Use of non-commercial software for UNIX in undergraduate engineering education

The paper discusses the use of non-commercial software for UNIX in the undergraduate engineering laboratory and classroom. Two main categories of software are addressed: engineering applications across a variety of disciplines, and graphical user interface components. Engineering applications are surveyed, and it is argued the best of these have several important advantages over similar commercial packages in the context of engineering education. Graphical user interface components which allow the presentation of these applications to students in a "user-friendly" way are surveyed, and several example GUIs are described.