"Xtools"

Some awsome programers have made some killer tools for Linux, for free.
Until I deleted my Win2000 partition, I had no idea how much cool stuff is out there.
This page is here to supply links the coolest resources I have found

Reference Freecode (the new freshmeat)

Reference Equivalent Linux Software

Live Resuce Boot Disks

Parted Magic - Live CD Linux distribution (CD/USB/PXE) for disk work, including many tools (Partimage, TestDisk, Truecrypt, Clonezilla, G4L, SuperGrubDisk, ddrescue, etc¿), and supports many file systems (btrfs, ext2, ext3, ext4, fat16, fat32, hfs, hfs+, jfs, linux-swap, ntfs, reiserfs, reiser4, and xfs.)

Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK) - Live CD Linux distribution based on Mandriva Linux, aimed specifically at offline operations for Windows and Linux systems such as rescue, repair, password resets and disk cloning.

Vrtualization

Virtues of Virtualization! What does it all mean?
Category	Method	Disadvantages	Examples
Emulation	virtulize OS that support arch of hosting system.	Low Performance, Low Density	VMware, VirtualBox, QEmu, Bochs, Parallels.
Paravirtualization	Virtualize modified OS in hypervisor	Better performance, needs modified guest OS	Xen, UML, HyperKit(OsX), Hyper-V(Win)
OS-level virtualization	Multiple iolated execution environments within single operating system.	Best Performance, and Density, but guest OSs' share same kerne	docker, schroot+dbootstrap, FreeBSD Jail, Solaris Zones/Containers, Linux-VServer, OpenVZ and iVirtuozzo

Desktop Applications

Docker is a set of Platform As A Service (PaaS) products, offers OS-level virtualization, jailed in containers.
Containers have their own /proc, /sys, /dev, libraries, configuration
The system includes repositories, tools for access them, and spinning up container instances

This project exists as a general virtualization project to maintain common packages, to collect documentation and to give the user a general overview what's available on all Gentoo platforms. Includes: KVM, Qemu, Lguest, Xen, VMWare, VirtualBox, vServer, OpenVZ, Linux Containers, Solaris Zones, FreeBSD Jails. GPL.

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer ( ARM, x86, PowerPC, and S390). GPL

KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). GPL

The Xen hypervisor for virtualization of x86, x86_64, IA64, ARM, and other CPU architectures. Sites using this include Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Hosting and Linode. GPL.

Linux-VServer provides virtualization for GNU/Linux systems, run on the same kernel, sufficiently isolated to guarantee the required security, with shared resources. GPL.

OpenVZ is container-based virtualization for Linux. OpenVZ creates multiple secure, isolated Linux containers (otherwise known as VEs or VPSs) on a single physical server enabling better server utilization and ensuring that applications do not conflict.

LXC is the userspace control package for Linux Containers, a lightweight virtual system mechanism sometimes described as chroot on steroids.

x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product, Open Source Software, Oracle owns it now.

bochs - free vmware replacement.

coLinux - Cooperative Linux runs on Linux OS in parallel on a Windows machine.

Web Browsers

Firefox: The Mozilla team hatched "Mozilla, Jr." The name changed from Phoenix -> Firebird -> Firefox due to trademark issues, and Debian had to rename it iceweasel due to more trademark issues, and it looks like it has been renamed again to icecat due to artwork and plugin licences.
Inspite of all the unnesesary legal distractions, the browser has not been killed or killed anyone.
SessionSaver now built-in with:
Edit->Preferences->Main->When Firefox starts:->Show my windows and tabs from last time

Mozbraille extention for Firefox. This is greate for people who are blind or slow readers. Wish there was an open-source recordings for the blind project"

Opera: IE is slick but it crashes like a drunk driver, is as dangerous as a bad girl friend, and is guilty of OS descrimination. Netscape is very cool, but try checking your web page development when your off line, and it hangs. Opera is small, simple, and has just enough window dressing, though the icons could be smaller out of the box.

