hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0575.txt

Episode: 575
Title: HPR0575: Free and open source software on windows
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0575/hpr0575.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 23:24:41

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I'm going to tell you a bit about the free and open source software that's available for windows.
Most of you are probably running windows already if you've just wandered in here rather than already involved in Linux.
So you don't have to completely give up on that and go and completely wipe your computer and start again with new software.
You can start and play around with open source software just adding applications and whatever to what you're already using.
Once all the applications you're using are open source then you can give up on windows and move over to Linux if you're that way inclined or move to any other operating system.
Because a lot of the open source software does run on pretty much any platform because the source is available and you could compile it for anything you want.
So yeah, short introduction about me. I've been, yeah, started playing around with computers when I was quite young.
Yeah, got a computer that didn't work and spent weeks trying to make it work.
I was then really proud when it actually booted up properly without just displaying error messages.
And since then they've been messing around with computers in one form or another.
I moved into Linux when I had a spare computer to play with and I've been running that on and off since then.
And I am now a developer and my day job is writing software for both Windows and Linux.
So yeah, this is just very short tour of assembling up the software that's available.
There is lots of other stuff that you could use and lots of stuff that I'm going to miss out.
So if you do know of any open source software and your favorite applications missed out, I am sorry about that.
There is far too much open source software out there to cover it all in a 15 minute talk.
So we're just going to have short overview through a few things.
So yeah, I've split the applications into a few different categories but they are fairly arbitrary and it was just for grouping things rather than anything else.
Most of the applications fit into a few different categories.
Probably the biggest open source application that you can start using would be OpenOffice.org and I am sorry that is horribly pixelated.
But yeah, it doesn't look quite as bad on the laptop but pixels are bigger there.
OpenOffice is an office suite where processor, database, spreadsheet, presentation application.
It opens Microsoft Office formats and formats from other office suite to think it opens the Apple ones and things from Word Perfect and whatever, from way back when.
I don't think we're still using any of them but if you've still got files lying around you can open them up that way.
You can create documents in OpenOffice and its own formats are open and anybody can support them and they are actual standards that are now adopted by international bodies.
Next one is just a collection of utilities that you can use for various things in your computer.
Some of these you'll already know that you need them and you'll understand what they are and others might be a little bit weird.
Yeah, mine mine is actually a wiki that you can install on any computer and it's a similar idea to Wikipedia but one for just you and you can then keep any notes in it and organize things like that.
You can have it running such that other people can get access to it as well so if you want to share things around you can set up your own wiki and point things at that with mine mine and there are alternative wiki engines if you want to use something a bit different.
I enter recorder is an open source CD and DVD burning application so it works a little bit.
It has a few more features in the month built into Windows so it does pretty much just what it says on the tin.
It burns CDs and DVDs from whatever you happen to have that you want to burn them from.
IE 7ZIP is ZIP application handles most archiving formats and again there is archiving built into Windows but 7ZIP adds a few more features to it and lets you do a bit of things like that.
A new cache is an accounting type application that keep track of what many you've spent and how much you don't have anymore.
A true crypt is encryption for file systems which can run on a lot of different platforms.
It can do some quite clever things that you can even encrypt a file system and then hide it with the stack overviews so even if somebody does get out of the laptop they don't even know that there's data there that's encrypted to try and decrypt.
Next one round is just a few games that we're going to go through and I'm going to have to refer to notes here because I'm not very into games.
First one is Vegas Strike which is a 3D action space sim. You get to fly around and shoot things I think.
Next we have Battle for Weismar. Fantasy turn-based strategy game. I'm not entirely sure what that means.
If you're into games you might want to have a look at them. Next one I actually do know because I played it on the police station that's dissent which is again flying around shooting things but it's very much fun.
Lots of things to blow up.
This is another one that's great fun. You get to get a penguin downhill and collect fish.
I think that one's actually Tuksh racer but it's now a planet penguin racer run various other divisions.
Multiple versions of the same source code but yeah got little changes each time different tracks and things like that.
It sounds like a really odd game but it is addictive that one.
