75 Popular Open Source Desktop Downloads

June 22, 2008
By

Jeff Vance

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Emulators

47. Bochs

Bochs is a portable IA-32 (x86) PC emulator written in C++. This software package emulates the Intel x86 CPU, common I/O devices, related AT hardware, and BIOS – enough to run Windows, Linux, BSD and other operating systems on your workstation. Operating Systems: OS Portable (source code is included to work with many OS platforms).

48. AdvanceMAME

For old-school arcade gamers, AdvanceMAME is a port of both the MAME and MESS emulators for arcade monitors and TVs. It can also be used for PC monitors. What this does, essentially, is recreate the hardware of old arcade and console games in software. AdvanceMAME contains a bootable LiveCD/USB, a frontend with animated MNG/MP3 snapshots, a ROM manager, and recompression utilities for compressed files. Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, BSD, UNIX, OS X, MS-DOS.

49. Game Launcher

This project is a cross-platform universal frontend for emulators. It is designed to work with pretty much any command-line emulator. Features include support for joysticks, menu animations, customizable screen resolutions and playback of music in the background. Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, BSD, UNIX, MS-DOS.

50. Wine

An OS implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL and UNIX, Wine (full name: Wine Is Not an Emulator) provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows sources to UNIX and a program loader, which allows unmodified Windows binaries to run on x86-based UNIXes, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris. Operating System: Windows, X, UNIX, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris.

Internet

51. K-Meleon

A fast, customizable, lightweight Web browser for Windows, K-Meleon is based on the Gecko layout engine, which is the rendering engine of Mozilla. K-Meleon has many standard browser features, such as tabbed browsing and popup blockers. However, it also has a cool feature that allows you to use your existing bookmarking system from Explorer, Opera or Mozilla (as opposed to simply importing bookmarks). You can also use multiple systems together. Operating System: Windows.

52. Galeon

Still don’t have enough browser options? Add Galeon to the list. Galeon is a GNOME browser based on the Gecko layout engine. The advantage of Galeon is that it is streamlined with low memory and processor requirements. To achieve this, Galeon has stripped out many ancillary features. It is a bare-bones browser that renders pages and stores bookmarks. Operating Systems: Linux, UNIX, BSD.

53. Swiftweasel

Swiftweasel optimizes Mozilla Firefox for Linux. It includes builds for both AMD and Intel processors and is completely compatible with all Firefox themes, plug-ins, and extensions. Operating System: Linux.

54. BookmarkBridge

Do you often toggle between different browsers? BookmarkBridge will help you keep your varied bookmarks in synch. Simply run it periodically and all of your bookmarks will stay consistent across whichever browsers you use. Operating Systems: Windows, UNIX, BSD, Linux.

55. Checky

This developer tool, an extension to Firefox, Mozilla and Netscape, connects you to online document validation and analysis services. Checky helps you validate and analyze documents containing HTML, XHTML, CSS, RDF, RSS, XML, P3P, hyperlinks, metadata and more. It will also help you check WAI and Section 508 compliance of HTML and XHTML documents. Operating Systems: OS independent.

56. BO2K

For years network admins have complained about the lack of good remote administration tools for Windows. BO2K was developed to correct that. Strong cryptography keeps data safe as it travels over public networks, and other features include session logging, multiple server connections at once (to any Windows PCs with a BO2K client installed) and remote upgrading, installation or uninstallation. Operating Systems: Windows.

57. SquirrelMail

SquirrelMail is a Webmail project written in PHP. It includes PHP support for the IMAP and SMTP protocols, while all pages render in HTML 4.0. SquirrelMail offers the typical range of email client features, including address book, folder management and SPAM filters. Operating Systems: OS independent.

58. AmphetaDesk

A cross-platform, customizable news aggregator, AmphetaDesk sits on your desktop, downloads the latest news items, and displays them in a customizable Webpage. No Webserver is required. Operating Systems: Windows, UNIX, BSD, Linux.

59. Subtext

A personal blog publishing platform, Subtext is intended to be more user friendly than other common blogging engines. It is based on the .TEXT engine. Operating Systems: Windows.

60. SCREEM

Written for the GNOME desktop environment, SCREEM is a web development tool. Not for the faint of heart, SCREEM is intended for serious developers. For instance, unlike most other HTML editors, SCREEM does not provide a WYSIWYG display of pages. Instead, it presents raw HTML source in the editor window. (The argument here is that WYSIWYG editors don’t always produce clean, valid HTML.) SCREEM can also serve as an XML editing environment. Operating Systems: Linux, BSD, UNIX.