Unix Tools on Windows

I still had my old XP license, so I installed it on my spare hard drive. The reason I care at all is, as everyone knows, drivers. Linux drivers for some things are just great, but even HP can’t create a proper HPLIP driver for CUPS which prints as nicely as it does in Windows. Having tried it repeatedly with different distros of Linux, it always prints a little too low on the page, and I can’t find any way to adjust that. Then there’s that business with the on-board Intel-HDA sound chipset which always clicks and pops under Linux, and not a one of the various manual adjustments works to fix the jack sensing so plugging in my headphones kills the speakers. And on and on it goes. After awhile it just gets tiresome.

So I reinstalled XP and all is dandy, except I was still jonesing for the CLI tools in Unixland. Thank God for GnuWin32. For my personal use, it was enough to grab the basic core utilities, along with units, and the file command to ID stuff in my browser cache. These are the things I use most.

In a similar vein, after my discussion on grabbing videos from your browser cache, playing with the Firefox add-on which downloads and converts media files, the author wanted money for some of the critical features. I have no problem with that, but I also have no money. Besides, that constantly animated icon on the mainbar at the top of Firefox drove me nuts. So I went and found this wonderful page on ffmpeg and related tools for Windows. There are several GUI frontends for it, and you’ll have to make up your own mind. I am prepared to do it on the CLI, so converting FLVs to MP4 or stripping the audio file down to MP3 is pretty easy to do, once you find a decent recipe. However, just for fun, I decided to test the one labeled Super from eRightSoft. It comes bundled with a reasonably recent copy of the ffmpeg backend, and appears to work well enough.

As you might expect, I’m also using Cream/Gvim for Windows — yes, I actually use Gvim quite a bit without the Cream — and other nifty things like Really Slick Screensavers, PuTTy, and stuff like that. Naturally, you gotta have that AV package, and I keep a homesite license to Sunbelt VIPRE because I can scrape up just enough every year to renew it. That way I can run it on as many Win-boxes as I have in my immediate family.