Help Me Rebuild My Computer

I’ve been forced to reinstall Windows today. I wanted to do this since a little while, but now I’ve been forced to due to a nasty recurring bug.

So I have to reinstall all of my software too. I’d like you to help me build a perfect system. Here is what I have installed right now. You’ll notice that most of it (except Windows) is open-source or free. I’d like to build a machine that’s as pirate-free as possible. I know I will have to install Photoshop because I’m so used to it, but I,ll try to keep this to a minimum.

So, what is your suggestions for my new software…?

Installed software: what would you add?

-Firefox
-Thunderbird
-MSN Messenger Live Beta
- iTunes (need it for iPod)
- Notepad++ (used to use Notepad2, but I’ll try this one)
- Filezilla
- Rainlendar
- Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition (I’ll have to :pirate: Visual Studio…)
- LaTeX libraries and TeXniC Center

This is what I have so far. You can see that I have a lot of space for improvement… I’m not a huge fan of OpenOffice, as I’ve had some bad compatibility problems with Office users (and most of my docs are done in LaTeX anyways…), so I might have to pirate this.

April 7th, 2006 | General Science

11 comments

Rajeev36: Try http://www.ubuntuforums.org/, they probably have a better answer than I could ever give you.

Comment by Julien — December 31, 2006 @ 4:51 pm

Hi, I’m new to Ubuntu and I’m having a hard time going online. My wireless card is a Belkin F5D7000-W. I would really appreciate it if someone gave me a clue as to how to go about this,thanx.

Comment by Rajeev36 — December 30, 2006 @ 3:53 pm

sorry let me reword that how do i get better graphics on a labtop?

Comment by muddenboy.07 — November 16, 2006 @ 12:09 pm

how do I get my computer to have better graphics and on a labtop to?

Comment by muddenboy.07 — November 16, 2006 @ 12:07 pm

[...] Essential Software List By Julien One of my colleague was forced to reinstall his system due to a hard drive failure. Poor guy. However, he was kind enough to keep a list of the software he installed. While most of this is either freeware or open-source, there are a couple of pieces of proprietary software that we installed. I consider this post as a natural follow-up to my previous “Help me rebuild my computer” post a while ago. You may take this list as a “How To… choose all the right software for your computer”! [...]

Pingback by Essential Software List — September 19, 2006 @ 4:42 pm

Thanks for the replies all… :) I’ll come up with my definitive list sometimes soon, but for now, I’ll just react to your comments.

Notepad++: Before my reinstall, I was using notepad2. It’s nice, lightweight and has syntax highlighting. However, the more I play around with Notepad++, the more I like it. At first glance, it’s much more powerful than notepad2, despite not being a lot heavier.

Firefox: I agree that it’s getting bluky, but I’m not sure that I’d be able to switch back to IE. Maybe (and that’s a big maybe… perhaps it should be capitalized and bolded) IE7 can get me, but I’m really not sure. I might as well try Opera, but it would get me out of my comfort zone that I have right now with Firefox. And it’s pretty cozy down here… :P

Filezilla: Can’t live without it, because I got plenty of FTPing to do.

Messenger Beta is installed on my computer and I use the offline messaging option extensively. I’m not considering other options such as GAIM, as all my contacts are on MSN and I would not be using the other protocols so much.

Paint.net is installed on my computer, but I have not used it yet. However, it will be really hard for me to part from Photoshop, as the course I had in digital photography used it extensively. I’ve managed to acquire a nice expertise with it so it would hurt me to move away from it. I tried GIMP and I was unable to do anything with it. Habits are strong to lose…

AntiVir is my current antivirus protection. However, I might move to AVG as I’ve had a popup telling me to upgrade to the pro version. And I utterly hate popups. I despise them. I’ll see if it happens again. Apart from that, I’m pretty happy with the software (pretty light and otherwise non-obstrusive).

