Best Linux Software

 linux

Office

AbiWord – a word processing program similar to (and compatible with) Microsoft Word. AbiWord is unique among word processors in its drive to become a fully cross-platform word processor. The source code is carefully written so that AbiWord will run on virtually any operating system with a minimum of time spent on porting. This combined with our support for internationalization (the ability to run AbiWord in many languages) gives AbiWord a massive potential user-base.

gedit is the official text editor of the GNOME desktop environment.

GNU Emacs is a text editor. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp (“elisp”, for short), a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. Some of the features of GNU Emacs include: content sensitive major modes for a wide variety of file types, from plain text to source code to HTML files, complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users, support for many languages and their scripts, including all the European “Latin” scripts, Russian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Ethiopian, and some Indian scripts.

OpenOffice is a multi platform and multi lingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.

KOffice is a free, integrated office suite for KDE, the K Desktop Environment. The KOffice suite includes a frame-based word processor, a spreadsheet application, a full-featured presentation program, an integrated environment for creating databases and database applications, a vector drawing application, a layered pixel image manipulation application, an integrated graph and chart drawing tool, formula editor, a tool for generating business quality reports, and more.

SiagOffice is a tightly integrated, free office package. It consists of the spreadsheet Siag, the word processor PW, the animation program Egon, the text editor XedPlus, the file manager Xfiler and the previewer Gvu.

Email Software

Email Clients

Balsa is an e-mal client for GNOME, highly configurable and incorporating all the features you would expect in a robust mail client. It has support for local mailbox formats: mbox, maildir, mh, allows nested mailboxes, supports for POP3 and IMAP mail access protocols, has spell checking.

Evolution – is an application that provides integrated mail, address book and calendaring functionality to users of the GNOME desktop.

Ishmail is a powerful yet easy to use tool for reading, composing, organizing, and filing electronic mail. It handles multimedia mail, supports the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME), a standard for mailing files containing various kinds of multimedia data across the Internet. Ishmail has a graphical user interface, built using the X Window System and OSF/Motif. It is compatible with the CDE Desktop.

Mahogany is a cross-platform mail and news client. It is available for X11/Unix and MS Win32 platforms, supporting a wide range of protocols and standards, including SMTP, POP3, IMAP, NNTP (including SSL support for all of them) and full MIME support.

MUTT is a small yet powerful text-based mail client. It includes support for color terminals, MIME, and a threaded sorting mode. color support. It possess various features to support mailing lists, including list-reply.

Email Servers

Exim is a message transfer agent (MTA). There is a great deal of flexibility in the way mail can be routed, and there are extensive facilities for checking incoming mail. Exim can be installed in place of sendmail, although the configuration of exim is quite different to that of sendmail.

Mailman is free software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists. Mailman is integrated with the web, making it easy for users to manage their accounts and for list owners to administer their lists. Mailman supports built-in archiving, automatic bounce processing, content filtering, digest delivery, spam filters, and more.

qmail is an Internet Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). It’s a replacement for the Sendmail system provided with UNIX operating systems. qmail uses the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to exchange messages with MTA’s on other systems. qmail was designed for high security.

FTP Servers and Clients

FTP Clients

C-Kermit is a combined network and serial communication software package offering a consistent, transport-independent, cross-platform approach to connection establishment, terminal sessions, file transfer, file management, character-set translation, numeric and alphanumeric paging, and automation of file transfer, dialogs, and communication tasks through its built-in scripting language.

Curl is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax, supporting FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, FILE and LDAP. Curl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos…), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and a busload of other useful tricks.

gFTP is a free multithreaded file transfer client for *NIX based machines. It is written in C and has a text interface and a GTK+ 1.2/2.x interface . gFTP supports the FTP, FTPS (control connection only), HTTP, HTTPS, SSH and FSP protocols. It has support for FTP and HTTP proxy server.

IglooFTP PRO is a graphical and user friendly FTP client. Its main goals are to be easy to use and intuitive when used by novice, but powerful and fully configurable in the hand of experienced users. It includes all the feature you may expect.

