Essential Free Software

Here’s my essential free list when setting up a new environment. I’ve omitted the essential non-free ones like MS Word, Outlook et c.

5 Stars (Desktop) - Software I use regularly

• Adobe Acrobat Reader Enterprise Version
• Apple iTunes
• Cygwin
• Vim
• Curl
• PDFCreator
• ActiveState Python
• Microsoft SQL Server Express
• Microsoft SQL Server Express Books Online
• Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio
• Microsoft SSEUtil.exe
• Microsoft Dot Net 2.0 Runtime, SDK
• .Net Reflector
• VNC

5 Stars - Web

• WordPress
• Zope
• Putty - works better than Cygwin SSH

4 Stars - Software I use occassionally

• VMWare Server
• Microsoft Virtual PC
• SpaceMonger
• PC Inspector File Recovery
• CVS
• sitecopy
• SysInternals ProcessExplorer

3 Stars - Software for Experimentation

• SmallTalk
• LispBox
• clisp
• Chez Scheme
• NetBeans
• Eclipse
• PHP
• Watcom Fortran - a bit better than GNU Fortran the last time I looked

2 Stars - Important software, but not often required

• darcs
• Netcat
• MSYS
• Microsoft Services for Unix
• Alex Moffat’s Sequence Diagram Generator

1 Star - Fun stuff

• TweakUI
• Paint.Net
• ArtRage