Chrome: Nice cross platform, well supported browser by a big search engine and web applicaiton company.

Email Clients (Mail Transfer Agents)

Squirrelmail: Web mail goes nuts. This is a pretty goood web interface I have run for many years. They seperate layers of client from presentation, but it is hard to find an ajax skin.

Roundcube: Web mail with ajax. Has things like drag-n-drop, and right click context. More modern interface. They mix the client and presentation layers.

Evolution: Wonderful Email user agent. Connects with Exchange for free, as well as IMAP, POP, SIMAP, SPOP, SMTP. Was a product of Ximian, now Novel. Offers virutal folders for special filtering, and a nice GUI.
When you need help with crashes, do 3 things:
1. Get traces with debugging symbols,
2. get E2K_DEBUG traces,
3. Report bugs

Thunderbird: Email user agent. Lite, nice, IMAP, POP, SIMAP, SPOP, SMTP

ClawsMail: Email user agent. Lite, nice, IMAP, POP, SIMAP, SPOP, SMTP, RSS (evolved from Sylpheed).

Sylpheed: Email user agent. Lite, nice, IMAP, POP, SIMAP, SPOP, SMTP

ALPINE: Email user agent (Based on Pine) released Dec. 2007. Lite, nice, IMAP, POP, SIMAP, SPOP, SMTP

PINE: Email user agent. Lite, nice, IMAP, POP, SIMAP, SPOP, SMTP

Instant Messengers

Pidgin: The new Gaim in town. It is AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, Novell GroupWise Messenger.

Kopete in KDE : It is AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus SameTime, and more. I found a gaim rpm for SuSE.

LICQ: This is much better than icq,
It has a "utilities," alternate skins, icons, and sounds
and it fully supports xwindidows display export (over ssh).
If you are running SuSE, get licq here.

CD/DVD Burning Tools

Handbreak: Best dvd-backup interface I've seen for Linux.

k9copy: Good dvd-backup interface for Linux.

k3b: Good cd-burner interface I've seen for Linux.

RSS Tools

Akregator: Cool rss reader for kde. This is my main rss reader"

Raggle raggle: Cool console based rss reader, written in Ruby. And some good news links: Latest Linux Kernel Version KernelTrap LWN.net freshmeat.net Slashdot News Laughing Squid

rssowl: Cool rss reader, for linux, mac, and windows. Uses Mozilla libs for embeded browser."

Text Editor Tools

Komodo Edit: Free, but not open source. Peforms code checking, offers function argument help, can jump to definitions. I have found it useful for c, python, perl, bash. Does support utf8.

Nedit: If you are shopping for a good, small, syntax hilighinging text editor, this is for you. Who needs the bulk or cost of slickedit. Unfortunately, since it is motif based, it does not support utf8.

vim: Hay, it's vim. Does a lot if you can learn.

Office Tools: Word processing, printing, spreadsheet, presentations, etc.

Enscrypt Enscript: for pretty command line printing. converts text files to PostScript or to other output languages

LibreOffice: GPL licensed replacement for Microsoft Office. I have switched to this from OpenOffice.

The FTC (asleep at the wheel again) approved Oracle's purchase of Sun, inheritig all their assets, including open source projects. But Oracle has always chosen the advisarial position to open source, so they made changes and people left to start independent forks (OpenOffice becomes LibreOffice, MySQL becomes MariaDB, Hudson becomes Jenkins, etc, OpenSolaris just died, VirtualBox hasn't forked). Do we learn nothing from a corporation's track record? After the success of LibreOffice, Oracle gave up on OpenOffice, but didn't give it to LibreOffice.org. Insted they gave it to Apache.org. The surface reason was Licensing: Libreoffice uses GPL vs. OpenOffice now uses Apache License.

