Useful Programs For Home Users

This page is designed to be a reference guide for students and staff who wish to do their work from home. It is not intended to be a usage guide for any of these programs, nor is it intended to be all-inclusive. We do not support any of these programs. If there is a program you think should be in this list that isn't, or you find a problem with the list, please send an email to the Computer Systems Lab (lab@cs.wisc.edu) and let us know.

Anti-Virus Software

There are many different antivirus tools available for use. If you are a University student, you probably qualify to use the one provided by DoIT. One free program available is Trend Micro's housecall. There are also offerings from Norton, F-Prot, and McAfee.

The CSL makes no guarantees or warranties for any of these products, but we do recommend that you use a virus scanner/removal tool regularly to keep your data safe.

E-mail Clients

Our recommended e-mail client at the CSL is Mozilla Thunderbird. It is relatively easy to use, and supports IMAP and pop3.

If you prefer UNIX command-line mail tools, mutt and pine are two options which are widely used. There are numerous other ones out there if you do a search on Google.

SSH Clients

Just about all 'nix distributions include or make available an ssh client. For Windows we suggest PuTTY^?. For more information on how to use this from home, check our section on SSH.

Web Browsers

Mozilla Firefox

The one we at the CSL recommend using is Mozilla Firefox. It is supported on multiple platforms including Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Macintosh OSX, as well as AIX/OpenBSD/other less common operating systems. It is standards compliant, fast, free, and secure.

Opera

Another web browser available is Opera. There are builds for Windows, Linux, Solaris, MacOS, and several others. It opens some pages that Mozilla doesn't display correctly, and is fast. However, the free version has ads built in, and there are some security issues with certain versions and platforms.

Internet Explorer

Of course, there is always Internet Explorer. It is only available for Windows.

X Servers

One option is to run Xming available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming, a fast, free, powerful X-server.

Microsoft DreamSpark (formerly MSDNAA)

Software licensed under the Microsoft DreamSpark Program is available for Computer Sciences Department students, faculty and staff. Note: authorization is automatic; authentication is via the CS Department authenticated web access.