This Christmas I brought back home my old laptop with the idea to leave it there for my parents. The laptop is a Toshiba Tecra S1 – a cute machine. The reason why I decided to leave�the Windows on it is because my mother is a dentist and unfortunatly all of her specialized software runs on Windows only. The following is a list of all free (as in freedom) software installed�for�use�by�my�parents,�who�are�quite�happy�with�it.

Daily Usage

Web Browser – Mozilla Firefox 2
Office Suite – OpenOffice
Media�Player – VLC (with the skins interface)
GTK+ Runtime Installer (requirement for most programs below) -�For�Windows
Simple and Easy Word Processing – AbiWord
Voice�&�Video Chat/VOiP Client – Ekiga (beta for win32)
Instant Messaging – Gaim 2
Archive Manager – 7-Zip

Specialized

Raster Graphics Editor – GIMP
Vector Graphics Editor – Inkscape
Diagrams Drawing – Dia

Look and Feel

Icons – Tango
Theme – Clearlooks
To avoid using crappy theme managers – patched uxtheme.dll + Replacer

Non-Free Software

Well for a start MS Windows itself and the drivers are proprietary software. I would like to see Evince or something similar working on MS Windows to replace Adobe Reader�(version�8�of�that�is�soooo�slow) and why not an open source Flash 9 compatible implementation.

My Software Development Stuff (I had temporaly for the holidays)

Advanced CD/DVD�Burning – cdrecord and tools
C/C++ Compiler – MinGW
C# Compiler�and�class�library – Mono
Code Editor – VIM + vim-taglist
Unix-ish CLI environment -�Cygwin
SVN Client�- TortoiseSVN

Conclusion

The installed software resulted a fully functional and usable desktop for my parents, made up from only free (as in freedom) software. It also resulted a fully compatible solution with all the proprietary applications like MS Office,�Adobe Photoshop, the different Instant Messangers, etc, etc.