Deleterious effects of fragmenting a project:
1) splitting developer's efforts slows progress.
2) splitting users community makes support more dificult to find and organize.
3) splitting branding makes public awarness harder, without a unified message.
Oracle does not gain from this, but they make a muddy brown cloud in the community pool anyway.
Oracle's action may not be a "Scorched Earth" strategy, but it is not the most community conscious.

OpenOffice: Apache licensed replacement for Microsoft Office, A $400.00 value for free without the bugs from Microsoft! Even exports pdf's, script macros in Ruby, can access real databases. One person's opinion

Need macros for making cool OpenOffice Impress presentations?

Need templates for making cool OpenOffice Impress presentations?

JOOConverter JOOConverter: Command line conversion of documents using openoffice (can convert all .doc to .pdf, or .txt)?

Audio Tools:

FFmpeg: a complete, command line, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video.

JACK Audio Connection Kit (JACK)
System for real-time, low latency audio (and MIDI), patching of audio sources (software or hardware) to desitnations (software or hardware).

JAMin is the JACK Audio Connection Kit (JACK) Audio Mastering interface
30 band graphic EQ, 1023 band hand drawn EQ with parametric controls, Spectrum analyser, 3 band peak compressor, Lookahead brickwall limiter, Multiband stereo processing, Presets and scenes, Loudness maximiser

Rakarrack: Rakarrack is a richly featured multi-effects processor emulating a guitar effects pedalboard.
Includes many standard effects. Most of engine built from modules in synthesizer ZynAddSubFX. Processes signals in stereo. Does not apply internal band-limiting filtering. Rakarrack is designed for Linux distributions with Jack Audio Connection Kit.

Opendjmix: OpenSource mixing solution
OpenDjMix is a virtual DJ Software which split in two parts: a C++ modular API which manage a virtual mixing bus and a Qt front-end which provide four audio tracks mixing.

BRP_PACU: smaart replacement
A dual channel FFT based Acoustic Analysis Tool to help engineers configure professional sound systems in live. One feature is the ability to take several transfer function sample plots, average them, and flip the average to aid in final equalization.

BaudLine: A time-frequency browser designed for scientific visualization of the spectral domain. Signal analysis is performed by Fourier, correlation, and raster transforms that create colorful spectrograms with vibrant detail. Useful for hunting down and studying elusive signal characteristics.

Audacity: sound editor
Record sounds, play sounds, import and export WAV, AIFF, and MP3 files, and more.

vlc: cross-platform media player, streamer, transcoding, client and server.

MPD: Music Player Daemon - allows remote access for playing music (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, Mod, and wave files) and managing playlists.

Pulseaudio: sound server for POSIX and Win32 systems. Tested on tested on Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

AquaLung: Advanced music player, started on GNU/Linux, now also FreeBSD,OpenBSD,OsX, and Windows. Plays CD's,files,streams. Pluggible format support (uncompressd WAV, AIFF, AU, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, MPEG VBR & UBR, MOD, S3M, XM, IT, etc, WavPack, AC3, AAC, WMA. LADSPA plugin support (http://tap-plugins.sourceforge.net/) (on gentoo install media-plugins/tap-plugins) adds single and tripple band parametric eq, as well filters for allpass/highpass/lowpass and others.

Qsynth: offers some parametric adjustment to audio.

Amuc: Ampsterdam Music Composer: Linux application for composing and playing music

LMMS: Linux MultiMedia Studio.

Audacious: I replaced xmms with this program, as Gentoo offers it in a package. Based on GTK2, and seems just as feature ritch as xmms was.

XMMS: Everyone has the mp3's, so this is winamp-like, since winamp didn't make a unix version..
Skin: Rebelamp: X-Wing 1.1
Skin: Trooper 5.0
Skin: Star Wars attack of the clones retro style 5.0

di.fm
shoutcast
kzsu.stanford.edu Gota Have Music

Video and Graphic Tools:

GIMP: GNU Image Manipulation Program. Think of it as Free Photoshop with more & less.

Inkscape: An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Blender: free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems.

