Applications Recommended by the Hampshire GLUG
Free Software applications are not limited to running on Free Software operating systems: any given project intended to run on any operating system can release the source code under the GPL, for example. Even if you run a proprietary operating system such as Mac OS X or Windows, there are many Free solutions that are often superior in functionality and ease of use than their proprietary counterparts. Additionally, seeing as every application on this list is available for GNU+Linux, the more of these you use under Windows or Mac OS X, the less change you have to undergo when switching to GNU+Linux at a later date.
All applications on this list have binary executables for Windows and Mac OS X, unless otherwise noted. Also, because every entry on this list is Free Software, the source code is also made available for download. The reason no binary executables for GNU+Linux are offered for download here is because GNU+Linux users can just download these applications with a couple clicks of the mouse via their distribution's package management system. There are a couple of rare instances where a precompiled binary executable for GNU+Linux is available for download here as well: these applications do not have packages in Debian and/or Ubuntu.
Suggestions on additions to or modifications of this list are welcomed, as are notifications of the existence of a newer version of a given application.
Office Suite
 OpenOffice.org |
OpenOffice.org is a complete office suite and drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office. It contains a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet program (Calc), a slideware application (Impress), a vector graphics editor (Draw), a mathematical formulae editor (Math), and a database component (Base). It has greater format compatibility than Microsoft Office, supporting reading a writing to the international standard OpenDocument format, Rich Text Format, StarWriter format, Hyper Text Markup Language documents, DocBook XML files, AportisDoc files, Pocket Word format, Portable Document Format, and even Microsoft's proprietary binary-only file formats such as .doc, .xls, and .ppt. In fact, OpenOffice.org maintains support for a wider variety of Microsoft's formats than Microsoft's own office suite: it can read and save to the format used by Microsoft Word 6.0 (pre-Windows 95) up to the present. Of course, to preserve and respect your data, you should always use a free standard such as OpenDocument. The OpenOffice.org project is working on producing a version native to the Mac OS X user interface, Aqua, but until then the downloads offered here for that operating system are for a slightly modified fork called NeoOffice. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Intel 1 | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 3.1.0 | ||
| License: | GNU Lesser General Public License v3 (LGPL v3) | ||
Internet/Web
 Firefox |
Take back the web! Firefox is an extraordinary testament to the power of Free Software to create a clearly superior and innovative product and win market share back from the virtual monopoly of a proprietary problem. Once Microsoft beat Netscape in the browser wars by illegally bundling Internet Explorer into their Windows operating system, they stopped improving or fixing the browser and turned a blind eye to its rampant security problems and crippling of web standards. Firefox is exponentially more secure, has more features, and has support for third-party addons called extensions such as AdBlockPlus or NoScript. Note that some people may choose to use Iceweasel because the official builds of Firefox contain a proprietary component called Talkback to report crashes to Mozilla, and because the Firefox logo is not freely licensed. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 3.0.10 | ||
| License:2 | 1) GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) 2) GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 (LGPL v2.1) 3) Mozilla Public License (MPL) |
||
 AdBlock Plus |
AdBlock Plus is a third-party extension to the Firefox/Iceweasel web browser which uses a blacklist of known advertising servers to free your web browsing experience by obliterating banner and text advertisements completely. With AdBlock Plus, your web browser will henceforth refuse to even *download* any ads, causing web pages not only to look much cleaner, but also load more swiftly as well! Once you start using AdBlock Plus to completely enhance your web browsing experience, you will never go back.... | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Cross-Platform Extension | ||
| Version: | 1.0.2 | ||
| License:2 | 1) GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) 2) GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 (LGPL v2.1) 3) Mozilla Public License (MPL) |
||
 Thunderbird |
Thunderbird is the Mozilla project's E-mail client and compliments Firefox nicely as a cross-platform Free E-mail, calandering, and news solution. It provides support for IMAP, POP3, SMTP, S/MIME, SSL/TLS encryption, RSS feeds, NNTP, and even Gmail accounts! Just like with Firefox, you can customise Thunderbird with different themes to change the appearance, or add third-party extensions to extend functionality. The extension Enigmail adds OpenGPG support to Thunderbird, for example. Note that the offical builds of Thunderbird, like Firefox, contain a proprietary component called Talkback for reporting crashes as well as a non-free logo. For this reason, you might prefer to use Icedove. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 3.0 Beta 2 | ||
| License:2 | 1) GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) 2) GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 (LGPL v2.1) 3) Mozilla Public License (MPL) |
