Open Source programs for Windows and *nix/BSD

Open Source (GPL, OSI, and/or Free/Libre) Software
Good Quality Software

General & Office Programs:

LibreOffice (old: Open Office.org) - word processor, spreadsheet, office suite
- Open Office: Forums, Tutorials
- Templates:
  - Cybersite: book, calendar, fax, resume, and more (Creative Commons)
  - OO Extras: variety of templates
  - Template repository
  - Label templates - various sizes for labels and business cards (public license)
- Tips:
  - If you don't use .odb files (database), then this tip may speed things up: go to Tools / Options / Java, then uncheckmark "Use Java Runtime Environment"
- NeoOffice - MacOS X version
- Star Office (commercial software)
Scribus - desktop publishing (GPL)
Collaborative text editors:
- Gobby
Content Management:
- Data Crow: multimedia cataloger and organizer
- Alfresco Community Edition
- Calibre: ebook manager
Nvu - HTML editor, WYSIWYG (GPL)
Freemind - personal information manager (GPL)
Optical Character Recognition (OCR):
- Tesseract: (open source)
- Simple OCR - optical character recognition (royalty free, source for sale)
Tux Typing - typing tutor
PDF:
- Evince (Linux, Windows)
- Sumatra PDF: viewer (Windows, GPLv3)
- Ghost View: viewer
- PDF editing tools
- Discussion of Adobe PDF Reader exploits (2009-03-05)
Project Management:
- Redmine (GPL 2)
- Trac
- Web Collab (GPL)
- ClockingIT (MIT/X)
Reference management software comparison (includes GPL and $)
Genealogy:
- Gramps

Comparable Windows & Linux programs:
- LinuxRSP.ru
- Ubuntu forums
Screenreader: NVDA (GPL v2, Windows only)

Multi-Media (Audio, Graphics, Video):

Audio:
- Audacity - audio editor
- CDex - convert CD tunes to MP3 or Ogg
- FLAC - lossless compression of audio files
- Free Amp - play MP3 and Ogg tunes
- Galan - graphical audio language
- mp3 split - split mp3s into sections
  - see also (not all OSS): PyMP3Cut, Cut MP3, Cutter (Windows), MP3::Splitter (CPAN), Perl Packager, Praat
- Pulse Audio: sound server for POSIX & Windows
- Real Alternative
CD & DVD:
- Burn at Once - CD/DVD burner
- CD Burner XP
- VLC - cross-platform media player and streaming server
Graphics
- Blender - 3D modeling (Development)
- CinePaint: frame by frame movie editing
- Font Forge - create or edit fonts (previously PfaEdit)
- Gimp - photo & graphics editor
  - Gimp-Win - windows installer
  - Grokking the GIMP, Tutorials (alternate?), LinuxHaxor's 50 tutorials more tutorials, Webmaster tutorials
  - Color Management:
    - Free Color Management
    - Little Color Management System
  - Liquid Rescale: fancy resizing
  - GimpShop
    - Makes Gimp look and work something like the Photoshop® environment, using MDI (Multiple Document Interface)
- Image Magick - graphic converter, tool
  - tips
  - Alternate download site
- Inkscape: vector graphics editor
- POV Ray - Persistance Of Vision Raytracing
- Sodipodi - 2D vector-based drawing editor
Text:
- Lyx: WYMIWYG editor for LaTeX documents
  - FAQ
  - TeXnik tips
  - Latex Community forum
  - Book tips (includes script for new TeX fonts)
- GutenMark: text formatter (e.g. Gutenberg texts)
TV & PVR:
- Build Your Own PVR - blog about PVR software and hardware
- myth TV - PVR
  - Tips
- TV Time - video capture
- Virtual Dub - video capture & editing
  - unofficial support forums
Video:
1. VLC - Video multimedia player; plays many formats
2. Media Player Classic - Home Cinema
3. Xine - multimedia player (FAQ)
4. Flare: create your own Flash^TM videos (*nix, BSD license)
5. Miro: play and organize videos, including podcasts (*nix, Windows)
6. Cinelerra - video editor
7. Dscaler - filter and display various video inputs
8. Defiler Pak - many common codecs
9. LCD Test: test LCD monitor for proper configuration
10. Where's James - webcam publisher
11. Codec packs:
  - K-Lite - lots of codecs (encode and decode)
VoIP:
- OpenWengo: SIP compliant client, Firefox extension (GPL)
- Ekiga: VoIP and video, H.323 and SIP (GNOME, GPL)
- I Hear U: (GPL)
- PhoneGaim: based on Gaim and SIP (GPL)
- SipX: SIP based (LGPL)
- Google's Libjingle: (BSD)
- KPhone: for KDE, SIP (GPL)
Find rough equivalents of Windows software:
- Linux Alternatives Project
- Linux App Finder