RawTherapee: RAW converter and digital photo processing.

ImageMagic: Great suite of command line tools for image manipulation.

Gallery: A really nice web image gallery.

RealPalayer: I like hering music and vidio on the net, so this is the best RealPlayer I've see for linux

mplayer: great media player. I use this as my default media player.

Avidemux: Nice gui interface for mencoder, for converting Matroska (mkv) files to avi.

A browser plugin that uses mplayer to play digital media from websites.
click for mplayer tweeks

Mistif Model 3D: OpenGL-based 3D model editor, GPL

ac3d: Make 3d desings, and animation...

moonlight3d: This 3d program also rocks. Take the time to do the tutorials.

Cinelerra: most advanced non-linear video editor and compositor for Linux.

Cinepaint: 8 deep paint image retouching tool that supports higher color fidelity than ordinary painting tools (8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit color channels)

jahshaka: A free, Open Source realtime 2D animation interface, open source.

LiVES: A free, Open Source video editor *and* a VJ tool.

AviDemux: A free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks.

OpenMovieEditor: A free and open source video editing program, designed for basic movie making capabilities.

kdenlive: A free and open source non-liniear video editing program. supporting DV, HDV and AVCHD(not complete yet) editing.

Flowblade: multitrack non-linear video editor for Linux.

Lightworks: multi-platform non-liniear video editing program, supporting up to 4k, SD, HD formats.

Shotcut: free, open-source, cross-platfrom video editor.

Openshot: features: 3D animation, curve-based camera motion, compositing, transitions, audio mixing, and vector titles.

Pitivi: Linux based free, open-source, multi-platform non-liniear video editing program.

lvempeg lvempeg: Linux Video Editor. frame and GOP accurate editing of MPEG1/2 video files.

Linux based video camera security solution.

Lots Of Other Tools

J-Pilot: Best palm pilot interface I've seen for Linux. Backup can backup everything on the palm pilot, edit/read the NotePad, which I don't see on other interfaces. Palm faled to release a cool Linux interface (typical corporation).

Kgpg (for KDE) and Seahorse (for Gnome) are GPG front ends.

Using gpg to implement pgp security can be easier for non-technical peope with these programs

eclipse: IBM's IDE gift to the world. I use it with subverison plugin Subclipse and Subversive

kdiff3: Great graphic diff tool for kde.

xxdiff-subversion - I had a hell of a time getting xxdiff to work properly with subversion, and I need a graphic diff tool.

KDevelop: Kde development application for php and other gui langages

Quanta: Qt development application for php and other gui langages

Kate: Another development application for php and other gui langages

XWC X WINCOMMANDER: Very Explorer looking file manager

LinNeighborhood: Until the corts have some effect on the industry, you'll need to interact with windows systems This is the best, slick tool for mounting, and viewing network shares.

wxftp: Alexander Yukhimets did a bang-up job on this utility. It looks good, and works good, but it still doesn't use ssh... but it's functional."

X2X X2X: an older program to share mouse & keyboard between monitors hooked to different computers. Framebuffering. Very handy!!!
On receiving system: xhost+
On keybard system &/devnull; x2x -to receiving_ip:0 -west -resurface >& /dev/null

Synergy: A newer program to share one mouse & keyboard of one computer, with multiple other computers, supporting different opperating systems (unix,linux,osx,windows).
Opens a port on the client and one on the server.
Does not rely on xhost+, merges clipboard between all systems, synchronizes screen savers.
Some of my config files for windows/linux setup

okvm okvm is open source console management and KVM management software, as well as open source KVM hardware.

kdirstat: Graphicly look at where all your hard drive is going.
Does it's job, and takes it's time doing it.

kde-misc/filelight: Graphicly look at where all your hard drive is going. not there yet, but it will be
./configure --prefix=`kde-config --prefix` --enable-final --disable-debug && make && su -c "make install"

JDU: Disk Usage visualizor (written in java), distrubuted as a javaws app.

