- GNUWin II
GNUWin II is a large collection of
free software forMicrosoft Windows created by theLinux User Group of theEPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne). It is intended at easing the transition from proprietary applications and operation systems to free ones, by acclimating the user to widely used and cross-platform software. As of January 2005, project members are defining GNUWin III.History
GNUWin 1
The GNUWin project started in spring 2001 in the
EPFL to respond to the need of a mean of distributingLaTeX packages for MS Windows. The logical extension was to include LaTeX documentation, customised hints in form of HTML pages, and other software packages such asgnuplot andStar Office (which was not exactly Free Software, a special license fromSun Microsystems was obtained for the occasion). GNUWin was only available in French, and was mainly distributed within theEPFL .GNUWin II
Due to the success of GNUWin, it was decided to build a second edition the year after. The main feature was that the CD was multilingual: the three main official languages of Switzerland (German, French and Italian) were included, as well as English; software was updated (notably, StarOffice was replaced by the Free
OpenOffice.org ); and a server script was written to ease addition. TheEPFL itself sponsored the printing of 1000 CDs.Translations
GNUWin II immediately met broad success outside the EPFL, due to its translation into German. Free software is more commonly accepted in Germany and German Switzerland, which led to GNUWin being advertised and mirrored on the Internet. It also made it into important Swiss German newspapers.
Quite quickly, a Spanish translation was set up by contributors outside of the original team. From there, contributors from around the world began to have greater importance. The second translation, quite interestingly, was Catalan (probably due to political and cultural tensions between Spanish Catalonians and the majority Castilians who speak "Spanish"). Numerous languages followed, notably Portuguese, Hindi and Swedish. Translations in Polish, Romanian, Greek and Turkish (another example of competing cultures where the presence of one drives the other), and Esperanto are all currently under development. Interlingua is one of the most recent additions. GNUWin is striving to set up Asian translations, particularly in Chinese and Japanese.
Other contributions include private companies offering CDs in various places (example [http://linuxcentral.com/catalog/index.php3?prod_code=L000-264] ).
Programs and CD ISO images
The GNUWin site offers download of executables or installers, as well as complete
ISO image s containing local copies of the internet site, though recently the internet site has grown bigger than a CD-ROM, thus the distribution now includes several CDs. DVD ISO images are under study.GNUWin II is originally hosted at the EPFL. It is mirrored by the Sunsite Switch mirror, and others ( [http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/en/order.html more information] ). Typical number of downloads is about 2000 a month for the Switch mirror alone.
Included programs
3D Games
*
Celestia
*glTron
*Tux Racer
*BZFlag
*FlightGear Computer Security
*Eraser
*GNU Privacy Guard
*WinPT
*Nmap Desktop Environments
*
LiteStep Development
*
MinGW32
*XEmacs
*Blender
*SiePerl
*PLT-Scheme Education
*GNU Solfege
*Tux Paint
*TuxTypeEngineering
*Dia
*LeoCAD
*gEDA
*QCad Games
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Crack Attack!
*Freeciv
*Frozen Bubble
*GNU Chess
*LBreakout2 Graphics
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GIMP
*Sodipodi
*Blender
*POV-Ray
*DiaInternet and communications
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Mozilla Firefox
*Gaim
*Mozilla
*PuTTY
*FileZilla Multimedia
*
VideoLAN
*MPlayer
*OpenDivX
*winLAME
*Zinf Audio PlayerOffice
*
OpenOffice.org
*XEmacs
*AbiWord
*Ghostscript
*LaTeX Operating systems
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GNU GRUB
*Cooperative Linux
*DOSBox
*FreeDOS
*Gestor de Arranque Gráfico ciences and Math
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GNU Maxima
*GNU Octave
*Celestia
*R
*Scilab ervers and database
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Database Design Tool
*Apache web server
*MySQL
*PHP
* UnisonUtilities
*
7-Zip
*antiword
*gzip
*UnxUtils
*wmfishtime Other
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DRKSpider
*WinPenguins
*cygwin External links
* [http://gnuwin.epfl.ch GNUWin II home]
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