Freely available and legal software.

[Nemesis]

FOG is a free open-source ghost-like imaging solution/rescue suite.

G4L is a hard disk and partition imaging and cloning tool.
This is a bootable CD with FOG based on Linux.  G4L = Ghost for Linux

g4u - Harddisk Image Cloning for PCs
This is a bootable CD with FOG based on BSD Unix.  G4U = Ghost for Unix

[Czar Mohab]

Last time I tried to post into this it didn't go so well... so, I'll try again:

CCleaner

Summary:
CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) is a freeware system optimization tool. That removes unused and temporary files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster, more efficiently and giving you more hard disk space. The best part is that it's fast! (normally taking less that a second to run) and Free.

There was going to be another one, but apparently I might have downloaded my version while it was still "donations are nice, but program's free"... not free anymore, it seems

But CCleaner's free, and I didn't see it on your list.

Czar "Haven't tried it yet, but was highly recommended by coworker," Mohab.

[Nemesis]

Gnash is the GNU Flash movie player

Gnash is a free SWF movie player. It is available as a stand-alone application or as a plugin for several popular web browsers. It supports playing media from a disk or streaming over a network connection. Some popular video sharing sites like YouTube are supported on a wide variety of devices from embedded ones to modern desktops.

[NJAntman]

Here is one for the graphics list: Daz Studio

http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/software/studio/-/?&_m=d

Its a 3d model manipulation program geared toward creating pics as the end product. Fairly easy to use and lots of user created support and materials. Had my 10 year old niece creating here own content of fighting dragons in less than an hour.

[Nemesis]

FlightGear is an open-source flight simulator.

The FlightGear flight simulator project is an open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight simulator development project. Source code for the entire project is available and licensed under the GNU General Public License.

The goal of the FlightGear project is to create a sophisticated flight simulator framework for use in research or academic environments, for the development and pursuit of other interesting flight simulation ideas, and as an end-user application. We are developing a sophisticated, open simulation framework that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing.

[Nemesis]

Some of you may remember a program called Lotus Symphony.  The program is long gone but IBM has released a new (free) version derived from Open Office 1.x.

Link to site

I haven't read the license yet or downloaded it myself but I understand that it is closed source.  Windows and Linux only but localized in a significant number of languages.

[Nemesis]

NetRacer

Overview:

NetRacer is a simple racing game written to demonstrate the potential of multiplayer games over the Internet with the Commodore 64.  It builds on our earlier two-player effort Artillery Duel with realtime gameplay and the addition of a server.

The game was unveiled at the Cincinnati Commodore Computer Club Expo 2008.  Check out the Powerpoint presentation about the project and pictures of the event and setup.

I never was a C64 user but since there are some around I thought this might be of some interest. 

[Bonk]

Speaking of which, I'm not sure if this one is on our list:

CCS64

CCS64 is a Commodore 64 Emulator for PC and also in the future other platforms.

I've been using it to play Paradroid. 

[Bonk]

Microsoft has acquired Caligari and is now offering trueSpace for free download (must register though). 

trueSpace

trueSpace7.6 is a fully-featured 3D authoring package that will let you model, texture, light, animate and render 3D content. As well as traditional images and movies, you can also make 3D content for online shared spaces, and for Virtual Earth.

(Thanks Cyberkada and toasty0!)

[Nemesis]

I saw toastyo's post myself and was going to add it in.  You beat me to it.   

Going through his links I found that Google has a product that is in the same field though I lack the knowledge, skill and artistic talent  to evaluate it

Google SketchUp

Google SketchUp is software that you can use to create, modify and share 3D models. It's easier to learn than other 3D modeling programs, which is why so many people are already using it.

We designed SketchUp's simplified toolset, guided drawing system and clean look-and-feel to help you concentrate on two things: getting your work done as efficiently as possible, and having fun while you're doing it.

Windows 2000 and XP
Windows Vista
Mac OS X
Note:

    * A Linux version of Google SketchUp isn't available at this time.
    * Google SketchUp will run on multiple-processor machines; however, Google SketchUp will only use one processor. Google SketchUp doesn't support hyperthreading or multithreading at this time.

If not for toastyo's post I would not have found this one.

There is a non free Pro version apparently educators have an option to get it free. 

[Bonk]

Some video editors (which I have not tried yet) which are not on our list.

t@b ZS4 Video Editor

ZS4 Video Editor is video editing and compositing software which aims to provide media experts with a facility to combine a variety of media types (currently photos, videos and audio files) into one (or more) output file(s).

virtualdub

VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).  It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video.  It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters.  VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.