||
 FileZilla |
FileZilla is a powerful, feature-rich FTP client that, despite the name similarity, is not part of the Mozilla project. Although Firefox has basic FTP support built-in, it's useless if you need to upload data to a server or use SSL/TLS encryption. FileZilla provides support for anonymous and login FTP, SFTP, SSL/TLS for implicit or explicit encryption, and both active and passive mode for data transfers. It provides an easy and efficient user interface to handle browsing of local and remote directory structures, and it displays FTP commands and transfer queue status. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - PowerPC / Mac OS X - x86 | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 3.2.4.1 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 Deluge |
Deluge is a client for the Bit Torrent peer2peer protocol that is written in Python. It is an incredibly feature-rich Bit Torrent client with support for third-party plugins to extend the functionality of the program. Out of the box, Deluge has incredibly advanced usage statistics and support for protocol encryption, DHT, and built-in blocklist support to ban unfriendly IP addresses from talking to your computer. Deluge can be installed through MacPorts for those on Mac OS X, but until an installable .dmg file can be offered here, the Bit Torrent client BitTyrant is offered for Mac users instead. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer | |
| Version: | 1.1.8 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 KompoZer |
KompoZer is a WYSIWYG HTML and CSS editor for simplistic web design that is comparable to Adobe's Dreamweaver or Microsoft's FrontPage. For those unfamiliar with WYSIWIG HTML editors, KompoZer makes web design easy by allowing for insertion and deletion of HTML elements and styling via toolbars and menus in the user interface as well as source editing and site-wide configurations. KompoZer is based heavily off of Nvu: as the lead developer has abandoned work on Nvu to concentrate his efforts on the next generation Mozilla Composer, a community dedicated to bug fixing and general maintenance sprung up and released KompoZer. Of course, to truly have control of your web site, the (X)HTML and CSS should be coded by hand in a text editor. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 0.8a4 | ||
| License:2 | 1) GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) 2) GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 (LGPL v2.1) 3) Mozilla Public License (MPL) |
||
Audio
 Amarok |
Amarok is a revolutionary piece of software that makes music playback a joy. It can browse your music based on a 'library' concept after it automatically scans the metadata (artist, album, track number, title, etc. information), or by browsing the files as they are stored on your hard drive. Everything is searchable and Amarok has built-in support for playlists, radio streams, equalisation, podcasts, visualisers, and portable media players like iPods. Amarok can fetch album covers on-demand from Amazon.com, or display the lyrics of the currently playing track automatically. It even can show you the Wikipedia page for the currently playing artist/album/track within the application! Amarok is currently only available for GNU+Linux, but the next version (2.0) will see native Mac OS X and Windows ports, as well as video playback support. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | BETA Mac OS X - Intel x86 only | Install Amarok on Windows through KDE |
| Version: | 2.0.2 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 Ardour |
Ardour is a professional Digital Audio Workstation that is comparable to proprietary applications such as ProTools, Nuendo, or Pyramix. With it you can record, edit, and mix multi-track audio to which you can apply a wide range of effects in real-time using a wide variety of plugins. Ardour has timecode synchronisation, a powerful mixer, non-destructive editing with unlimited undo/redo, multichannel recording, full automation support, and unlimited tracks/busses/plugins. It is only available for GNU+Linux for years, until someone exercised their freedoms under the GPL to produce a Mac OS X version. As of yet no Windows version has been released. On GNU+Linux, there are hundreds of effects plugins available using LADSPA, and VST plugins can be used if you compile from source. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - x86 version | No Windows Version |
| Version: | 2.8 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 Audacity |
Audacity is a simpler but highly effective multi-track digital audio editor that has many built-in digital effects plug-ins and, like Ardour, supports using LADSPA plugins under GNU+Linux. It aims to satisfy a different market than Ardour by not trying to suite every need a professional mixer or masterer might require from an advanced DAW. It can read and write to the WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and MP3 (if the LAME encoder libraries are separately downloaded) formats, and it has nice features to handle noise removal and adjusting audio speed without changing pitch. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 1.3.7 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 Hydrogen |
Hydrogen is an advanced drum machine application aiming to bring simple and intuitive yet professional pattern-based drum programming to the world. It is centered around a pattern-based sequencer with unlimited number of patterns and ability to chain patterns together within a track. For each pattern created, there are up to 64 ticks with individual per-level events and 32 instrument tracks to choose from, each having individually configurable volume, mute, solo, and pan capabilities. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - x86 Version (no PowerPC Version) | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 0.9.4rc1 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 EasyTag |
