Outfitting laptops for faculty

24 February 2005

I have dominion over a handful of laptops that faculty can check out of the IDEA Center. After MIS puts the base image on the laptop (operating system, Novell stuff, MS Office) they hand it over to me to add whatever I want. Then MIS captures the image and pushes it down to the other laptops and we end up with five identical images.

So what did I put on the image? In no particular order:

  • Firefox, an Internet Explorer alternative. And extensions!
    • Adblock, for blocking ads
    • Bugmenot, for bypassing compulsory registration on some news sites
    • TinyURL Creator, for automatically generating a shortened URL from the current page
    • Web Developer Toolbar, a tool every web author should have
    • ColorZilla, for picking colors from a web page (among other things)
    • RSS Editor, just because I wanted to try it

    I also include bookmarks for Zane State and edtech right in the link toolbar (and for IE, too), not to mention my own search bar additions for various learning object repositories.

  • Nvu, a cross-platform web authoring system. Think enhanced Mozilla Composer.
  • RSSBandit, for reading and managing RSS feeds. Of course it is pre-populated with edtech and other feeds.
  • w.bloggar, a blogging client
  • WinSCP, a SFTP/secure copy client for Windows
  • Crimson Editor, a nice freeware text editor featuring multiple document interface, syntax highlighting, and great find and replace features
  • Google Desktop, for finding files on the computer
  • PuTTY, a free telnet/ssh client
  • PDFCreator, for creating PDF’s from any application
  • IrfanView, the greatest freeware app for working with graphics–converting from one format to another, batch processing, creating slideshows and web galleries etc.
  • Gaim, a multi-protocol instant messaging client; it does Yahoo!, MSN, AIM, ICQ, Jabber, GroupWise, IRC, Napster, and Gadu-Gadu. Yes, that means you can have all of your IM account through a single interface.
  • OpenOffice.org, a free software MS Office alternative
  • NetSupport School, for group training without a data projector. This progam does a lot.
  • 7-zip, a file archiver that handles a lot of formats, such as .zip, .tar.gz, bzip2, rar etc.
  • SpyBot Search and Destroy, for protection against spyware. I set it up with the Tea Timer.

There are other packages I can’t put on the base image because I don’t have enough licenses to go around. These include Macromedia stuff (Flash, Authorware, Dreamweaver), and Photoshop. Most users will be able to get by with the apps I’ve installed, but I can install these others pending license availability.

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