The Effective Desktop, For (Mostly) Free
Setting up a new computer is one of those things that should be enjoyable, but is mostly just tedium. That’s because there really isn’t a single OS out there that does for me everything I want in a single distribution – at least not one I’ve found. In truth Linux comes closest, but in the case of Linux, there are still some things (like Motocross Madness 2, one of the best PC games ever) that you just don’t get there.
And don’t start giving me lectures on Mac. Same problem applies there. Even without games, I still have pretty much the same setup overhead for Mac as anything else. Macs are great, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t write Mac software anymore, so I don’t have to be showing the Steve-love for a while now, until I start doing Mac development again.
Anyway, I’m willing to bet that at my new job my development machine will be a Windows machine – it’s just a hunch I have. So here’s the rundown of setting the machine up for usefulness and effectiveness.
| Basics | |
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First is Firefox. Firefox is a great web browser, fast and pretty reliable. Once you’ve got Firefox installed, you’ll want to grab a handful of Firefox plugins. When I set up next, I’ll be trying Google Gears, AdBlock, FireBug, Better GMail/GCal/GReader, Tab Mix Plus, FaviconizeTab, Fission, and GreaseMonkey of course. I keep IE around because sometimes I need it, but I make Firefox my default browser. |
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In addition to e-mail, I use calendaring and news readers (RSS/Atom) almost every day. A lack of decent free options in the past got me used to using Google for all of this stuff. But if I were to decide to use rich applications for these purposes instead, I’d give Thunderbird, Sunbird, and RSSOwl a try. |
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Next is OpenOffice.org. I know, most people use Microsoft Office. I realize it is better. I realize it is more powerful. I realize it is more ubiquitous. It is also expensive for my purposes. Stick with Office if you like it. |
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For instant messaging I use Pidgin. Since I’ve got friends using MSN/Hotmail, Google, and Yahoo! among others, Pidgin gives me a great way to be able to chat with all of them in a single IM client. And it has some great plugins that I’m eager to try out. |
| Multimedia | |
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For listening to and organizing music, I’ve been hearing a lot about Songbird and I think I’ll give that a try. I don’t buy music from iTunes and I don’t have an iPod (I know, lame). If I did I’d go with iTunes. Although, I do like iTunes Genius feature, so I might go with iTunes just for that. |
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When it comes to audio editing, Audacity is where it’s at. I’ve used Audacity to make ringtones from some of my music MP3s, to edit and mix recorded WAV files into MP3 files, and even for my son’s science project to examine the differences between sound waves. A must-have. |
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In doing research for this blog post, I ran across these apps: MediaCoder for translating and saving media files, Handbrake for ripping copies of your DVDs to formats for your handheld, and ImgBurn for creating DVDs. So I haven’t actually used them yet, but I can hardly wait to try them out. Managing video files and recordings is something I built my computer to do, but finding the software to get the job done has been tough. Hopefully I’ll find the answer among these tools. |
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DoubleTwist is a new application I’m eager to try for managing the transfer and synchronization of files from the PC to your handheld device. I’ve got a really cool little Sony Ericsson phone that is supposed to work flawlessly with DoubleTwist; can’t wait to find out. |
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I’ve used The Gimp for my photo editing for years and, for me, it removes any need for me to buy Photoshop. I’m sure Photoshop users would disagree. But hey, I’m not a graphic artist. I’m just a guy who needs to edit photos from time to time, even for my job, and can’t justify the expense of Photoshop. Lately, friends have been telling me about Paint.NET, and what they are telling me is that they like it better than The Gimp. That’s a high standard in my opinion. I’ll have to check it out. |
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Ah – where would I be without Steam? Steam’s client is free to download and serves as the launching pad for most of the games I play. A lot of games I really like, such as Audiosurf and World of Goo, I first found out about via Steam. Every time I launch it it seems there are more titles and more publishers available through Steam. |
| Security | |
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Truecrypt is a highly regarded application for encrypting data on your PC – one I’ve been meaning to try for a long time and plan to soon. I know, I should do this. Eraser, on the other hand, is one I’ve used for a long time. It makes it really easy to truly erase files from your computer by performing multiple overwrite passes to keep your data from being restored after you’ve intentionally deleted it. |
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For managing the applications that launch automatically when your PC starts, it is hard to beat Mike Lin’s Startup Monitor and Startup Control Panel applications. Startup Monitor runs discretely in the background, and just notifies you when some application has requested to be run at startup, allowing you to decide whether to accept this or not. Startup Control Panel offers a simple view of the applications already scheduled to run at startup, and allows you to disable them. Great for improving boot times and free resources, not to mention helpful in keeping your desktop secure from rogue apps running in the background doing who knows what. |
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Spybot Search & Destroy is essential for keeping your PC clear of spyware and adware that want to do evil things behind your back. It integrates with most common web browsers, including Firefox, to help lock them down to avoid evil cookies and other tracking software from sending information about you to others. |
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If you are up for trying a free PC antivirus application, ClamAV is the answer for you.
