Recommended Software at the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences
There are billions of software packages out there, but these are our
suggestions
- Mail Clients. See our E-Mail Page for
more information.
- Operating Systems: Your Pick. We support Windows of all flavors,
Macintosh OS 8, 9 or 10, Linux, Solaris or whatever. We do have the media for
XP and Vista Business, so if you want to upgrade any departmental
(not personal) Windows machine
to XP or Vista all it costs is the
upgrade cost of about $50. We also have media for 98SE and 2000 Professional
if you need them. Similarly we have the media for MacOS 10.4, and numerous
distributions of Linux. You can also download ISO images of several of the
most popular
Linux distributions from wuarchive.
- Office Suites: Microsoft Office We would prefer everyone used
StarOffice or OpenOffice, but unfortunately 98% of the folks in the world use
the product from Microsoft. We have Office 2007 and 2003 for Windows and Office 2004 for
Macintosh available for only a low departmental license fee of about $50.
Braver souls can try the free alternatives like
OpenOffice from a
mirror site,
or IBM's Lotus Symphony for free
as well.
For word processing only,
try AbiWord which runs on Windows, Mac
and Linux and does not eat up all the resources of Word or OpenOffice's
Writer.
- Browsers: Mozilla Firefox. Microsoft Internet Explorer is the biggest
security hole on most Windows machines, and
should only be used where absolutely necessary. Suggestion number one is Mozilla
Firefox which is updated very quickly, and number two would be
Opera.
Safari on the Mac runs fine as do the host of other browsers available on Linux.
- Communications: For remote terminal access we recommend people use
a SSH client, either the free client from SSH.com or putty. Both are
available
here. For a Windows
FTP clients there is the old standby WSFTP or the newer choice FileZilla (which
supports SFTP), both of which are available for free
here. Mac users can SSH
from a terminal window and for FTP use
OneButton FTP
or Fetch which is free for educational use.
- Graphics: Adobe Illustrator/PhotoShop. We receive the best deals
and have found the most robust graphics packages come from Adobe. We have the
media for some, but not all packages, and they are all available at very
modest prices from Software Plus. Those wanting to try out the open source
alternatives should give Inkscape and
the GIMP a try.
- Anti-Virus: Norton/Symantec Anti-Virus Corporate Edition.
The department has
purchased a large number of licenses for departmental use. We have
XP, Vista and Mac OSX versions
available. The corporate version cannot
be used for home use. Grab a completely free anti-virus package for home like
AVG or
avast.
- Anti-Spyware: Note that Anti-Virus software has not been fully
designed to
stop the tons of nasty adware and spyware that is clogging up many Windows
machines these days. There are several free cleaners that do a very good job
of cleaning this junk off your machine. Since each misses some of them it is
best to run all four in Safe Mode one after the other and then reboot.
The five tools are:
SpywareTerminator,
SUPERAntiSpyware,
AdAware,
SpyBot, and
Microsoft
AntiSpyware/Defender. Note that the Microsoft product was written by another
company that Microsoft bought out, so it is actually pretty good! Afterwards,
delete the Internet Explorer icon off your desktop and use any other browser
you can find. The newest two are Spyware Terminator and SUPER AntiSpyware which
are said to be pretty good, but do not have the history of the others.
- Firewall:
ZoneAlarm (free version). Some folks prefer the Norton Internet Security
Suite, but the free version of ZoneAlarm works very well for most cases.
Another nice free firewall is
Comodo Firewall. Anything is better than the piece of junk that
comes with Windows XP (yes, including the "improvement" in SP2). The firewalls
for Linux and Macs are built-in, of course, but make sure you turn it on in
Mac OSX.
- Web Development Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. We have the media here
so all you need is an extra license which costs about $80. Open source
alternatives are also available like Amaya
and nvu
- Peer to Peer (P2P) File Sharing Software
Just Say No! It is not worth it! Okay, I think
most of us know that "sharing" licensed music, movies and software is illegal,
but amazingly P2P software does show up on a lot of people's computers. My
advice is by all means to stay away from the full Kazaa and LimeWire
clients,
and if you are being forced by gunpoint to install P2P software on your
computer, I actually know of some ways to share files that are safe to use on
your computer. For
example the BitTorrent clients like Azureus by themselves are completely legitimate
and safe to use (i.e. not infested with adware and spyware), and they are an
easy and legal way to retrieve the latest version of open Linux distributions.
If you are a P2P addict and just have to do it, at least be informed by reading
www.slyck.com before you install some adware infested client on your PC.
Note that college students are currently getting sued
for thousands of dollars by the RIAA and it is
easy to locate your PC running Limewire or BitTorrent so DO NOT USE THEM!!.
So if you are going to be a thief, by all means do not be a stupid thief and
leave your PC on all day with LimeWire or BitTorrent running continuously, or
you are asking the RIAA to send you a subpoena. If you are a registered WashU
student and want to listen to just about any music you could possibly want
for free and completely legally, try Ruckus.
- ArcGIS Due to a
licensing agreement between the university and ESRI, any student,
faculty or staff member can install ArcGIS on their computer for academic
and research purposes. Visit the web site for more information and to find out
how to obtain the software.
More free utilities, patches and applications can be found at
our free software site. For a
very nice collection of the best of the best in Windows freeware, visit
PricelessWareHome.org. Mac users
should visit OpenSourceMac.org.
For commercial pricing, visit the
Software Library site,
or contact Chad Adams at Software Plus,
692-7638 x117.
Hugh Chou,
hugh@levee, Room 289, 5-4012
(Add .wustl.edu if e-mailing from off-campus!)
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Geobiology