Useful Free Software for Windows
Sometimes I have to work with Windows systems (company policy or special
software requirements). First step is to install essential software the
default install is lacking. This collection is biased towards network
administration. I prefer
free software.
(This list is usually outdated, because I use GNU/Linux most of the time.)
- Editor
- Notepad++
is a free editor with good Windows integration.
Vim
is available for Windows as well.
- FTP
- The FileZilla project
provides free FTP and FTPS client and server software, as well as an
SFTP client.
- Image manipulation
- GIMP,
the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is also available for Windows.
It can even be used to scan documents.
- Network scanner
- Angry IP Scanner
is a free, easy to use network scanner.
nmap
is available for Windows. It includes netcat as well.
- Network sniffer
- Wireshark,
the network sniffer, is available for Windows as well.
- Office
- LibreOffice
is a free and full fledged office suite.
- Packer
- 7-ZIP
is a free file archive with support for many archive formats.
- Password manager
- Password Safe
is my preferred password manager, some co-workers prefer
KeePass.
- PDF
- I have not (yet) decided on which PDF reader to recommend, but the
PDFreaders.org
site by the
fsfe
(Free Software Foundation Europe) lists and recommends free ones.
- pdftk,
a free PDF toolkit, is available for Windows as well (called
pdftk-server). This is a command line program, to use it
you have to put up with the very crude Windows command shell (or
install a real one, e.g.
MSYS)
- SCP/SFTP
- WinSCP
is a very nice and free graphical SCP and SFTP client.
Recent versions of Windows provide a fork of the free software
OpenSSH
as a Windows feature to activate similarly to the built-in Telnet client.
This includes the sftp and scp clients for
file transfer.
- SSH/telnet/serial
- PuTTY
is my preferred SSH and telnet client on Windows. Works well to access a
switch's command line via serial connection, too. PuTTY is free software.
Tera Term
is another free SSH/telnet/serial client for Windows. It also supports
file transfer over serial connections (XMODEM, YMODEM, ZMODEM, and more).
Recent versions of Windows provide a fork of the free software
OpenSSH
as a Windows feature to activate similarly to the built-in Telnet client.
This includes the ssh client for remote login.
- TFTP server
- Tftpd32 resp. Tftpd64
is a very good free TFTP server. Includes DHCP, DNS, SNTP and Syslog
servers as well.
- Video player
- VLC media player
is a very good free media player that is available for Windows as well.
My preferred GNU/Linux media player,
MPlayer,
is
available
for Windows, too.
- Virtualization
- VirtualBox
is a fine free cross-platform virtualization product.
- VPN
- OpenVPN
is a nice free cross-platform VPN solution.
- Web browser
- Firefox
is my preferred (and free) web browser, available for Windows as well.
GNU or UNIX Like Systems for Windows
I do not like the GNU/Windows efforts (like Cygwin)
very much, because they all lack integration with Windows
applications. This is because Windows applications do not know about
GNU. The same holds for the Windows
Subsystem for UNIX Applications (SUA), with the added constraint of
less powerful non-GNU software. If you can do your work using those,
you can do it much more comfortably using GNU/Linux. Whenever I had
to use Windows, I had to use some Windows software as well, because
my co-workers were using those.
Links
Of course there are other web pages linking to or providing free software for
Windows.
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