EasyTag makes organising your music collection easy! It scans the metadata, or tags, on the audio files you specify and can handle bulk editing of tags to make an otherwise daunting task much easier. EasyTag can rename files based on the tag data that already exists, but it can also do the opposite: filling in tag data based on the filename! Depending on the format, the following fields can be edited: Title, Artist, Album, Disc Album, Year, Track Number, Genre, Comment, Composer, Original Artist, Copyright, URL, Encoder and Picture. EasyTag supports many audio formats, including MP3, MP2, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP4/AAC, MPC, and APE. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X Version requires Fink | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 2.1 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
Video
 VLC |
VLC is a multimedia playback, encoder, and streaming powerhouse. The unique aspect about VLC is that it has all of the software needed to play back virtually any audio or video format (called a CoDec) built straight into the application. Gone are the days where extra software needed to be downloaded and installed every time you encounter a new audio or video format on the Internet! VLC can play back the following technologies: DVD, CD, VCD, SVCD, AVI, ASF, FLV, MKV, OGM, WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP, DivX, XviD, Theora, VC-1, WMV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, Sorenson, DV, Cinepak, AAC, HuffYUV, Indeo 3, MJPEG, MP3, AC3, ALAC, Speex, Ogg Vorbis, RealAudio, Quicktime, MP4, and 3GP. If you don't know what these are, that's fine too: just get VLC and you won't have to worry about it! | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 0.9.9 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 MPlayer |
Although VLC is an excellent media player and should suite all user's needs quite nicely, it never hurts to have another around! MPlayer, and its transcoding cousin MEncoder, is a fine alternative to play back a wide variety of audio and video formats out of the box. A fully functional MPlayer, and indeed VLC as well, may violate specific patents held on common multimedia formats for localities where software patents are legally recognised. The problem of software patents is great, and no category of software is hit harder than multimedia playback and encoding products. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | Windows: smplayer 0.6.6 | Mac OS X: 1.0 RC2 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 Avidemux |
Avidemux offers a solutions for simplistic yet effective digital video editing and transcoding. It is comparable to Audacity's relationship with Ardour in that it is not as powerful as Cinelerra nor does it target the same market. It is designed for multi-purpose video editing and processing in a very similar approach as VirtualDubMod, a GPLed package for Windows. It can also multiplex and demultiplex one or multiple audio streams onto and from a video stream, and it allows a simple way to transcode any of these streams from one format to another, including a choice of container format. Avidemux also has built-in subtitle processing, both for hard subtitle capabilities and Optical Character Recognition to soft subtitle formats. Thanks to libavcodec, the amount of formats you can read from and write to out-of-the-box is very large. As a nice bonus, Avidemux implements multithreading to boost the performance of encoding to all MPEG video formats. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 2.4.4 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL 2) | ||
Graphics
 GIMP |
The GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a highly advanced raster graphics editor and image retoucher comparable to Adobe's Photoshop. While the interface is slightly different than Photoshop, it is full of many features to suite the needs of most people in search of an advanced image editor, and it is constantly improving. GIMP features many manipulation tools such as filters, transformation, selection, layer, and masking options as well as 48 different brushes with the ability to create new ones in hard-edged, soft-edged, or eraser modes at varying opacities. The colour palette has RGB, HSV, colour wheel, HTML hexadecimal, CMYK, and mixing modes, and full support for customisable gradients is integrated throughout the toolset such as fills and brushes. The Windows version and source code offered here is for Instrumented GIMP, a distributed computing project which modified the GIMP to report extensive anonymous usage statistics to a central server in order to improve the usability of the application. Plain GIMP without this helpful feature is available either through your GNU+Linux distribution's package manager or from the official GIMP website. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS 10.5 Leopard | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 2.6.6 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 CinePaint |
Originally a fork from GIMP, CinePaint is a professional tool to paint on and retouch bitmap frames of movies. Due to its specialised nature, CinePaint has evolved to have many features that GIMP does not: the addition of a frame manager, onion skinning support, and ability to work with 16-bit and floating point pixels for HDR are perhaps the most notable. It also supports per-channel colour engine core in 8-bit, 16-bit, or 32-bit modes with CIE*Lab and CMYK editing, as well as support for a wide variety of image formats. CinePaint has been used for such films as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Spider-Man, The Last Samurai, Stuart Little, Planet of the Apes, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Little Nicky, Cats & Dogs, and many others. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Intel x86 | Windows Version (In heavy development) |