It's been hours to get a slightly better time and find a different route down the mountain that's slightly faster.
This one is Scorch 3D which is a modernisation of the classic DOS game Scorch start which I think is shooting at things.
There seems to be a lot of this in games. This one's artillery type thing.
Strategy you've got two teams that try and shoot each other and you can build shields and things like that to try and defend yourself.
Next we have Neverball which is similar to a pinball type thing where you have to guide the ball around the course and get it somewhere.
There's lots of little puzzle games that are available and this one is Enigma which you're trying to find pares in this one but I'm not entirely sure what it's pares all for how you find them.
Most of the games here are on the open CD. If they're not then you can download them and probably this way.
If you want to know more about games there is only demonstrate in the meantime to actually DOS play games and point you at ones that have a bit more experience of them.
Next category is Multimedia stuff. We start with VLC which again is hardly pixelated.
If Multimedia player plays audio or video in pretty much any format you can throw at it then less is encrypted than it has any problems.
Not supposed to play that but it plays pretty much anything and works on cross-platforms. It can also do transcoding and streaming.
If you want to stream video from your computer to something else on your network you can do that with VLC.
I actually did my master's project using VLC a lot to stream around from different computers with transcoding and stuff like that.
It's actually showing big book bunny there playing which was made in Blender which we will get to later.
It made more science to have already covered that in time to get here but yeah it's a big book bunny was kind of an open source video
where all of the models and whatever that they used all the models and artwork that they used to make the video is all available with the DVDs when you get them.
You can say to change the storyline or mess around or re-render the whole thing with the money being a different color or whatever it's all available.
Next we have Songbird which is music library applications in our iTunes or the library features in Windows Media Player.
So it's artworks slightly different features and because it's open you can add things that you want and it's not tied into iTunes.
It's not trying to sell you things all the time or whatever that is.
Next one is...
Last we have Songbird is that tied into Firefox or is it entirely separate application?
It's made by the same people and I'm not sure how much integration there is but it is a standalone application.
I don't know when you actually have to use Firefox but yeah it comes from Mozilla the same people who make Firefox and Thunderbird and it uses some of the same libraries and things like that.
Next one is Djkocher which is a non-linear video audio editing application.
So each of the things you see there are chunks of audio and you can arrange them how you want to mix them together and record things.
It does not have a lot of Windows as well.
It's quite a good example there because Djkocher was designed for Linux and then ported to Windows and it was a fairly easy process to get it running on Windows.
In the case of recombiling everything.
I know the process that was done there so I'm involved with the people who write it and I wrote some of the documentation for them.
Next one is Audacity which is another audio recording and mixing application but a slightly different approach to Djkocher.
The two of them are kind of a good example of the way the open source works is there are often a lot of different applications that do the same thing but with a slightly different spin on it.
If you go for audio editing, open source, you'll turn up both Djkocher, Audacity and a load of others that varying levels of complexity and just how they actually work.
Because Audacity works by actually making changes to the audio as you edit it and Djkocher works by recording a big list of the changes that you've made as you edit things but the audio files still stay the same.
So everything can be undone in Djkocher but it's slower to render things when you make it play and that's it.
It's just the kind of different approaches that you get with the different applications and you can pick and mix as you want and use each for different bits of the same project often if you're working on audio stuff.
Next category round is Graphic Stuff.
Drawing mostly but other things as well. A pencil there is a 2D animation system where you draw things and draw your different frames and tie them together and it can interpolate between frames if you've got movement.
It's quite fun to play with if you want to do some animation.
In this Inkscape which is gain horribly pixelated which is not a good added work for Inkscape because it's all about vector graphics where you don't get this horrible pixelation.
Inkscape is vector graphics application unless you draw things and I think it's similar to the Illustrator but it's a long time since I've actually done any vector graphics that wasn't in Inkscape.
How much difference is there if I've used them before? Yes, nice one is Blender which you have mentioned before with the Big Book Bunny movie that I made.
Blender is 3D graphics mostly. You can use it for creating 3D models and then rendering them into animations or it's got a game system built-ins if you want to make games from your models.
