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1. Mozilla Firefox (Web browser)
Mozilla Firefox is a graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation and a large community of external contributors. Firefox, officially abbreviated as Fx or fx and popularly abbreviated FF, started as a fork of the Navigator browser component of the Mozilla Application Suite. Firefox has replaced the Mozilla Suite as the flagship product of the Mozilla project, under the direction of the Mozilla Foundation.
Mozilla Firefox is a cross-platform browser, providing support for various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. However, the source code has been unofficially ported to other operating systems, including FreeBSD, OS/2, Solaris, SkyOS, BeOS and more recently, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.
Firefox's source code is freely available under the terms of the Mozilla tri-license as free and open source software.
2. Mozilla Thunderbird (Email client)
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser. Just as Firefox aims to redefine the web browser, Thunderbird is a refinement of the mail and news interface.
3. Open Office (Office suite)
OpenOffice.org is a free office suite of applications available for many different operating systems including Linux, Microsoft Windows, Solaris, OpenVMS, IRIX and Mac OS X. It supports the OpenDocument standard for data interchange.
OpenOffice.org is based on StarOffice, an office suite developed by StarDivision and acquired by Sun Microsystems in August 1999. The source code of the suite was released in July 2000 with the aim of reducing the dominant market share of Microsoft Office by providing a free, open and high-quality alternative. OpenOffice.org is free software, available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
The project and software are informally referred to as "OpenOffice", but project organizers report that this term is a trademark held by another party, requiring them to adopt "OpenOffice.org" as its formal name, and abbreviated as OOo or OO.o.
4. Gaim (Instant messenger)
Gaim (to be renamed Pidgin in the next release due to legal troubles) is a popular multi-platform instant messaging client that supports many commonly used instant messaging protocols. Gaim is free software available under the GNU General Public License.
Gaim was originally known as GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger. In response to complaints from AOL, the program was renamed to Gaim, an acronym of its previous name. As AOL's IM program AOL Instant Messenger gained popularity, AOL trademarked its acronym, "AIM", leading to a lengthy legal struggle with Gaim's creators that was kept largely secret.
Supported protocols include:
5. ClamWin (Antivirus)
ClamWin is a free, open source antivirus software for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista. It provides a graphical user interface to the ClamAV (Clam AntiVirus) engine.
ClamWin Free Antivirus is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License and can be downloaded from the official website for no charge.
6. VLC Media Player (Audio/video player)
VLC media player is a free software (GPL) media player by the VideoLAN project.
It is a highly portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various different formats. VLC used to stand for "VideoLan Client", but that meaning is deprecated.
It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, BSD, Windows CE, and Solaris, and is widely used with almost 30 million downloads for version 0.8.5.
VLC uses a large number of free/open source decoding and encoding libraries. Many of its codecs are provided by the libavcodec codec library from the FFmpeg project, but it uses its own muxer and demuxers. It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux by using the libdvdcss DVD decryption library.
Version 0.8.6, which adds support for WMV version 9 and enhances support for H.264, was released on 10 December 2006.
7. KeePass (Password manager)
KeePass Password Safe is a password management utility, released under the GNU General Public License. It is available for Microsoft Windows & Mac OS X KeePass encrypts the password database with the AES or Twofish encryption ciphers.
KeePass is maintained by Dominik Reichl. Development began in November 2003. KeePass stores passwords, usernames, and URLs in an encrypted database accessed with a password and/or a key-file ("key-disk"). The project is hosted on SourceForge, is currently rated Production/Stable and there are more than 28 translations available.
There are currently several unofficial ports in development targeting PocketPC and Linux/Mac OS X.
8. Cygwin (Unix command line emulator)
Cygwin (IPA: "sɪgwɪn") is a collection of free software tools originally developed by Cygnus Solutions to allow various versions of Microsoft Windows to act similar to a Unix system. It aims mainly at porting software that runs on POSIX systems (such as Linux, BSD, and Unix systems) to run on Windows with little more than a recompilation. Programs ported with Cygwin work better on Windows NT, but some may run acceptably on Windows 9x. While Cygwin provides header files and libraries that makes it easier to recompile or port Unix applications for use on Windows, it does not directly make Unix binaries compatible with Windows (or vice versa).
Cygwin is currently maintained by employees of Red Hat, NetApp and others. Released under the GNU General Public License, Cygwin is free software.
9. Eraser (Data deletion utility)
Eraser is a secure data removal tool for Windows. It completely removes sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns.
10. TrueCrypt (File encryption utility)
TrueCrypt is a free open source on-the-fly encryption (OTFE) program for Microsoft Windows XP/2000/2003/Vista and Linux. It allows one to create a virtual encrypted disk (TrueCrypt volume) within a file and then mount it as a real disk. TrueCrypt can also encrypt an entire hard disk partition or a storage device/medium, such as floppy disk or USB memory stick. Thus, TrueCrypt creates device-hosted TrueCrypt volumes. Everything stored on a TrueCrypt volume is entirely encrypted (i.e., including file names and folder names). TrueCrypt volumes behave as real physical disk drives. This means that it is possible, for example, to repair the encrypted filesystem with chkdsk, defragment mounted volumes created by TrueCrypt, etc.
The encryption algorithms supported by TrueCrypt include AES, Blowfish, CAST5, Serpent, Triple DES, and Twofish. It also allows the use of a cascade of different ciphers, for instance AES+Twofish+Serpent.
All encryption algorithms use the LRW mode of operation, which is more secure than CBC mode for on-the-fly storage encryption.
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Computer Systems