NcFTP Client is a set of free application programs implementing the File Transfer Protocol.

XFTP Athena X interface to ftp. xftp is a X ftp interface. It allows retrieval or transmission of selected files and directory trees. From Debian 3.0r0 APT

FTP Client for Linux: Yafc is yet another ftp client. It is developed under Linux, but there should be no or little problem compiling it on any Unix which is almost POSIX compliant and have an ANSI C compiler. Yafc is hosted at SourceForge.

FTP server

FTP Client for Linux: AxY FTP is an X Window System FTP client designed to be used mainly on Linux workstations. It is written using Motif widget set and XmAxyList Widget. GTK+ GUI implementation is also available.

FTP Server for Linux: Pure-FTPd is a free (BSD), secure, production-quality and standard-conformant FTP server. It focuses on efficiency and ease of use. It provides simple answers to common needs, plus unique useful features for personal users as well as hosting providers.

Ftpcopy is a simple FTP client written to copy files or directories (recursively) from a FTP server. It was written to mirror FTP sites which support the EPLF directory listing format, but it also supports the traditional listing format (/bin/ls). It may also be used to simply copy files.

Amaya is a Web editor, a tool used to create and update documents directly on the Web. Browsing features are integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. This follows the original vision of the Web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium.

Epiphany is the web browser for the GNOME desktop. It is simple and easy to use. It ties together many GNOME components in order to let you focus on the Web content, instead of the browser application. As part of the GNOME project, Epiphany is Free Software. Epiphany displays webpages with the same speed and accuracy as Mozilla Firefox. In addition, it provides an elegant, responsive and uncomplicated user interface that fits in perfectly with GNOME, and it has been translated to over thirty languages.

Galeon is a GNOME Web browser based on Gecko. It is fast, it has a light interface, and it is fully standards-compliant.

Konqueror is an Open Source web browser with HTML 4.01 compliance, supporting Java applets, JavaScript, CSS 1, CSS 2.1, as well as Netscape plugins (for example, Flash or RealVideo plugins).

Lynx Lynx is a text based web browser. Platform: Linux / Unix.

Mozilla is an open-source web browser. Platform: Linux / Unix, MacOS X, Windows.

Netscape Navigator is a browser-only release. It does not contain an e-mail client, newsgroup reader, or HTML composer.

WebCon is a simple Web tool that allows you to perform any HTTP operation automatically like posting data, saving data, deleting documents, etc.

Opera is considered the fastest browser. Here ‘s the site that provides articles and illustrated guides for using Opera on Linux. Community

Web Servers

AOLserver is America online’s Open Source web server. AOL server is a multithreaded, Tcl-enabled web server used for large scale, dynamic web sites.

Apache HTTP Server Project is a collaborative software development effort aimed at creating a robust, commercial-grade, and freely-available source code implementation of an HTTP server. Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April 1996.

Boa Webserver is a high performance web server for Unix-alike computers. Boa is a single-tasking HTTP server. That means that unlike traditional web servers, it does not fork for each incoming connection, nor does it fork many copies of itself to handle multiple connections. It internally multiplexes all of the ongoing HTTP connections, and forks only for CGI programs (which must be separate processes.) Preliminary tests show boa is about twice as fast as Apache, and is capable of handling 50 hits per second on a 66 MHz ‘486.

CERN httpd (also known as W3C httpd) is a generic public domain full-featured hypertext server which can be used as a regular HTTP server. The server is typically running on port 80 to serve hypertext and other documents but it can also serve as a proxy — a server on a firewall machine — that provides access for people inside a firewall to the outside world. When running as proxy httpd may be configured to do caching of documents resulting in faster response times.

CL-HTTP is a full-featured server for the Internet Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP 1.1, HTML 2.0, 3.2 & 4.0.1) that comes complete with source code. The server has been proven in major production systems, applied in a number of Artificial Intelligence systems, and used in top research laboratories around the world.

IBM HTTP Servers is based on the Apache HTTP Server. IBM has enhanced the Apache-powered HTTP Server. For example, IBM has added SSL for secure transactions and offers full support, when part of the WebSphere bundle.

Jigsaw is W3C’s leading-edge Web server platform, providing a sample HTTP 1.1 implementation and a variety of other features on top of an advanced architecture implemented in Java. Jigsaw is an W3C Open Source Project.

PoPToP is the PPTP server solution for Linux. Ports also exist for Solaris 2.6, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and others. With Poptop, Linux servers can now function seamlessly in a PPTP VPN environment. This enables administrators to leverage the considerable benefits of both Microsoft and Linux operating systems.

Roxen WebServer is a full-featured open-source web server distributed under the GPL license. It runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X. It has a web-based interface for easy configuration and administration. Roxen graphics support can be used for dynamic generation of e.g. headers, images and charts. It has integrated MySQL database.

thttpd (tiny/turbo/throttling HTTP server) is a simple, small, portable, fast, and secure HTTP server. It handles only the minimum necessary to implement HTTP/1.1. It compiles cleanly on most any Unix-like OS, specifically including FreeBSD, SunOS 4, Solaris 2, BSD/OS, Linux, OSF.

Xitami is a small, fast, and powerful multiplatform Open Source Web server. Xitami provides server-side processing for XML and GSL files using the iMatix GSL scripting language, built-in to the web server engine. GSL lets you load and manipulate XML data, turn it into HTML or other text, and is compatible with all browsers.

Graphics and Image

Dia – is a gtk+ based diagram creation program. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.

DuhDraw is an Open Source clone of The DRAW, a DOS based ASCII art editor.

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats. Many webpage authors use Inkscape for webpage mockups or to generate parts of web pages, such as banners, logos, icons, and more.

Giftrans converts any GIF file into a GIF89a. The following changes are possible: you can specify the transparent and the background color, change a color in the global color table, add new comment and remove old one, and more.

GNU Ghostscript & Ghostview is the name of a set of software that provides: an interpreter for the PostScript language and the PDF file format, a set of C procedures (the Ghostscript library) that implement the graphics capabilities that appear as primitive operations in the PostScript language, and a wide variety of output drivers for various file formats and printers.

GIMP is a freely distributed piece of software that performs such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

GMT – Generic Mapping Tools is an open source collection of about 60 tools for manipulating geographic and Cartesian data sets (including filtering, trend fitting, gridding, projecting, etc.) and producing Encapsulated PostScript File (EPS) illustrations ranging from simple x-y plots via contour maps to artificially illuminated surfaces and 3-D perspective views.

CinePaint is a collection of free open source software tools for deep paint manipulation and image processing. CinePaint is used for motion picture frame-by-frame retouching, dirt removal, wire rig removal, render repair, background plates, and 3d model textures.

ImageMagick is a free software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a large variety of formats. Images can be cropped, colors can be changed, various effects can be applied, images can be rotated and combined, and text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves can be added to images and stretched and rotate.

Karbon is a vector-based drawing application for KOffice. It allows artists to create complex drawings without losing image quality when zooming in on, or resizing the drawing. You can use Karbon to add finishing touches to diagrams created using Kivio or charts created using KChart .

Krita is a painting and image editing application for KOffice. Krita is part of KOffice since version 1.4. Krita contains both ease-of-use and fun features like guided painting and high-end features like support for 16 bit images, CMYK, L*a*b and even OpenEXR HDR images.

Skencil is a Free Software interactive vector drawing application. It is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes. A unique feature of Skencil is that it is implemented almost completely in a very high-level, interpreted language, Python.

Xfig is an interactive drawing tool. In Xfig, figures may be drawn using objects such as circles, boxes, lines, spline curves, text, etc. It is also possible to import images in formats such as GIF, JPEG, EPSF (PostScript), etc. Those objects can be created, deleted, moved or modified. Attributes such as colors or line styles can be selected in various ways. For text, 35 fonts are available.

XPaint is a color image editing tool, suitable for producing simple graphics. It does offer some advanced features such as image processing functions and gradient fill. It allows for the editing of multiple images simultaneously and supports various formats, including PPM, XBM, TIFF, etc.

Image viewers

Gwenview is a fast and easy to use image viewer for KDE. It can load and save all image formats supported by KDE, browse GIMP files (*.xcf) due to the included QXCFI component developed by Lignum Computing. It correctly displays images with alpha channel, using the traditional checker board as a background to reveal transparency. Gwenview let you accurately control the way images are scaled: you can zoom in and out or automatically scale the image to fit the window. You can also lock the zoom factor to keep the same zoom between images. Gwenview can also show SVG images and play videos.

GQview is an image viewer. It’s key features include single click file viewing, external editor support, thumbnail preview, and zoom features. Some image management features are also included.

The Eye of GNOME is an image viewer for the GNOME Desktop environment. With it, you can view single image files, as well as large image collections. It supports a variety of image file formats.

3D

K-3D is a 3D modeling, animation and rendering system. It features a robust plugin architecture and visualization pipeline, designed to scale to the needs of professional artists. K-3D allows you to create and edit documents in multiple realtime OpenGL solid, shaded, texture-mapped views. You can even model, animate, and interact with animations while they play back.

Wings 3D is a subdivision modeler inspired by Nendo and Mirai from Izware. It allows to assign materials, vertex color, UV coordinates and textures. There is no support in Wings for doing animations.

Art of Illusion is a free, open source 3D modeling and rendering studio. It is written entirely in Java, and should be usable on any Java Virtual Machine. It is both stable and powerful enough to be used for serious, high end animation work. Many of its capabilities rival those found in commercial programs. Some of the highlights include subdivision surface based modeling tools, skeleton based animation, and a graphical language for designing procedural textures and materials.

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

Multimedia

aTunes is a full-featured audio player and manager, developed in Java programming language, so it can be executed on different platforms: Windows, Linux and Unix-like systems. Currently it plays mp3, ogg, wma, wav, flac, mp4 and radio streaming, allowing users to easily edit tags, organize music and rip Audio CDs.

Banshe is a music management and playback for gnome. With Banshee’s simple and powerful interface you can import, organize and share your music. It allows to rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs. Most portable music devices are supported. It has support for podcasting, smart playlists, music recommendations, and much more.

Songbird is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions and skins feathers. Like Firefox, it is built from Mozilla, cross-platform and open source.

Exaile is a music player aiming to be similar to KDE’s Amarok, but for GTK+ and written in Python. It incorporates many of the cool things from Amarok (and other media players) like automatic fetching of album art, handling of large libraries, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm submission support, and optional iPod support via a plugin.

Listen is an audio player written in Python. It allows to easily organize your music collections. It supports many features such as Podcasts management, browse Shoutcast directory. It intuitively creates playlists for you by retrieving informations from lastfm and what you most frequently listen to.

Rhythmbox is an integrated music management application, originally inspired by Apple’s iTunes. It is free software, designed to work well under the GNOME Desktop, and based on the powerful GStreamer media framework.

KPlayer is a KDE multimedia player. With KPlayer you can easily play a wide variety of video and audio files and streams using a rich and friendly interface that follows KDE standards.

xine is a free multimedia player. It plays back CDs, DVDs, and VCDs. It also decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and MP3 from local disk drives, and displays multimedia streamed over the Internet. It interprets many of the most common multimedia formats available – and some of the most uncommon formats.

Video Editing Applications

Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs

LiVES is a video editing system. It is designed to be simple to use, yet powerful. It is small in size, yet it has many advanced features. LiVES mixes realtime video performance and non-linear editing in one application. It will let you start editing and making video right away, without having to worry about formats, frame sizes, or framerates.

Kdenlive is a non linear video editor for the KDE environment.

Navigation

Pace & Place is a platform-independent application for managing and visualizing GPS and sports training data. It empowers the user to track training events and combine them with geographic data (e.g. GPS device records). Map, waypoint and track visualizations and associations with taken photos are frequent use cases as well.

