An Economist's guide to build a zero-cost computing system

Tired of keeping up with endless upgrades of all sorts of software that squeeze your wallet, regardless of you're a Windows user, or a Mac fan?

Me too. Economists should be cost conscious, especially during these recession years. Moreover, getting freedom back is a nice by-product.

Well, we cannot make hardware ourselves, but at least we can DIY to furnish all sorts of software for free that is needed in research.

But be forewarned building a free computing system costs a lot of time and energy, not to mention steep learning curves.

Here's how to do it:
  1. Operating system: go for Linux systems, such as gNewSense. Under Linux, software is 100% free.
  2. Office applications: here is OpenOffice. It can open and save into Microsoft office formats.
  3. Statistical (or even numerical) analysis: R has been long championed by professional statisticians; gretl is the open-source counterpart of Stata.
  4. Matlab-compatible numerical analysis environment: scilab or Octave.
  5. Latex document formatting: check CTAN.
  6. C++ IDE: use CodeBlocks.