Wax

Wax is a high performance and flexible video compositing and special effects software. The idea for Wax is to be very general purpose and flexible in video compositing and effects, so that you can compose your dream video sequence with ease everytime.

jahshaka

    * Edit with flexibility and speed
    * Create Effects in real time
    * Animate with unlimited features
    * Paint and design on moving video
    * Create music with all the tools the pros use
    * Work in any format at any resolution

[Nemesis]

R

R - R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS.

[Nemesis]

The KDE Education Project

The KDE Education Project

Free Educational Software based on the KDE technologies: students, parents, children, teachers, adults, you can freely use our software, copy it, modify it to your needs and enjoy learning!

Please have a look at the Tour webpage to get a quick preview of our programs which are translated in more than 65 languages.

Our primary focus is on schoolchildren aged 3 to 18, and the specialized user interface needs of young users. However, we also have programs to aid teachers in planning lessons, and others that are of interest to university students and anyone else with a desire to learn!

While until now only available on Unix, BSD and Linux, still in beta but already usable, the KDE 4 series bring our applications on Windows. Read more on the KDE-Edu on Windows page!

All the KDE-Edu news are available in your favourite RSS reader: RSS
Have a look at aKregator.

[Nemesis]

Trinity Rescue Kit

Trinity Rescue Kit or TRK is a free live Linux distribution that aims specifically at recovery and repair operations on Windows machines, but is equally usable for Linux recovery issues.

It is possible to boot TRK in three different ways:

• -as a bootable CD which you can burn yourself from a downloadable isofile
• -from a USB stick/disk (optionally also a fixed disk), installable from Windows or from the bootable TRK cd
• -from network over PXE, which requires some modifications on your local network (version 3.2). Version 3.3 has the ability to act as a network bootserver itself, without any modifications to your local network.

TRK is a complete commandline based distribution, apart from a few tools like qtparted, links, partition image and midnight commander

[Bonk]

Two good ones not on our list:

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL Licence.

Based on a powerful editing component Scintilla, Notepad++ is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size. By optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendlyness, Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment.

BKChem

BKChem is a free (as in free software ) chemical drawing program. It was conceived and written by Beda Kosata.

BKChem is written in Python, an interpreted and very nice programming language. This implies some of the program features:

    * platform independence - BKChem should run on any platform that Python does.*
    * performance - as Python is interpreted language you should not expect the performance of a native code compiled application (in present days a very cheap tradeoff for platform independence). However BKChem should be pretty usable on all modern systems.

* BKChem is developed on GNU/Linux. It was however successfully used under WinXP and MacOS X.

[Bonk]

Another text editor geared for source code editing (not on our list):

SciTE

SciTE is a SCIntilla based Text Editor. Originally built to demonstrate Scintilla, it has grown to be a generally useful editor with facilities for building and running programs. It is best used for jobs with simple configurations - I use it for building test and demonstration programs as well as SciTE and Scintilla, themselves.

SciTE is currently available for Intel Win32 and Linux compatible operating systems with GTK+. It has been run on Windows XP and on Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10 with GTK+ 2.12.

... and the library it is based on:

Scintilla

Scintilla is a free source code editing component. It comes with complete source code and a license that permits use in any free project or commercial product.

As well as features found in standard text editing components, Scintilla includes features especially useful when editing and debugging source code. These include support for syntax styling, error indicators, code completion and call tips. The selection margin can contain markers like those used in debuggers to indicate breakpoints and the current line. Styling choices are more open than with many editors, allowing the use of proportional fonts, bold and italics, multiple foreground and background colours and multiple fonts.

[Bonk]

And another good one not on our list:

ConvertAll

Why write another unit converter? There are plenty of them out there. Well, I couldn't find one that worked quite the way I wanted.

With ConvertAll, you can combine the units any way you want. If you want to convert from inches per decade, that's fine. Or from meter-pounds. Or from cubic nautical miles. The units don't have to make sense to anyone else.

ConvertAll Features:

    *  The base units for conversion may be either typed (with auto-completion) or selected from a list.
    * Units may be selected using either an abbreviation or a full name.
    * Units may be combined with the "*" and "/" operators.
    * Units may be raised to powers with the "^" operator.
    * Units with non-linear scales, such as temperature, can also be converted.
    * A unit list may be filtered and searched
    * Numbers may be entered on either the "From" or the "To" units side, for conversions in both directions.
    * Basic mathematical expressions may be entered in place of numbers.
    * Options control the formatting of numerical results.
    * The unit data includes over 400 units.
    * The format of the unit data file makes it easy to add additional units.
    * Command line options are available to do conversions without the GUI.