Internet & Network:

Aggie - RSS news aggregator
Email:
- Blue HTTP mail - access web mail from a desktop client
- Mr Postman - access web mail from your regular email client
- Dada mail - mailing list server (GPL)
- CRM 114 - “regex mutilator,” spam detector & classifier
GAIM - instant messenger chat: AIM, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, Yahoo
Mozilla - web browser, email, chat, and more
- Torpark: Firefox + Tor for somewhat private browsing, works off a USB drive, compatible with PortableApps
Cloud Computing:
- Eucalyptus
cURL - techniques for getting internet data
HTTrack - web site downloader
OpenVPN - virtual private network
Network-Attached Storage (NAS):
- Free NAS (FreeBSD)
Synergy - share a mouse & keyboard between 2 networked computers
Tor - anonymizing toolset for improved safety, security, and privacy
X Chat - IRC
Dillo - web browser that's very quick and small (file-size wise), mostly just for Linux and BSD systems

Games & Hobbies:

Angband - dungeons
Carnivore.Webcam.Sniffing - matrix-like animation
Celestia - astronomy
Chromium BSU - 2D shooter
Crack Attack - like Tetris
Dancing Games:
- Stepmania
- PyDance (was PyDDR)
- Dance pads:
  - Buy 'N Shop: BNS DX X-treme
Ubuntu forums
Egoboo - 3D dungeons, like Zelda (needs work?)
FreeCiv - Civilization
IceBreaker - like Jezzball
Liquid War - mess with armies of goo
Maelstrom - like Asteroids
Really Slick Screensavers - you guessed it, screensavers
Tux Racer - downhill racing
World Wind - NASA 3D global terrain maps
XPlanet - map(s) of earth/universe

Expert/Geek Software:

Database:
- PostgreSQL (BSD style)
  - OpenFTS - Full Text Search (GPL)
  - PGAdmin - GUI frontend (Artistic license)
  - Ubuntu (Breezy) installation HowTo
- MySQL:
  - Gotchas - quirks & warnings
- SQLite
  - for read-only DBs?
- SQL Relay
- Others:
  - ConceptNet - “A Very-Large Semantic Network of Common Sense Knowledge”
- DB Tools:
  - Glom - PostgreSQL front-end
  - knoda - DB front-end for KDE
  - Python Card - GUI construction kit
  - Report Lab - tools to create reports
Desktop Sharing:
- UltraVNC SC: single-click version, configurable
- VNC instructions
Text & Source Code Editors:
- Emacs:
  - Emacs lisp intro
- SciTE - nifty little editor, syntax highlighting, filetabs (BSD style license?)
- Scribus - Desktop publishing
- VIM - programmer's editor (download)
  - Tip: start with the tutorial (:help tutor)
  - Collection of Best Vim Tips
  - Add IDE features to Vim
  - see also: Cheat sheet (vi/vim), Color schemes, Efficient Vim editing, LaTeX & Vim Vi help (common commands), Vi lovers, General editing tips, Best of Vim tips, vim.org
Emulators:
- Bochs
- QEMU
LaTeX - de facto standard for creating and publishing scientific TeX documents
- newsgroup: comp.text.tex
- Lyx - What you see is what you mean (GPL)
  - Lyx for Windows (XP)
- Kile: KDE TeX/LaTeX editor
- Texnik - Tips and tricks
- Slashdot discussion of LaTex and alternatives (helper apps)
Files:
- Unison: synchronize files between multiple computers
- Problems with ext4 as of 2009-05-31
- 7-Zip - File Compression
- Recode - convert files to different character sets
- Snif - file tagging
- Explore2fs: GUI for ext2 and ext3 file systems from Windows
- File, data, & partition Recovery, undelete files:
  - Test Disk (CG Security) - recover deleted files, check and undelete partitions on various operating systems
    - see also: Photo Recovery: utility for memory card photo recovery
    - CmosPwd: recover CMOS password
    - LiloPwd: recover LILO password
    - Chntpw for DOS: access NTFS partition, change NT password
- Trinity Rescue Kit
- Insert: bootable recovery disk (fits on credit card size CD; GPL)
- Recovery is Possible (RIP): “CD or USB boot/rescue/backup/maintenance system”
Help Desk, ticketing systems:
- Request Tracker - track help tickets
IDE:
- Eclipse - Java, C/C++ and others
Networking:
- Kismet - WiFi detection
- Squid-cache - web proxy
- Synergy - 1 keyboard/mouse share multiple computers/monitors
- TightVNC - fork of VNC (GPL)
- UltraVNC - like TightVNC with more featuers (GPL)
- Twisted Matrix - event-driven networking framework written in Python (LGPL)
- MetaVNC - a window aware VNC
- Monitoring your network:
- Open Slug: for devices that work with the NSLU2-Linux project, e.g. Linksys NSLU2 Network Storage
- WRT54G & WRT54GL:
  - Tomato
  - OpenWrt
  - WiFi-Box
  - about DD-WRT
Security Tools:
- CF Engine
- ClamAV - Clam anti-virus
- Distros: Knoppix-STD, Trinux
- Dsniff
- EtherApe
- Nagios
- Nessus
- nmap - network port mapper
- OpenNMS
- OpenSSH: (see also port knocking)
- OpenSSL
- OSSTMM - Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual
- OSSIM - Open Source System Information Management
- SSH Windows - SSH server and client (ala Cygwin)
- True Crypt - on the fly encryption (Linux, Win 2K, XP, 2003, Vista)
  - TC Explorer: run TrueCrypt without admin rights
  - Slashdot discussion of version 6
Server Log File reports:
- glTail.rb: animates log files
- MkConsole - displays logfiles on desktop (Mac OS X)
- Visitors
Utils:
- Captive - Access NTFS partitions from GNU/Linux
- Bellard's utils - including TinyCC and TCC boot; also here
- Cygwin - GNU/Linux/BSD tools for Windows
- FoxServ - Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Python (installer package for Windows)
- GnuWin32 - Win32-versions of GNU tools
  - See also: Unx Utils
- Hard Drive:
  - Backup/Copy:
    - ddrescue: recover data from corrupted drives
    - Backup PC - backup Linux and WinXX PCs and laptops to a server's disk (GPL)
    - rsync snapshots (use OpenSSH?)
    - Linux - NTFS clone -
      - tutorial
      - Related: MS-SYS, RIP
    - Unattended + WPKG
  - Partitioning
    - gParted - repartitioning, live CD
  - Defragging
    - JkDefrag: disable windows screensaver-defragging feature before using any other defragger
  - Erasers:
    - Derik's Boot and Nuke
Versioning Systems:
1. Git - (GPL)
2. Mercurial
3. Subversion
4. OpenCVS - new project (2004)
5. CVS - Concurrent Versioning System
Virtual Machines:
- Virtual Box

Misc:

CMS, CRM, Project Management, Wiki:
- Request Tracker
- ToDoList - project task prioritizer (Windows)
- TWiki
- Moodle - education and course managment
Diagram & Flowchart:
- Dia (Windows installer)
Linux Distros:
- Distro Watch
Editors:
- Notepad++ - syntax highlighting programmer's editor (GPL)
- SiEd - Palm OS^® editor for keyboard owners
- TextSTAT - create a concordance
Email:
- Anomy sanitizer - email virus scanner, and more
- SQL Grey - grey & white list domains via postfix policy service
Emulators:
- QEMU - generic processor emulator (mostly GPL)
Fax:
- Hylafax
FTP:
- Filezilla
- WinSCP
Mathematics & Statistics:
- Grace - WYSIWYG 2D plotting
- Maxima - algebra, symbolic integration, 3D plotting, and an ODE solver
- Octave - numerical computation language
- R Project - statistical computing
PIM:
- Notecase - much like TreePad
- KnowIt - tree-based outliner (KDE)
- Tux Cards
- JreePad - tree-based outliner (Java)
- Ecco32 - (Windows)
- QuikiWiki (PHP)
- Rainlender - (Windows)
- TreeLine (Windows?)
- Mind-Mappers:
  - FreeMind - hierarchical outliner, notepad (Java)
  - Kdissert - for dissertations and similar documents (KDE)
PBX:
- Asterisk
- Lin Modems
- VOCP
RSS Aggregators:
- Weblog's compendium of RSS aggregators - includes closed and Open Source
Security:
- PHP Ki
VOIP:
- Open H323
Web Server:
- Apache