@Raven: As much as I’d like to keep my computer as Open-sourced as possible, I have acquired some habits and expertise that would hurt me to lose. That is why I have included some commercial software in my list…

Comment by Julien — April 12, 2006 @ 12:05 pm

Hello Julien
I was just surfing the net today, came across this site, and stumbled on this question. As I have been involved with computers for a few years now, and am part of a few online computer communities, I thought this would be a good way to start up a relationship between the two konquest domains.

I noticed that you wanted to have a computer filled with open-source/free software, but were thinking of using photoshop on top of all of that. Before you do that, I would have to suggest that you take a look at a program called Paint.net (found @ http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/). This is a great little tool with many features that you would find in expencive programs such as photoshop.

I would also like to second the motion to Open Office. Their version 2 is a great improvement over open office 1, and I am sure will not let you down.

Other programs that I would suggest would be antivir (found @ http://www.free-av.com/). This is a well-reviewed anti-virus program which, ofcourse, is also free! And, along the lines of security, adaware, spybot S&D, and spywareblaster are also a must (free as well). You can find more information on them by doing a simple google search. Also, I put together a list of software which many people have found to be very useful (you can check it out @ http://forum.konquest.com/index.php?showtopic=45)

If you have any more questions relating to this, feel free to jump over to http://www.konquest.com, sign-up for free, and I(raven) along with the rest of our humble community, will be able to help you out even more. I admire the fact that you are going open-source/freeware, and I hope that you stick with it, because now a days, it IS possible to do.

Raven

Comment by Raven — April 12, 2006 @ 11:39 am

You probably don’t want the Microsoft’s 2005 Express Edition of Visual studio. I hear when it was in beta, the beta testers were begging microsoft not to release it because it was full of bugs. Low and behold, there it is. I recommend 2003 or 2004 Express.

Notepad++ is amazing. I use it at work, home, just about everywhere.

Filezilla is amazing too. Notepad++ and filezilla is a powerful combo.

Firefox is starting to get pretty bulky, slow, and buggy. It’s still very useful for it’s plugins (specifically Web Developer), but IE 7 is catching up fast, and it’s actually more reliable (despite me not being much of a microsoft fan). Firefox sometimes crashes on me or eats up hundreds of mb of memory even though all the windows are closed. (It sometimes doesn’t clean up properly — you’ve got to close it through Task Manager)

MSN Messenger Beta is awesome =) Lets you write offline messages. I think they use a different communication protocol to store the messages or something. =) I’ll have to look into that.

For art software, there’s always Paint.net. Though it’s not as great as photoshop. It’s good for editing and not content creation.

Smile,
Kenneth

Comment by Kenneth — April 12, 2006 @ 11:23 am

Notepad++ is absolutely marvelous. I use it at work constantly (perl, batch files, XML, etc etc etc)

Also, you could probably manage to find a Visual Studio 2005 Beta lying around somewhere on the internet. Its free (well, it was! ).

Comment by yoann pearson — April 11, 2006 @ 10:20 pm

I’m ready to give OpenOffice a second chance. I’ve taken this decision because I want my computer to be as pirate-free as possible and combined to the fact that I probably won’t use it extensively. At the very worst, I can still use Office at work… :)

I’m coming close to finishing my reinstallation, I’ll make a definitive list of the software I installed.

Comment by Julien — April 9, 2006 @ 2:31 pm

Oh, please give OpenOffice a try again! ;> You can of course just exchange PDF files instead of the actual files, when editing isn’t necessary. I’ve also got a draft chapter on working with Microsoft Office users; if you haven’t tried all the suggestions in that chapter, that might help.
http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/04/draft_chapters_.html (post)
http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/ms.pdf (chapter)

Plus, the OpenOffice drawing tools are great, and you can export to a zillion graphics formats. (Not sure if you need that regularly but it comes in handy.)

There’s a huge frickin’ list of free Windows software here.
http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/02/133_free_or_ope.html

Not sure if you need screen capture software but Snagit is great.

Comment by Solveig Haugland — April 9, 2006 @ 3:33 am