Category Image Windows XP: First Steps


My university recently provided all full-time faculty members with HP laptops running Windows XP. I received mine a couple of weeks ago, and began acclimating myself to Windows. Prior to receiving the laptop, my experience with Windows was limited to using MATLAB and an archaic web-browser named Internet Explorer. So after a couple of weeks of using Windows XP, I'd have to say that it seems quite inferior to Mac OS X Tiger, Linux, and Solaris. On the other hand, I've discovered a few free applications that don't bring Windows XP up to par with Mac OS X or other UNIX-type systems, but they help make this quirky little operating system useful and "reasonably" friendly to UNIX geeks.

  • Cygwin and Cygwin/X Want the UNIX shells bash, tcsh,and zsh? Want to run some UNIX software on your Windows machine? Want to use the GCC developer tools on your Windows platform? If you answered yes to these questions, Cygwin is for you! It really helps to make a Windows machine usable.
  • TeXnicCenter This is a pretty nice LaTeX GUI.
  • MiKTeX This is a well-designed LaTeX installation manager. It makes installing, updating, and managing LaTeX, including add-ons, very easy. I wish someone would develop something like this for Mac OS X.
  • Putty An SSH application.
  • WinSCP An SFTP and SCP GUI application.
  • R There are versions of this statistics package for Mac OS X and Linux/UNIX. It's unbelievable that this awesome application is free.
  • Terminator If you like tabs with your terminal application, this one is for you. There are Mac OS X and Linux versions, too.
  • Firefox The popular cross-platform web browser.
  • Thunderbird The popular cross-platform email client.
  • Opera A pretty cool web browser with versions for Mac OS X, Linux, and Solaris. (This may have been the first web browser to support tabs.)
  • Gaim This IM client supports multiple IM protocols. There are versions for Mac OS X (via DarwinPorts and Fink)and Linux. I like this application better than Trillian, but not as much as the Mac OS X-only Adium.)
  • Coccinella A Tcl-based Jabber client with a Whiteboard. Versions for Mac OS X and Linux are available.
  • Picasa This free photo management application from Google reminds me a little of the commercial Mac OS X iPhoto.

For some screenshots, just click the "read more" link below.

The following are made possible by Cygwin:

An bash shell running in an rxvt window:




Octave with gnuplot,:




The good "old" vim editor:







A gcc compilation and run of a C program that calls gnuplot via the system function. (Notice that make is used to build the executable.):









An x3270 connection to Brown University's IBM z/VM mainframe:








xabacus is not included with Cygwin, but can be built very easily using the development tools provided by Cygwin and Cygwin/X:














The following don't depend on Cygwin, but they show very well-designed and useful applications:



Managing a LaTeX installation with MiKTeX:







MiKTeX includes an Update Wizard:







Editing a LaTeX source file with TeXnicCenter:





In summary, it looks like I'll be able to function in the Windows XP environment, but I plan to keep my Macs running Mac OS X!


Posted: Sunday - June 11, 2006 at 06:24 PM        

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