GNUWin II
Encyclopedia
GNUWin II was a large collection of free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 for Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 created by the Linux User Group
Linux User Group
A Linux User Group or Linux Users' Group or GNU/Linux User Group is a private, generally non-profit or not-for-profit organization that provides support and/or education for Linux users, particularly for inexperienced users...

 of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
The École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne is one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology and is located in Lausanne, Switzerland.The school was founded by the Swiss Federal Government with the stated mission to:...

 (EPFL). It was 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.

GNUWin 1

The GNUWin project started in spring 2001 in the EPFL to respond to the need of a means of distributing LaTeX
LaTeX
LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...

 packages for MS Windows. The logical extension was to include LaTeX documentation, customised hints in form of HTML pages, and other software packages such as gnuplot
Gnuplot
- License :Despite gnuplot's name, it is not part of or related to the GNU system and it is not distributed under the GNU General Public License .However, some GNU packages do use gnuplot....

 and StarOffice
StarOffice
StarOffice, known briefly as Oracle Open Office before its discontinuation in 2010, is a proprietary office suite. It was originally developed by StarDivision which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999...

 (which was not exactly Free Software, a special license from Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

 was obtained for the occasion). GNUWin was only available in French, and was mainly distributed within the EPFL.

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
OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org, commonly known as OOo or OpenOffice, is an open-source application suite whose main components are for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. OpenOffice is available for a number of different computer operating systems, is distributed as free software...

); and a server script was written to ease addition. The EPFL 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
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 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
Catalan language
Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...

 (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
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

 and Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

.

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
ISO image
An ISO image is an archive file of an optical disc, composed of the data contents of every written sector of an optical disc, including the optical disc file system...

s containing local copies of the internet site, though the internet site has grown bigger than a CD-ROM, thus the distribution included several CDs.

GNUWin II was originally hosted at the EPFL. It was mirrored by the Sunsite Switch mirror, and others (more information).

According to GNUWin homepage, it is without a maintainer since 2004.

Graphics

  • GIMP
    GIMP
    GIMP is a free software raster graphics editor. It is primarily employed as an image retouching and editing tool and is freely available in versions tailored for most popular operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and Linux.In addition to detailed image retouching and...

  • Sodipodi
    Sodipodi
    Sodipodi is an open source vector graphics editor, discontinued in 2004, which is the predecessor to Inkscape.-Development:Sodipodi started as a fork of Gill, a vector-graphics program written by Raph Levien. The main author is Lauris Kaplinski, and several other people have contributed to the...

  • Blender
    Blender (software)
    Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, interactive 3D applications or video games. The current release version is 2.60, and was released on October 19, 2011...

  • POV-Ray
    POV-Ray
    The Persistence of Vision Raytracer, or POV-Ray, is a ray tracing program available for a variety of computer platforms. It was originally based on DKBTrace, written by David Kirk Buck and Aaron A. Collins. There are also influences from the earlier Polyray raytracer contributed by its author...

  • Dia

Internet and communications

  • Mozilla Firefox
    Mozilla Firefox
    Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...

  • Gaim
  • Mozilla
    Mozilla
    Mozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software....

  • PuTTY
    PuTTY
    PuTTY is a free and open source terminal emulator application which can act as a client for the SSH, Telnet, rlogin, and raw TCP computing protocols and as a serial console client...

  • FileZilla
    FileZilla
    FileZilla is free, open source, cross-platform FTP software, consisting of FileZilla Client and FileZilla Server. Binaries are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It supports FTP, SFTP, and FTPS . As of 18 April 2011, FileZilla Client was the 7th most popular download of all time from...


Operating systems

  • GNU GRUB
    GNU GRUB
    GNU GRUB is a boot loader package from the GNU Project. GRUB is the reference implementation of the Multiboot Specification, which provides a user the choice to boot one of multiple operating systems installed on a computer or select a specific kernel configuration available on a particular...

  • Cooperative Linux
    Cooperative Linux
    Cooperative Linux, abbreviated as coLinux, is software which allows Microsoft Windows and the Linux kernel to run simultaneously in parallel on the same machine....

  • DOSBox
    DOSBox
    DOSBox is emulator software that emulates an IBM PC compatible computer running MS-DOS. It is intended especially for use with old PC games. DOSBox is free software....

  • FreeDOS
    FreeDOS
    FreeDOS is an operating system for IBM PC compatible computers. FreeDOS is made up of many different, separate programs that act as "packages" to the overall FreeDOS Project...

  • Gestor de Arranque Gráfico

Sciences and Math

  • GNU Maxima
  • GNU Octave
    GNU Octave
    GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command-line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with MATLAB...

  • Celestia
    Celestia
    Celestia is a 3D astronomy program created by Chris Laurel. The program is based on the Hipparcos Catalogue and allows users to travel through an extensive universe, modeled after reality, at any speed, in any direction and at any time in history...

  • R
  • Scilab
    Scilab
    Scilab is an open source, cross-platform numerical computational package and a high-level, numerically oriented programming language. Itcan be used for signal processing, statistical analysis, image enhancement, fluid dynamics simulations, numerical optimization, and modeling and simulation of...


Servers and database

  • Database Design Tool
  • Apache web server
  • MySQL
    MySQL
    MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...

  • PHP
    PHP
    PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

  • Unison
    Unison (file synchronizer)
    Unison is a file synchronization program. It is used for synchronizing files between two directories, either on one computer, or between a computer and another storage device Unison is a file synchronization program. It is used for synchronizing files between two directories, either on one...


See also

  • OpenDisc
    OpenDisc
    The OpenDisc project offers a selection of high quality open source software on a disc for Microsoft Windows users. The aims of the project are "to provide a free alternative to costly software, with equal or often better quality equivalents to proprietary, shareware or freeware software for...

  • WinLibre
    WinLibre
    WinLibre was a package of free and open source software for Microsoft Windows, in French and English. WinLibre is no longer maintained, as its latest version is 0.3.1 from December 18, 2004...

  • Open Source Software CD
    Open Source Software CD
    The Open Source Software CD was a collection of about 150 open-source programs for Microsoft Windows. It contained programs for software development, fun and games, Internet, multimedia, productivity, security, text editing, and utilities. It was last updated in December 2005, and is no longer...

  • LoLiWin
    LoLiWin
    Like OpenDisc for English-speaking users, LoLiWin aims to introduce French-speaking users of Microsoft Windows to the benefits of free and open source software . It is a DVD image that can freely be downloaded and copied.-See also:* OpenDisc...

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK