Setting Up a New Windows Machine

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Setting up a new machine is never fun, but it's always interesting to compare what different people have in their toolkits. Here's what I have installed so far on the desktop machine I'll be using to do Software Carpentry course develpoment:

• Windows XP (yes, I still use XP)
• Cygwin (a collection of Unix emulation tools for Windows)
• Adobe PDF Reader
• Audacity (for sound editing)
• MikTeX (an all-in-one LaTeX for Windows)
• GIMP (the open source clone of Photoshop)
• Google Talk (for chatting with my co-conspirators)
• Inkscape (an open source vector drawing tool)
• iTunes (this course brought to you by Beethoven, John Coltrane, and a variety of 80s bands)
• MATLAB (I'm using R2008b)
• MWSnap (for doing screen captures)
• Microsoft Office 2007 (because most scientists who use anything, use Excel)
• OpenOffice (but I'll mostly use MS Office)
• Python 2.6 (because some of the packages I want don't exist for Python 3 yet)
• R 2.11 (because after Python and MATLAB, R and Perl are our next target languages)
• SciPy (which gives me almost everything I want that isn't in the standard Python install)
• Skype (for talking to collaborators)
• VLC (for viewing video files)
• yED (for creating and editing simple bubble-and-arrow diagrams)

What's missing (so far) are the science-specific tools that I'll be adding as needed for particular topics—I'll blog about those as I install them. What's interesting is how many of these tools are free (as in beer) and open (as in modifiable): I'll be blogging soon about the distinction, and why I think both are important to science, as well.