| Version: | 0.22-1 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 Inkscape |
Inkscape is an advanced vector graphics editor comparable to non-free applications such as Adobe's Illustrator and CorelDRAW. It uses the XML-based SVG as it's primary file format, but it can save to many others such as SVGZ, PostScript, EPS, EPSi, LaTeX and POVRay. Extensions to the application allow for the support of additional formats: PDF, EPS, Adobe Illustrator, Dia, and Sketch. Inkscape strives for being fully compliant with the XML, SVG and CSS standards. The toolset is quite extensive, with a wide variety of object creation and manipulation tools, styling objects, operations performable on paths, text support, and rendering configurations. It also supports collaborative editing over a network, third-party extensions, and features a streamlined user interface translated into over 40 languages. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS 10.4 Tiger | Mac OS 10.5 Leopard | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 0.46 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 Blender |
Blender is a high-end 3D animation program for the professional market that provides the ability to perform modelling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulating, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications. Its robust feature set and impressive scope are comparable to other high-end 3D software such as Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, and Maya. Blender provides advanced simulation tools such as rigid body dynamics, fluid dynamics, and softbody dynamics, modifier based modelling tools, powerful character animation tools, a node based material and compositing system and Python for embedded scripting. A chart of Blender's features as compared to other common solutions can be found here. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - PowerPC / Mac OS X - x86 | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 2.48a | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
Communications
 Pidgin |
Pidgin is an instant messaging client with a wide variety of support for many different protocols, such as OSCAR (AIM/ICQ/.Mac accounts), XMPP (Jabber/Google Talk/Gmail accounts), .NET (aka MSN), YIM!, IRC, SILC, Zephyr, GroupWise, QQ, Gadu-Gadu, OpenNAP, Lotus Sametime, and SIP (text only). Formerly called Gaim, the project had to change names due to threats made to the individual developers from AOL/Time Warner over trademark issues. Pidgin allows for unlimited contacts, multiple accounts logged in simultaneously even using a single protocol, tabbed message windows for easy management of conversation, and conversation and chat logging. For Mac OS X users, the download offered here is Adium, which is essentially a Mac OS specific version of Pidgin with built-in OTR support. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | Windows + Source Code: 2.5.6 | Mac OS X (Adium): 1.3.4 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 Off-the-Record |
Off-the-Record Messaging, commonly referred to as OTR, is an cryptographic protocol with a large amount of attention and thought put into its technological design based off of political and social realities of the practical use and importance of encryption. In addition to providing incredibly strong encryption and authentication, OTR features deniable encryption which gives the user plausible deniability that they even took part in the conversation if forced to hand over the encryption keys to an organisation such as the government. Also, OTR provides perfect forward secrecy which prevents all previous encrypted conversations from being unlocked if the private key for only one conversation is intercepted. Once installed, OTR is extremely easy to use and can be configured to automatically enable itself if the other person you are conversing with is also using OTR. As a bonus, Adium users on Mac OS X already have OTR installed and enabled, but Pidgin users on Windows or GNU+Linux must download and install it separately. GNU+Linux users should download the 'pidgin-otr' package from their package management system to add OTR support to their Pidgin installation. The downloads offered here are for the Pidgin plugin. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X users: get Adium! | Windows Installer for Pidgin |
| Version: | 3.2.0 | ||
| License: | Library: GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 (LGPL v2.1) Pidgin plugin: GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) |
||
 KVIrc |
KVIrc is a highly customisable and powerful Internet Relay Chat client. It supports a wide variety of easily alterable server-specific configurations, such as custom nick/password combinations, SSL/TLS support, UTF-8, automatic connections on application startup, custom proxy servers, IPv6 support, on-connect command execution, and autojoin channel lists. KVIrc's appearance is highly customisable, with support for backgrounds and themes. Also, the functionality of KVIrc is extensible through built-in scripting abilities. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Intel x86 only | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 3.4.2 | ||
| License:3 | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) [modified] | ||
 Ekiga |
