Computing & software (including PWF)
Obtaining free software
There is a lot of good free software available on the Internet. The following are good sites for browsing for free software:
- http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/nfs-server/ for Unix related software (requests for additional software will be considered)
- http://www.freesoftware4all.co.uk/ for all platforms
- http://www.tucows.com/ for all platforms
- http://www.freemacware.com/ for Macintosh software
- http://www.mirrorservice.org/ which was formerly the JISC mirror service until 2004, and is now hosted by the University of Kent.
Some particular applications which may be of general interest in the University are:
- PuTTY (free Windows Telnet/ssh client for logging into remote systems); obtainable from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
- Firefox (web browser for Windows, Mac and Linux, with many useful add-ons), from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
- Thunderbird (email and News client for Windows, Mac and Linux) from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
- Acrobat Reader (for reading PDF files); comes bundled with many systems but can be downloaded from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
- OpenOffice (office suite for Windows, Mac and Linux), from http://www.openoffice.org/
- Neo-office (office suite for Macs), from http://neooffice.org/
- Stuffit Expander (for expanding/decoding compressed files, for Windows and Mac) from http://www.stuffit.com/; see also the list of site-licensed software, below.
- Cygwin (a Linux-like environment for Windows, giving access to a wide range of applications), from http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/windows/cygwin/
- WinSCP (file transfer client for Windows) from http://winscp.net/eng/
- 7.zip (file compression utility for Windows) from http://www.7-zip.org/
- TeX and LaTeX (mathematical typesetting, all platforms) http://www.tex.ac.uk/ but see http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/ for software for Macs
The title of this document is:
Obtaining free software
URL:
http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/compsoft/free-software.html
Last updated: 4 February 2010

