This page is my attempt to put together a set of free software that CS students who do their work on Windows machines might find useful. Feel free to use this page as you see fit. If you run across a program that you think I should add to this page let me know. You are on your own as far as installing and getting these applications to run on your machine. Unless otherwise noted - all of this software is free for educational use.
The current version of the Java toolkit and the documentation for the Java API can be found on the Sun website http://www.java.sun.com/downloads.html. For most of the work you will do here at RIT the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) is what you will want to install.
Emacs is a powerful editor that I strongly encourage you to use. Here at RIT we use the Java Development Environment (JDE) along with emacs to create the environment you use in the lab. I have created a zip file that contains the latest version of emacs and the JDE configured to work just like emacs works in our labs. Click here for installation instructions and a link to my zip file.
If you wish to establish a character-based remote connection with one of the machines in the department you will need a secure shell client on your machine. There are at least two free packages to choose from. The one I use is secure shell for workstations developed by SSH. This is a commercial product that can be used for free for non-commercial use. You can find the current binaries for windows machines at ftp.ssh.com. Another choice is PuTTY a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 platforms that include anxtermterminal emulator. You can download PuTTY from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html.
Either program will work with the machines within the department. When accessing the CS machines remotely you should use the machinesholly,hilley, orqueeg. The lab machines should only be used by people who are physically in the lab.
Cygwin is a UNIX environment, developed by Red Hat, for Windows. Cygwin basically will make your PC, from the command line, look and feel like a UNIX workstation. Included in the Cygwin distribution are the revision control tools, RCS and CVS, that are used in most courses. You can download the Cygwin package from http://www.cygwin.com.
Petite Chez Scheme, which is the Scheme we use on the CS Unix systems is available for free on a variety of different platforms. You can get a copy of the system from Cadence Research Systems
If you want a reasonable scripting language I recommend ActivePerl from Active State.
Last Changed on Wednesday, September 11, 2002 09:08 AM