Ekiga is a VoIP and video conferencing solution that supports both the SIP and H.323 protocols, as well as many high-quality audio and video codecs. It supports features such as: addressbook with speed dials, SIP URLs and H.323/callto, a dialpad, advanced call history, auto answer and do not disturb modes, call forwarding, call transfer, call hold, instant messaging and text chat, outbound proxy support, LDAP, ZeroConf integration, Novell Evolution integration, and auto-detection of sound and video devices. Future version will include the ZRTP encryption protocol, as well as support for H.263 and H.264 video conferencing. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | No Mac OS X Version | Windows Installer (Beta) |
| Version: | Source code & GNU+Linux: 3.2.4 | Windows: 3.0.2 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
Games
 Nexuiz |
Nexuiz is a fast-paced 3-D first person shooter built on top of DarkPlaces, a modification of the original Quake engine by id Software that adds advanced features such a real time lighting, bump mapping, OpenGL Shading Language support, improved network code, and a built-in server browser. Nexuiz can run on very old hardware, but if the graphics and sound settings are turned up all the way, it can tax the resources of even the newest computers. It focuses on bringing FPS back to the basics with quick but lethal battles and advanced weaponry. While it does include a single-player campaign, Nexuiz is intended primarily for multiplayer action. The reason Nexuiz is possible is because of id Software's dedication to their fan base and community following by releasing the source code of their game engines under the GPL a while after their initial commercial release. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 2.4 | ||
| License:4 | Software and content: GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 Tremulous |
Original developed as a modification of Quake III Arena, Tremulous became a standalone Free game after id Software released the source code of id Tech 3 (also known as the Quake III engine) under the terms of the GPL. It combines team-based first person shooter action with real-time strategy elements that bear a certain amount of resemblance to the Half-Life modification 'Natural Selection' or the Quake II modification 'Gloom'. The gameplay of Tremulous pits humans against aliens, each team having specific strength, weaknesses, and differing evolution and upgrade paths. Unfortunately the content is released under a Creative Commons license, which is not DFSG free. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 1.1.0 | ||
| License:4 | Software: GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) Content: Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike v2.5 (CC-BY-SA v2.5) |
||
 OpenArena |
When id Software releases the source code for their games under the GPL, they retain exclusive distribution rights on the copyrighted game content. Because of this, the OpenArena project was born the day after id Software GPLed their id Tech 3 engine in 2005 with the goal of creating an entirely Free Software and Content replacement for Quake III Arena. While still under development, OpenArena provides the closest solution possible for a comparable Free Quake III experience, and a missionpack add-on is planned to take advantage of the Quake III: Team Arena source code. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 0.7.1 | ||
| License:4 | Software and content: GNU General Public License v2 (GPLv2) | ||
Emulators
 ScummVM |
ScummVM actually shouldn't be in this section: it's not actually an emulator! It's a virtual machine that includes a collection of game engine recreations with the original intent to provide an environment in which to play LucasArts adventure games using the SCUMM engine. ScummVM has since added support for more engines than just SCUMM, including games from Revolution Software, Adventure Soft, Humongous Entertainment, and Sierra Online. A compatibility list of games playable with ScummVM is available on the official website. A design goal of the project is portability, and as such there are binary executables available for a wide variety of platforms, including: Debian GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Fedora, Slackware, Sony PSP, Nintendo DS, PalmOS, Dreamcast, GP2X, Solaris, BeOS, OS/2, AmigaOS, Atari/FreeMiNT, and Symbian. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 0.13.1 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 Nestopia |
Nestopia is an emulator for the original Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom. It is designed to emulate the hardware of the NES as accurately as possible without resorting to hacks for a speed increase. It is arguably the most advanced NES emulator in existence and certainly has support for more titles than any other. Nestopia has many features including: savestates, NSF playback, non-standard controllers, Famicom Disk System support, over 200 memory mappers, and movie recording. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 1.40 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 ZSNES |
ZSNES is an emulator for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System/Super Famicom video game systems. Originally proprietary, ZSNES liberated its code in 2001 by distributing it under the terms of the GPL v2 and has since undergone rapid and substantial improvements. It is written in 32-bit x86 assembly language, and as such is limited to x86 platforms such as Windows, Apple computers with Intel made microprocessors, the Xbox, *BSD, and of course 32-bit x86 builds of GNU+Linux. ZSNES pioneered and innovated all throughout the evolution of SNES emulation, and introduced many features later adopted by other emulators, such as: savestates, screenshot saving, ability to save console sound output to a file, gameplay movie recording and playback, support for both rewinding and fast-forwarding the game, and multiplayer via TCP/IP which allows two users to play SNES games over a LAN or the Internet. ZSNES also can scale up the resolution by multiple times that of the original as limited by SNES and television hardware and apply advanced graphics filters to vastly improve the quality of the visual experience. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - x86 Version | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 1.51 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 VisualBoyAdvance |