[Bonk]

And another:

Cornice

Cornice is a cross-platform image viewer written in Python + wxPython + PIL. It doesn't pretend to be complete, fast, or even useful, but I like it and it is the viewer I use on both Linux and Windows. It has been inspired by the famous Windows-only ACDSee.

Why did I write it? Well, because I like ACDSee, but it's not free and it doesn't run on Linux, which is my main platform. There already exists an ACDsee-like viewer, GTKSee, but it is unmaintained and it lacks some features I wanted (bookmarks, a good keyboard navigation and zooming). First I tried to add such features to it, but then I decided to rewrite it from scratch, so that I could use it also on windows (and also because I had some troubles, especially when trying to port GTKSee to the gdk_pixbuf lib, and also because Python is more fun than C, and... ;-)

Here is a list of the main features of Cornice:

    * Fully cross-platform: it should run wherever wxPython does;
    * Detail and thumbnail view for images;
    * Image preview;
    * Automatic recognition of images, with a variety of formats supported;
    * Bookmarks;
    * Full-screen view;
    * Zooming and rotation;
    * Slideshow;
    * Good keyboard navigation (still not perfect, but this is true for all the features ;-);
    * Image loading from zip archives;
    * i18n support (with Italian and French translations available);
    * EXIF data support;
    * Some more...

(Note: most of the software I've been posting lately will run portably, I found this one at portableapps: http://portableapps.com/apps/graphics_pictures/cornice_portable)

[Bonk]

This looks like a good one, (I haven't tried it out but intend to do so eventually):

Clonezilla

You're probably familiar with the popular proprietary commercial package Norton Ghost®, and its OpenSource counterpart, Partition Image. The problem with these software packages is that it takes a lot of time to massively clone systems to many computers. You've probably also heard of Symantec's solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition® with multicasting. Well, now there is an OpenSource clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting!

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, partclone, and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC's Classroom C, Clonezilla SE was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

[Bonk]

This one looks handy for those who are not comfortable doing it manually:

The PC Decrapifier

The PC Decrapifier will uninstall many of the common trialware and annoyances found on many of the PCs from big name OEMs. Here is the current list of software and items that the PC Decrapifier can detect and remove. You get to see the list of items it detects and then choose what will be removed automatically.

I usually do it myself, but some may be unsure what is crap and what is not, this looks reasonably accurate. Note it uses Autoit which may flag some AV scanners, but it is OK. He is moving to another development platform soon anyway.

[Bonk]

I can't believe we forgot this one, thought I'd add it to the list before I go to bed and forget tomorrow.

TightVNC

TightVNC is a free remote control software package derived from the popular VNC software. With TightVNC, you can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer.

Made somewhat obsolete by windows remote desktop, but with all the crippled versions of Vista out there, it is useful again.

Edit: Oh, poop... from the FAQ:

Does TightVNC work on Windows Vista?

Unfortunately, TightVNC has known issues with Windows Vista operating system, just like all other versions and free distributions of VNC-derived software. Vista's new security features broke the way VNC service was implemented. And it's not clear yet how much effort would be required to workaround the problems. Unfortunately, that does not look very simple.

Oh well, still a good program for other platforms.

[Bonk]

Actually, I have discovered that TightVNC can work on Vista, mostly.

To make it work on Vista, don't install or run the service, run the server as admin from the start menu shortcut, turn off Aero and check "poll full screen" in the TightVNC server options.

So it works with some limitations.

Take that MS cripplemeisters! 

[Bonk]

Here's a good one I used back in '01, I must check out the latest version:

AMDIS

The Automated Mass Spectral Deconvolution and Identification System (AMDIS) is a computer program that extracts spectra for individual components in a GC/MS data file and identifies target compounds by matching these spectra against a reference library. It was developed at NIST with support from the United States Department of Defense and is freely available.

Download page

[Bonk]

There are a number of such scientific programs linked through here:

http://www.nist.gov/srd/index.htm

[Bonk]

About to give this a try, running it from a folder with the kubuntu-8.10-desktop-amd64.iso in it. (It is reminiscent of the the old BeOS Personal Edition installer)

Wubi

Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way. Are you curious about Linux and Ubuntu? Trying them out has never been easier!

Note: Wubi is an AWESOME use of NSIS!


P.S. On researching what became of BeOS I was led to this:

Haiku

Haiku is an open-source operating system currently in development designed from the ground up for desktop computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku aims to provide users of all levels with a personal computing experience that is simple yet powerful, and free of any unnecessary complexities.