Israel Hanukoglu, Ph. D.
Department of Molecular Biology
Ariel University Center of Samaria
Ariel 44837, Israel

Operating systems

Microsoft Windows XP on our desktop PCs and Vista on the laptop PC. I cannot recommend Vista as an OS as it had a lot of problems from the start, and even after the service Pack 1 it still has many problems. With each new version the Windows OS has become increasingly "bloatware", taking up too much space with little added functionality. I set to myself the goal of slowly switching to Ubuntu Linux as an alternative OS. As a pathway for this transition I set the following goals:

• Switch gradually to Open source software that can run on Linux as well as Windows
• Generate files that can be read on both Windows and systems
• Run Linux in parallel with Windows
• Eventually complete transfer to Linux as the main OS

Office software

We are slowly switching from Microsoft Office to Open Office. Currently we are using the English version. There is also a Hebrew edition of Open Office.

Bibliographical software

We use Biblioscape for generating reference lists for publications.

Graphics

We use Irfanview for image viewing; Gimp for bitmap image editing; Inkscape and Microsoft Office for drawing vector graphics; and Excel for scientific graphs.

Internet Browser

Our favorite is Opera browser that is rich in customization options.

Molecular biology software

• Bioedit and embedded software for sequence comparison and alignment.
• GeneDoc for multi-sequence comparisons. Download GeneDoc: uptodate version (another site shown in Google has only old versions).
• Molecular Biology Databases
• Sequence tools

Windows utilities

Anti-virus: AVG Anti-Virus Free.

File Manager: UltraExplorer

E-mail client: I switched from Outlook Express to Thunderbird.