I really fond of open source software, there are several reason, stating it again is a repetition, so I will just put some links:

• The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• How To Become A Hacker
• http://www.opensource.org/

Several years ago, I have tried Sun Solaris, Free BSD, Redhat 7.0 and Mandrake, they all was nice, but I did not continue using it, I already believe in the concept of open source but the products was not suitable to me as I am using a lot of third party Windows Desktop software that relates to my work and I haven’t alternatives.

Although this, I enjoyed learning java and using it everywhere where possible, from web sites to desktop applications, even in
inhouse tools to manage issues on some servers.

Last year I restarted my dream again to use Linux instead of Windows, I have tried Centos, fedora core 5 and finally fall in love with Ubuntu, I am really a fan of Ubuntu, but after sometime the same issue of third party Windows software is taking me from Ubuntu, a really bad situation, I have tried Wine emulation, it is good, but not good enough, I hope I can contribute to the project to improve it but I am so busy.

I found a very good option that seems to work with me perfectly. It is Cygwin! I have to admit that, in recent years it was clear to me that the command line tools and shell programming is extremely powerful, in many cases much more than the GUI tools. So the idea is to use Cygwin command line tools and shell scripts whenever it makes sense. Some tasks are suitable for command line like using subversion in large projects and and automating my local files update to backup server through rsync.

So at home and work I am using Ubuntu as much as I can, when I have to use Windows I use open source software and the great cygwin linux layer as much as I can.

– Cygwin
– Firefox
– Thunderbird to check email and RSS feeds.
– Subversion, it is programmers version control system.
– RapidSVN, a client tool to subversion.
– Programmers notepad, simple and fast editor
– Eclipse, Java and C++ IDE.
– Netbeans, java develoment IDE.
– 7Zip, a great tool that open even rar file.
– Active Perl.
– DIA diagramming tool.
– Open Office.
– PSI, jabber based chat client.
– WinMerge, to show file directories differences and make merge.
– StarDict , an open source dictionary

If you want any of these tools, just google using thier name, and Google will present it as the first hit, thanks to Google.

If you want my support to start moving to open source, just give me the honor to help you, anyway I a going to post some tips that helps me in the open source world.