VisualBoyAdvance is an emulator for the Nintendo Game Boy, Super Game Boy, Game Boy Colour, and Game Boy Advance handheld game consoles. It offers support for savestates, fast-forward, screenshots and sound recording, and hacking abilities with Game Boy Gameshark, GameGenie, GamesharkAdvance, and CodeBreakerAdvance. Like ZSNES, the graphics can be vastly improved as they appear on the handheld consoles themselves by using filters such as 2xSaI, Super 2xSaI, Super Eagle, Pixelate and Motion Blur. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 1.7.2 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 PCSX |
PCSX allows you to play games made for the Sony Playstation on your computer, or even on an Xbox or Dreamcast. It has quite a high compatibility rate, and supports network play and external plugins providing advanced graphics and sound capabilities. A unique feature of PCSX is that it does not require the user to obtain a BIOS dump file from a PlayStation console (or much more commonly, illegally over the Internet) in order to make use of the software, as it emulates the functionality of the PlayStation BIOS internally. Development for PCSX has since ceased as most efforts are concentrated on improving PCSX2. Because of this, the consensus is usually "fix it yourself" if issues arise with compatibility with specific or obscure titles. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 1.5 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 PCSX2 |
While still heavily under development, PCSX2 aims to provide complete and working emulation for Sony's PlayStation 2 video game console. PlayStation 2 emulation is much more complex and formidable than past consoles because of the existence of multiple CPUs in the device. All of these must be accounted for and emulated with proper and synchronised communication flowing between all of them, which is no trivial task to make happen on a modern desktop PC with only one CPU. Thankfully, modern CPUs from Intel and AMD now support x86_64 extensions and feature multiple cores, which will be fully taken advantage of by PCSX2 to significantly speed up emulation. Like PCSX, PCSX2 uses a plugin architecture to separate functions such as graphics, sound, CD/DVD drive, and controls from the core emulation software. The emulator is improving so rapidly that Final Fantasy X (and some other games) is now playable from start to finish on higher end hardware. The compatibility list for PlayStation 2 games can be found on the official website. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Download: | Source Code | No Mac OS X Version | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 0.9.6 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 Yabause |
Yabause is an emulator for the Sega Saturn which is still under development but improving rapidly. It can run Saturn discs by placing them in the CD-ROM drive or from CD image files stored on the hard drive. It has multiple region emulation and a built-in cheat system, with savestate support promised before the release of version 1.0. | ||
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| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 0.9.9 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
Other
 Celestia |
Celestia is a 3-D astronomy program that leaves the user free to travel about the universe. It uses data from the Hipparcos Catalogue and supports display of a wide variety of objects in outer space, down from individual artificial satellites up to entire galaxies, all in three dimensions. The time is customisable and can be set as far in the distant past or upcoming future as desired, solar and lunar eclipses can be calculated up until the year 9999, constellation locations and outlines can be shown, names of all objects in space can be indicated including galaxies, clusters, stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets and satellites, high resolution movies of movements can be recorded, and orbits of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, satellites, and spacecraft can be notated. Many more features exist in Celestia, and still more are available through an extensive amount of community-created add-ons. | ||
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| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 1.5.1 | ||
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 Electric Sheep |
Electric Sheep is a novel distributed computing project for animating and evolving fractal animations. While it can be manually launched, it is usually installed as a screensaver on the end user's computer. When it runs, if you are pleased by a specific fractal animation, or sheep, you can vote it up or down. Your choices are reported back to a server whereupon a genetic algorithm generates new sheep. The name of this project comes from Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: the computers running the screensaver are androids drawing/dreaming the fractal movies, or sheep. | ||
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| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | GNU+Linux: 2.7b?? | Mac OS X: 2.7b15a | Windows: 2.7b16c |
| License: | GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2) | ||
 Tor |