Add some logic to them and make them move around depending on what the user's done and it's also got video editing built-in as well.
From the people who are using it to make films that move their chunks of rendered footage and edit them together with transitions and adding signs and things like that.
You can do the whole thing within the one application.
Next one is the game which is the GNU image manipulation program. It's similar kind of application to Photoshop but with a different interface that annoys everybody who's used to Photoshop.
But it has most of the same features and it can do photo manipulation and that kind of thing which you can chop people's heads off and attach them to other people's bodies.
Next one round we have internet applications to the things that you use to connect to other systems which is one of the things that is very big in open sources connecting together.
A lot of the open source stuff came off of servers and the big networks and people managing big networks need applications that they can play with to get them all working in the same way.
Things used there tend to have quite strong open source support so Firefox is one that most of you have heard of because they have quite a good job of their marketing to actually get everybody aware of it.
But it tends to have buying adverts in New York Times and things like that.
Thunderbird is from the same people who make Firefox but it's for email rather than just web browsing.
It's an alternative to outlook. It can integrate with most of the email servers that you're going to come across.
The filezilla is a system for moving files around. It speaks to a bunch of different protocols for getting things from your computer onto the server back of it.
Depending on what it is you need to move and where. And putty is the one that I really like.
It's about the only thing that makes Windows usable is having plenty. It connects to a Unix system.
But it's putty is SSH client that lets you open a command line that's running on a different computer and connect the two together.
So that is a broad overview of the application level things that you can do to add things to Windows.
But there are alternatives for using false Windows. You don't have to just add things. You can actually completely remove the Windows interface and replace it with an open source one.
So KDE is one that I've put a lot of effort into getting their desktop environment running on Windows.
And it just replaces the Windows interface with star menu and window management and things like that with the stuff from KDE.
Once you've gone to the point of using KDE rather than Windows, you're very nearly until an XC makes one screw the whole hog.
But it can be useful if you're using Linux machines and Windows machines. You can have the same interface.
But you can still run Windows applications within KDE. So if you've got one application life that there isn't an open source alternative and you're tied into that, you can still use something other than the Windows interface.
Another option for getting different operating systems can be co-existed is virtual box, which is a virtualization system that's very easy to use.
It's a point in click to tell you what you want to do. And Gordon's demonstrating virtualization outside.
If you've got anything that you want to know about virtual box, do give them a shout out and explain it all to you.
Another one that I really like is Saigwin, which gives you a Unix type system running in Windows.
So you can run bash and command line utilities and it gives you an X server.
It's a really useful one if you're using again heterogeneous system.
You've got Unix systems and Windows systems that let you use much the same tools that you're used to on Unix in Windows.
Yes, but really anything that's open source you can compile and run and use on Windows.
Because Windows is actually POSIX compliant.
So any user space open source stuff that's written for against the POSIX standard, which is user space stuff in Linux
and some of the user space stuff in Mac OS X actually is POSIX compliant as well.
And the other Unix is the BSTs and whatever.
They all use the POSIX standard and Windows does comply to it.
So anything that's using that, you can compile yourself and get it running in Windows.
Because the source is available with open source stuff, you are free to do that.
You're not limited by which ways the manufacturer compiled it.
If you don't particularly like the idea of compiling, it can be quite technical sometimes.
Yeah, don't be put off just because the application isn't there and it doesn't already have a prebuilt for Windows.
It's usually not that big a deal to get one.
So if you ask somebody might make it for you, ask them various mailing lists or forums.
Somebody will probably compile it for you for Windows.
It's not usually too much of a problem.
And if you're writing software, even if you've got a target Windows,
it's better to be using free and open source stuff.
Because there is a huge blur of libraries available that you can pull in.
So it means you actually have to do less writing yourself if you're writing free software rather than proprietary stuff.
Yeah, that would be all I've got to say actually.
So are there any questions about stuff that any applications that you particularly want to run?
Could you try KDE on Windows?
I did a couple of years ago, but I haven't recently.
I have used an open box, I think it's a black box room,
so it does much the same thing.
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