I am extremely happy with free (or ``open-source'', not to be
mistaken for a synonym for gratis)
software
in general. But I am specially enthusiastic about the Debian GNU/Linux
distribution
which I am installing on every computer I am allowed to. I
generally use the stable version of Debian which is well enough for me (and from time to time, I do
resort to the Knoppix
live CD on computers where I am
not allowed to thrash the hard disk).
Rather than giving all sorts of good reasons for this
(which would be useful, but boring), I just list below some of the software
that I used for producing these pages:
- GNU
emacs
whose motto is ``the
extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor''. Let's
say that, if you don't know anything about it you can still use it as a plain
text editor, and if you are sufficiently curious you will probably end up
doing many things from within
emacs (I use
VM
and
BBDB
for reading emails).
- LaTeX2HTML
which promises
to ``bring high quality documents to the Web'' from
LaTeX
sources. A frequent
complaint about
LaTeX2HTML is that it can't do maths, and some people
feel that the solution used by
TtH
or
HeVeA
is better
(although both of these can't really handle complex documents as
LaTeX2HTML does - all this site is generated from a single TeX
document!) But the real reason for this is that HTML itself doesn't know
about maths. Hopefully, better options are now becoming
available...
Note that LaTeX2HTML is
considered as non-free by Debian, check out what it means
there.
- Perl
which is one of several
available open-source scripting languages.
- Mozilla
(The browser; I am
now using the
Firefox
variant
of Mozilla - check here
for reasons why it is now actually called Iceweasel in Debian).
- Bogofilter
for
reading emails (and not junk!)
- CVS (Concurrent Versions
System)
which is (quote) ``the dominant
open-source network-transparent version control system. CVS is ** useful **
for everyone from individual developers to large, distributed teams''
(emphasis is mine; if you don't now what the word ``developer'' means, take
my word: it really stands for everyone who ever use a text editor, including
for writing LaTeX, and especially for anyone who is frequently working from different
computers).