GNUWin II

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GNUWin II is a large collection of free software for Microsoft Windows created by the Linux User Group of the EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne). It is intended at easing the transition from proprietary applications and operation systems to free ones, by accustomating the user to widely used and cross-platform software. As of January 2005, project members are defining GNUWin III.

GNUWin II logo

The GNUWin project started in spring 2001 in the EPFL to respond to the need of a mean of distributing LaTeX packages for MS Windows. The logical expension was to include LaTeX documentation, customised hints in form of HTML pages, and other software packages such as gnuplot and Star Office (which was not exactly Free Software, a special license from Sun Microsystems was obtained for the occasion). GNUWin was only available in French, and was mainly distributed within the EPFL.

Due to the success of GNUWin, it was decided to build a second edition the year after. The main feature was that the CD was multilingual: the three main official languages of Switzerland (German, French and Italian) were included, as well as English; software was updated (notably, StarOffice was replaced by the Free OpenOffice.org); and a server script was written to ease addition. The EPFL itself sponsored the printing of 1000 CDs.

GNUWin II immediately met broad success outside the EPFL, due to its translation into German. Free software is more commonly accepted in Germany and German Switzerland, which led to GNUWin being advertised and mirrored on the Internet. It also made it into important Swiss German newspapers.

Quite quickly, a Spanish translation was set up by contributors outside of the original team. From there, contributors from around the world began to have greater importance. The second translation, quite interestingly, was Catalan (probably due to political and cultural tensions between Spanish Catalonians and the majority Castilians who speak "Spanish"). Numerous languages followed, notably Portuguese, Hindi and Swedish. Translations in Polish, Romanian, Greek and Turkish (another example of competing cultures where the presence of one drives the other), and Esperanto are all currently under development. Interlingua is one of the most recent additions. GNUWin is striving to set up Asian translations, particularly in Chinese and Japanese.

Other contributions include private companies offering CDs in various places (example [1]).

The GNUWin site offers download of executables or installers, as well as complete ISO images containing local copies of the internet site, though recently the internet site has grown bigger than a CD-ROM, thus the distribution now includes several CDs. DVD ISO images are under study.

GNUWin II is originally hosted at the EPFL. It is mirrored by the Sunsite Switch mirror, and others (more information). Typical number of downloads is about 2000 a month for the Switch mirror alone.