The Onion Router, or Tor as it's commonly known, is an implementation of second-generation onion routing allowing users to communicate on the Internet anonymously. The US Naval Research Laboratory were the initial financial backers, followed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Tor aims to protect its users from traffic analysis attacks by routing outbound connections through a SOCKS proxy on the user's computer. After passing through the proxy and into the Tor network, layered encryption (hence onion) is employed through a complex circuit of routers until finally reaching an exit node whereupon the packets are sent in plaintext to the destination. From the point of the ultimate destination, the packets seem as if they originated from the Tor exit node rather than your computer, and because of all the encryption and varying traffic paths, it is hoped to make it impossible to trace the true origin of the communication. | ||
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| Download: | Source Code | Mac OS X - Universal Binary | Windows Installer |
| Version: | 0.2.0.34 | ||
| License: | BSD License | ||
 Wine |
Wine is a very important and special project for the Free Software world. It aims to reverse engineer and reimpliment the entire API in Microsoft's Windows through a compatibility layer. What this means is that it allows you to run Windows software and video games under GNU+Linux! This is an incredibly complex and daunting task, because Windows is proprietary and the Wine developers don't necessarily have access to the source code in order to craft everything to behave as it should. Even so, the amount of compatibility is constantly improving: Wine is one of the most rapidly progressing projects in existence, with a new release every two weeks. Many Windows-only video games and applications are fully usable under GNU+Linux, and a searchable compatibility database exists on the official Wine website. | ||
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| Download: | Source Code | Switch to GNU+Linux to run Windows programs with Wine! | ERR: DIV BY 0 |
| Version: | 1.1.22 | ||
| License: | GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 (LGPL v2.1) | ||
Footnotes
Footnote 1: At the beginning of 2006, Apple, Inc. completely switched the underlying hardware technology their computers used for the second time in the Macinstosh's history. The CPUs in their computers had since 1994 used the PowerPC microarchitecture, but they have since moved to the 32-bit x86 microarchitecture originally created by Intel Corporation. The practical ramifications of this change are vast: any Macintosh laptop, desktop, or server purchased within the last 1.5 years is now essentially what has been traditionally referred to as a "PC", save the operating system which obviously remains Mac OS X. Since software is compiled to run on a specific microarchitecure of a given CPU, applications can either be made for the PowerPC or x86 version of Mac OS X, not both. Thankfully to simplify this inherent dichotomy, there is a way to include both the PowerPC and x86 precompiled binaries in a single download, called a Universal Binary, so that users can remain ignorant of their hardware platform. An easy way to tell if you have a PowerPC or x86 Macintosh laptop (besides from the date of purchase) is the brand: all PowerBooks are PowerPC-based and all MacBooks are x86-based.
Footnote 2: If a distributor of software holds the copyright on the code, she/he/they may choose to license it under the terms of multiple licenses at once. For example, one could produce an application and license it under the GPL and BSD license simultaneously. One could even distribute it to different parties under separate licenses, or combinations of licenses. An application author or company could GPL their product and offer paying customers a customary proprietary license that wouldn't require the customer to release modifications as the GPL would require due to its copyleft clause.
Footnote 3: KVIrc is compiled against the QT toolkit for its user interface. The license for KVIrc is an exact copy of the GPL v2 with an additional clause that allows compiling against QT for the Windows version and not having to provide the QT source code as well. The GPL considers a library or otherwise directly compiled dependency as part of the work. This means that compiling KVIrc against QT makes the resulting product a work in itself. As such, under the terms of the GPL, if one distributes the resulting binary executable containing KVIrc+QT, then one must also at least offer to distribute the source code for the entire work. In order to relieve distributors of the KVIrc Windows build, the holder of the KVIrc copyrights chose to not force the source code for QT to also be distributed by these people. The modified license can be viewed here.
Footnote 4: When it comes to software that depends so heavily on artistic content to make use of the work, such as video games, sometimes the source code of the software and the game content are released under separate licenses. The content includes data such as music, maps, 2-D art like textures and sprites, 3-D models, speech files, and sound effects. A classic example of releasing software and content under different licenses is id Software, who choose to release the source code for their games a while after they're released but keep the content under copyright. It is illegal to distribute copies of Quake's content files without id's permission, but since the software source code is GPLed, one is Free to improve the underlying software of the game or even create all new content on top of the software. Games with Free Software but non-free content are not included here in order to promote Free Culture.