Okay, I haven’t used it and probably won’t for a while because I’ve already got a license for a security suite. But if you are in the market it is probably worth a try. It certainly could not be worse than BitDefender (that steaming pile). |
| Utilities | |
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Daemon Tools is a simple utility that can mount local disk images as filesystems. Mac does this very easily, of course, with .dmg files, but you need a tool like Daemon Tools to do it on a PC. Use Alcohol 120% to create mountable disk images from game CDs, for example, which will enable you in most cases to play PC games by mounting the disk image in Daemon Tools instead of inserting the CD. Or use it to mount ripped DVD ISOs when you are converting them to a format you can use on your handheld. |
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Many years ago, Novell had this really great product called iFolder that you used to synchronize files between multiple computers. Like many Novell products, it was a really awesome product that nobody ever heard about because Novell can’t figure out how to market anything. But Novell employees know about iFolder and most of them are like me – once I got used to using it I could hardly stand to not have it.
When I left Novell this was a big big problem for me. Finally Dropbox came along to address my problem. Dropbox allows you to do what iFolder did years ago – synchronize files between multiple computers. Dropbox is not nearly as full featured as the latest iFolder 3, but at least this one you can use without being a Novell employee. |
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As I’ve said before, once I started working for Mozy I realized that online backup should be considered essential for anyone. I really don’t know why a person wouldn’t use Mozy. Even if you are backing your data up on a second drive, USB drive, thumb drive, etc. you should be using Mozy, to automatically provide a secure backup copy of your data in a separate location – for recovery from fire damage, for example.
Having worked at Mozy for the past 14 months, I can vouch for their solid technology which is, in my opinion, the best in the industry without question. You need online backup, so why not use Mozy? You can back up 2GB for free or as much as you want for $5/month. |
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For archiving and compressing infrequently-used data, I recommend 7Zip. It will unpackage almost anything and will package in the most common formats, including Linux-compatible TAR/GZ formats. It’ll also do encryption and self-extracting packages in some formats. In other words, it’s pretty much everything you want in an archiving tool, for no cost. |
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I haven’t tried Everything yet but I plan to soon. This is a highly rated desktop search engine along the lines of Spotlight for Mac. Windows search I mostly use as last resort, but if this is anything like Spotlight I’ll use Everything all the time. |
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Freemind is a note-taking application that I’m eager to try. I’ve been needing one of these for some time, so I’m anxious to give it a shot. |
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I consider Cygwin an essential PC utility. Since I’m a lot more familiar with the Linux shell than the PC DOS-style shell, Cygwin provides me with a command prompt I’m comfortable with. Cygwin comes with a large number of helpful tools, like the GNU C complier suite, ssh/scp, wget, and others. |
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I’d also consider SQLite an essential PC utility. SQLite is a very simple file-based SQL engine that is very useful and freaking awesome. I’d recommend a PC utility for using SQLite but there really isn’t a good one. Probably your best option is SQLiteSpy. |
| Application Development | |
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I’ve said before that if a person’s going to learn to write software, I think the two most important languages to learn are C and Python. Since you already installed Cygwin you probably already have a C compiler on your machine, so now you need to get Python installed.
In addition to Python, Ruby seems pretty interesting and one you should definitely look at, in addition to Python (and not instead of Python, not yet anyway). You should note that if you plan to do Python and/or Ruby development, you’ll probably want to get used to doing that natively on your machine, and not via Cygwin. So don’t depend on the Cygwin Python and Ruby interpreters – use the native interpreters instead. If you must, use Java. Sometimes there’s stuff you just can’t do without it. |
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Ah, Eclipse: the mother of all development environments. Having worked closely with the Eclipse foundation and been part of starting an Eclipse project myself, I have a strong affinity for Eclipse. For Java development, I’d consider it one of the best, if not the best, Java IDE available. It’s also a great free alternative for a lot of other languages and application types. Get not only the base Eclipse, but the plugins for C/C++, PHP, RCP/Plugin development, Data Tools, Test and Profiling Tools, and Web Tools.
And if you aren’t going to get the Eclipse Python plugin, you’ll want to install Eric instead. Eric is a pretty good little Python IDE that works on both Linux and Windows. You’ll need PyQt for Eric to work I think. If you are really wanting to do development in C# and .NET instead, but don’t have the .NET platform, you could try SharpDevelop. I haven’t tried it though, so I can’t say – and in my new job, I’ll be doing my C# development in Visual Studio, which is certainly better. |
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If you want to try out simple GUI programming, especially cross-platform GUI programming, try wxWidgets. You can program directly to wxWidgets in C or C++, or in Python using wxPython. If you think GUI programming with wxPython is your cup of tea, you might also want to try Boa Constructor, which is a good Python development environment with GUI building tools. |
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For web development on a Windows PC, I love WAMP. This simple bundle offers Apache, MySQL, and PHP all together in a single package that you can easily start and stop all as one.
(This is the part where the Mozy PHP bigots comment to tell me how rotten PHP is, and where they tell me how much better Perl is, and where I nod and pretend to agree in order to keep the peace. So bring it on.) WAMP is great for your typical free-style web application development, especially if you are building from an existing framework, which is quite likely to be built in PHP. If you’re building from scratch, however, you would probably want to strongly consider Ruby on Rails, in which case you’ll want to install RubyGems to get Rails and other goodies. Finally, I hear Kompozer is a pretty good HTML-style editor and page builder, and I might give that a shot sometime. |
