Free and Open Source Software I use on Windows

1. Firefox 2.0.0.3 (Web Browser)
   
2. FreeBurner Free (CD/DVD Burner)
3. CCleaner (File and application cleaner)
4. Picasa 2 (Photo management)
5. Google Earth (3D Earth Viewer)
6. VLC (Multimedia Player)
7. Ad-Aware SE Personal (Antispyware)
8. Spybot (Antispyware)
   
9. AVG (Antivirus)
10. Open Office (Office Suite)
    

Wine 0.9.34 Released

Another Wine update. This version hasn't landed in the Feisty repositories yet, but I have a feeling it will before the final version of Ubuntu 7.04 is released in late April. I have had some success in running some of my Windows applications with Wine. I'll be covering Wine in more detail in a future post. Some features of this Wine update include :

• Support for Xcursor.
• A range of fixes for various installers.
• New builtin xcopy tool.
• The usual assortment of Direct3D fixes.
• Lots of bug fixes.

Visit http://www.winehq.com/ for more details.

Astronomy Software Part I : Celestia

I like Astronomy and there are some good Astronomy packages for Linux. In Ubuntu these can be found in Add/Remove under the Applications menu. I believe most are under the Education category. The first one is called "Celestia Space Simulator". After installation, it will appear under Applications > Education. When I ran it, it didn't come up full screen, so I hit the maximize button. The planets and stars will be display and you can pan and zoom in and out. The first thing to do is run the demo by pressing the "d" key. You can also click on the stars and planets and information will appear in the upper left corner. The "w" key will label asteroids. "i" will show cloud cover on Earth. "p" labels the planets. "b" labels major stars. "n" shows the locations of spacecraft. "?" turns on constellations. The arrow keys pan and rotate. the "<" and ">" keys let you zoom in and zoom out.

More information about Celestia at http://www.shatters.net/celestia/