preparation Systems
- GNU Emacs: one of (if not the) most complex, yet most powerful text editor available in the world. Thanks to Richard Stallman for getting the ball rolling on this nice piece of software and on Free Software in general.
-
LaTeX and teTex in particular: this suite of
many programs and packages built on top of TeX makes it perfect for producing
documents of the highest typographical quality.
By the way, Emacs together with AUCTeX is a very pleasant document creation environment. - xpdf: one nice PDF file previewer, which is making fast progress. Another strong contender: Evince, that aims to be the "be all, end all" of document viewing under Unix-like Operating Systems.
Development Tools
- Emacs again;
- GCC: the GNU Compiler Collection.
Network Tools
-
mutt: one of the most versatile
email programs available (and quite small, BTW). Supports all the
bells and whistles that many other pieces of software could only
dream of supporting. And it does that now. It incorporates
the true Unix spirit of "doing only one thing and doing it
well".
And it now its reign has been threatened by a fork: mutt-ng, which incorporates even more features than mutt itself.
Audio/Video/Entertainment
Three of my preferred software projects are GNU Emacs, LaTeX and Mozilla.
- Fluxbox: one of the lightest window managers, with a good balance between funtionality, minimalism and speed.
- mplayer: the player for most kinds of media types. You have some media? It is highly probable that mplayer can play it.
- Mozilla Suite: my browser of choice, also meant to be THE reference browser regarding WWW standards. It also includes an e-mail program, a calendar, an HTML-page editor and a chat program, among other things.
- Firefox: the smaller, faster sibling of the Mozilla Suite, with focus on being a browser only.