Tora: tk database editor. Supports Oracle and MySQL
Has a browser, query editor, graphs, and stuff I haven't learned.

Wireshark: Wireshark was ethereal, is expensive and building your own filters isn't tangable form most people. If youneed to be able to focus on a mac address or a IP, this will do it.

Nmap/Nmapfe: How do you know what ports are open on a machien? Or machine on your network is creating loads of trafic, but you don't know why. This will let you see what ports/services are active on the machien.

View traffic running around your network in a gui.

Fbuilder Fbuilder: Gui to design your iptables script. If you learn by example, this could be a great training tool for iptables.

SQLLedger: Ditch quickbooks. Screw PeachTree. SQLLedger is a free replacement. double entry accounting system, web interface, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or DB2 database, written in perl

Webmin: To help Windows admins configure your linux box, this will help.

WindowMaker DocApps My favorite WindowMaker doc apps.

shmux shmux: Run a command on more than one computer via rsh, ssh, sh

screen GNU screen: Multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, and even allows detached terminals

kibitz kibitz: Allows two (or more) people to interact with one shell. Part of Expect.

The Dotfile Generator A TK tool to construct dot files, enabling basic and exotic features, for Tcsh, Bash, Procmail, Elm, Emacs, Fvwm1, Fvwm2, Ipfwadm, and Rtin

Open source project/contact management system.

Commercial open source customer relationship management system.

Cfengine Cfengine: A autonomous agent and a middle to high level policy language for building expert systems which administrate and configure large computer networks.

Captive Captive: The first full read/write free access to NTFS disk drives from Linux. Microsoft is hardly trying at interoperability, but others are despit them.

Anti-Virus for scanning Linux file servers. Linux is not effected, but it will happyly share them.

AVG Anti-Virus: for scanning for Linux/Windows hosts, Free Edition (but not GPL) non-commercial, single home computer use only.

Qmail: Many large free email systems use this (Hotmail for one). I plugged many other programs into this system to make it cool. Get on the mailing list to learn something about email servers."

Cool stuff for qmail: vpopmail, qmailadmin, vqadmin, dnsadmin. Good stuff, good people.

qmailrocks.org: Current qmail system system. Has a large following. This has helped me setup many servers.

qinstall: Older Qmail setup system. I learned the hard way, and then I found this. Looks like the main project died. I saved the script: http://stilen.com/tools/qinstall_patched.tar.gz You should too, and it will make you a god.

PPTP Client is a Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD client for the proprietary Microsoft Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol, PPTP in a Microsoft VPN.

Openswan is a full-featured IPsec VPN solution. Linux.

OpenVPN is a full-featured SSL VPN solution. Linux, Windows 2000/XP and higher, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris. A windows gui client exists at: http://www.nilings.se/openvpn/

Make Gnome GTK theme engine uses your KDE QT styles. And you grab it from gnome-look.org. I like: gtk-qt-kcm + gtk-qt-engine.

KDE is the gui for people who like gui's. This site will show you what's hot.
I like: "Apperance&Themes->Style->Baghira, and Aperance&Themes->WindowDecorations->Baghira preview

Kde-apps including Komposéfor KDE, F9 to get fullscreen view of all windows on all virutal desktops.

freedesktop.org: Linkds to desktop environments and application development frameworks.

dd_rescue dd_rescue: Like dd, but does not halt on disk errors, so one can recover from a hard drive with major bad blocks.

bwm-ng Bandwidth Monitor NG (Next Generation): To monitor network traffic.

coreboot: Formerly LinuxBIOS... is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) you can find in most of today's computers.

perfkit: bundles many software profiling and debug tools into one package

Okular: better pdf viewer (for kde)

OnBoard: soft keyboard

cellwriter: handwriting character recognition program.

ink2text: This system provides printed and cursive handwriting recognition service as a shared library on GNU/Linux/Unix systems.