CD/DVD Burning

Graveman! is a GPL frontend for : cdrecord, mkisofs, readcd, sox, flac, dvd+rw-format/dvd+rw-tools and cdrdao. With it you can burn audio cd (from wav, ogg, mp3, flac, m3u and pts), burn data cd and dvd, duplicate cd do copy on the fly, clean rewritable cd and dvd, burn multissessions cd.

K3b is a feature-rich and easy to handle CD burning application.

X-CD-Roastis CD-burning software. It allows even the unexperienced user to create or copy a CD with a few mouse clicks in a intuitive and nice looking graphical user interface.

Backup Solutions

afbackup is a client-server backup system that allows many workstations to backup to a central server. Backups can be started remotely from the server or via cron jobs on the the clients.

AMANDA , the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, is a backup system that allows the administrator to set up a single master backup server to back up multiple hosts over network to tape drives/changers or disks or optical media.

Bacula is a set of computer programs that permit you (or the system administrator) to manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds.

Mondo is a GPL disaster recovery solution. It backs up your GNU/Linux server or workstation to tape, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R[W], DVD+R[W], NFS or hard disk partition. In the event of catastrophic data loss, you will be able to restore all of your data (or as much as you want).

NDMP (Network Data Management Protocol) allows backup and network file server vendors to focus on functionality instead of porting to new operating systems.

Personal Information Manager

Linux Journal: Journal is a small application that allows one to record anything. Each user has his own directory, and can have more “users”, or journal files. All files are encrypted.

GNOME-PIM is a personal information manager package for the GNOME Office. Currently it consists of calendar and address book applications.

KDE-PIM provides an application suite to manage personal information. This includes mail, time, people and more. The main result is KDE Kontact, our personal information manager.

Korganizer is the calendar and scheduling application of the K Desktop Environment (KDE). It provides management of events and tasks, alarm notification, web export, network transparent handling of data, group scheduling and more. Platform: Linux, Solaris, IRIX, FreeBSD.

XnotesPlus Whether you’re syncing your address book with your Palm Pilot or just trying to keep notes on your current project, XNotesPlus offers you the flexibility to organize your work at home and on the move.

Plan is a schedule planner which displays a month calendar to show appointments and gives warnings and alarms. Appointments, notes, todo items, vacations and more are displayed in monthly, weekly, daily or yearly graphical views.

Business Applications

OpenGoo is an Open Source Web Office. It is a LAMP server application that provides tools for task management and sharing of all kinds of information such as documents, contacts, e-mail and calendars.

Gstalker is a stock and commodities chart viewer, similar in appearance and function to those commercially available such as metastok and superchartz.

TUTOS is a tool to manage the organizational needs of small groups, teams, departments, etc. It provides a a calendar for users and groups; address manager for people, companies and departments; bug tracking system; support of relations to other projects (base product, subproject etc.); mailboxes (imap/pop); time tracking on projects, installations and bugs, and more.

SUSE Linux Enterprise (Ximian Desktop) is the leading provider of desktop and server solutions. Ximian offers a complete Linux desktop environment and productivity application suite as well as enterprise software management solutions.

Xxl is a free graphical spreadsheet. It is designed to be simple, easy to use and user friendly. Xxl provides a really functional spreadsheet for small or middle-size sheets. The model it defines is similar to that of all present-day spreadsheets.

Scientific Applications

NSCL SpecTcl A flexible extensible open source histogramming package for nuclear physics event data.

NSCL Data Acquisition system A flexible extensible open source data acquisition system for experimental nuclear physics applications.

Multi Function Tools

Swiss File Knife is a collection of command line tools, all combined in one executable: find and extract text in files, dir tree size, filter and replace text, instant ftp server, instant http server for easy file transfer, find duplicate files, split and join files, create md5 lists, run a command on all files, detab, hexdump, tcpdump, print colored text, convert CR/LF, list all .zip .jar .tar.gz .bz2 contents in all subfolders.

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