Linux Software

This page lists and comments interesting software on Linux

Image Viewers

New

• Shotwell
• Fotoxx (supports .RAW import)

Reviews

• Comparison of image viewers on Wikipedia
• 10 Best Image Viewers for Linux - TechCityInc
• What is a good image viewer? « Linux Photography

Recommends Ristretto for simple use case, and gThumb for more advanced uses.

Image Managers

• Digikam

digiKam is an advanced digital photo management application for Linux, Windows, and Mac-OSX.

• F-Spot

F-Spot is a full-featured personal photo management application for the GNOME desktop

User comment: Has apparently the bad habit to save files without notice...

My comment: Extremely bad! Can't browse a complete folder with a simple click on a photo in the folder and can't access the full interface. Very slow. Crappy slideshow with fade-in fade-out that can't be disabled at first sight!

• XnView

XnView is a free software to view, organise, convert graphics and photos files or to create slide show, contact sheet, HTML pages.

Middle Solutions

• GqView

an image browser that features single click access to view images and move around the directory tree

• gThumb

gThumb is an image viewer and browser for the GNOME Desktop.

My comment: Very promising! Fast image viewer, easy browsing, can view all the photos in one folder by clicking a file in Nautilus, and then go back to the full interface (à la ACDSee).

• Gwenview

Gwenview is a fast and easy to use image viewer for KDE.

Simple Viewers

• Comix - GTK Comic Book Viewer

Comix is a user-friendly, customizable image viewer. It is specifically designed to handle comic books, but also serves as a generic viewer.

• Eye of Gnome - The GNOME Image Viewer

The Eye of GNOME image viewer is the official image viewer for the GNOME Desktop environment

My comment: Interesting! Fast simple little image viewer. Default image viewer in GNOME.

• FEH

a fast and light Imlib2-based image viewer

feh -dF --zoom max
feh -dF --zoom fill    # Like bg fill

• Galapix

Tool focused on viewing very large collections of images at once, with smooth zooming from thumbnail down to original size

• Picasa from Google

Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great.

• QIV - Quick Image Viewer

... is a very small and pretty fast gdk/lmlib image viewer

user comment: very fast. looks very sparse to begin with, but has everything you need without cluttering up your display.

My comment: Very interesting! Very fast command-line image viewer. Type qiv -tf * to view all photos in current folder in full screen mode and best-fit zoom. Press F1 for help.

• Ristretto

Ristretto is a fast and lightweight picture-viewer for the Xfce desktop environment

• xv

The historical image viewer and editor for Linux

Gallery

Tools for generating thumbnails, browsing large directories of photos

• lazygal

Exist as a Debian package lazygal. Create gallery simply with:

cd /var/www/album
lazygal ~/pics

Image and photo editors

DarkTable

• Darktable (recommended by Gilles)

SmillaEnlarger

A magical image zoom utility

http://sourceforge.net/projects/imageenlarger/

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dhor/myway
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install smillaenlarger

Pinta

A simple yet powerful image editor.

Gimp

The most powerful editor on Linux, lots of feature. Only drawback is that it is quite difficult to master, even for basic operations.

PDF

pdfpc

On Ubuntu / Debian, the package is called pdf-presenter-console (just make sure that this package installs David Vilar's fork version).

Impressive

A Python app to display PDF document on screen, with nice transition effects, loop mode...

Web Tools

Web Developer Tools

Web Developer Tools includes

• Dean Edwards Javascript Compressor
• Css Minifier
• Css Button Generator
• Cool Button Generator
• RGB / HEX Color chart
• VTE Terminal
• WYSIWYG HTML 5 Editor

Diff Tools

Some GUI-based tools:

KDiff3

KDiff3 compares and merges 2 or 3 files or directories.

Meld

Meld is a visual diff and merge tool. You can compare two or three files and edit them in place (diffs update dynamically). You can compare two or three folders and launch file comparisons. You can browse and view a working copy from popular version control systems such such as CVS, Subversion, Bazaar-ng and Mercurial.

Diffuse

Diffuse is a small and simple text merge tool written in Python. With Diffuse, you can easily merge, edit, and review changes to your code.

diffuse file1 file2 file3       # Compare a Set of Files
diffuse -m                      # Review Local Changes or Fix Merge Conflicts
diffuse -r rev1 -r rev2 file    # Compare Specific Revisions
diffuse -c rev file             # Inspect a Revision

Some command-line based tools:

diff

The standard well-known diff tool.

colordiff

A diff wrapper written in Perl that adds color to diff output.

Search Tools

Links:

• An excellent review on TuxRadar.com on Google Desktop, Beagle, Recoll

See also Search tools on Windows

Beagle

Available in Ubuntu repository (package beagle). Open-source alternative to GD that had a very bad reputation of consuming lots of memory. According to TuxRadar.com's review, beagle is now excellent with complex search options.

Google Desktop

Available here for Linux. Tools from the famous search engine. According to TuxRadar.com's review, very fast but lack some additional filters.

locate / slocate / mlocate

locate (or its equivalent slocate and mlocate) build a database of filename, which can then be browsed rapidly to find files by name. Locate database is usually updated thanks to a cron script.

Mairix

Mairix is a powerful program for indexing and searching email messages stored in maildir, MH or mbox folders.

See Mail Tips on Yobi for setting up Mairix so that it replies to request via IMAP.

Recoll

See Recoll.

Miscellaneous

Shutter

A feature-rich screenshot program

Gnome Terminator

See Terminator.

4Pane

A multi-pane file manager: Add to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.4pane.co.uk/ubuntu/ lucid universe

Add the key and install:

sudo apt-key adv --fetch-keys http://www.4pane.co.uk/4Pane.asc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install 4pane

Evince

Evince is gnome PDF viewer.

Troubleshooting

• The following error message is due to apparmor (see bug 1016103) when using unusual location for /home directory (like /home being a symlink to /data/home).

(evince:11710): EggSMClient-WARNING **: Failed to connect to the session manager: None of the authentication protocols specified are supported
(evince:11710): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to store changes into `/home/beq06659/.local/share/recently-used.xbel', but failed: Failed to create file '/home/beq06659/.local/share/recently-
used.xbel.ZHHJ8W': Permission denied
(evince:11710): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to set the permissions of `/home/beq06659/.local/share/recently-used.xbel', but failed: No such file or directory

Fix the error by editing /etc/apparmor.d/tunables/home (see [1]), add the custom location for the home directory and restart apparmor (see [2]):

sudo vi /etc/apparmor.d/tunables/home            # Edit line as follows:
                                                 # @{HOMEDIRS}=/home/ /data/home/
sudo invoke-rc.d apparmor reload                 # Reload apparmor config

Youtube-dl

Youtube-dl download videos from youtube.com or other video platforms.

yt-dlp

yt-dlp is a fork that is more active than original youtube-dl.

• yt-dlp on GitHub
• Install with pip3: pip3 install yt-dlp

youtube-dl

To install, first install from the repository (this will install the necessary dependencies such as ffmpeg or avconv):

sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

To get an up-to-date version, download and install from git repository:

git clone https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl.git
cd youtube-dl
./youtube-dl <link>

Usage:

#YTDL=youtube-dl
YTDL=yt-dlp
$YTDL <youtube-link>
$YTDL --list-formats <youtube-link>        # To view available formats
$YTDL -f 135+bestaudio <youtube-link>      # Download 854x480 video and merge with best audio format available
$YTDL -r 1M -f 'bestvideo[height<=1080]+bestaudio/best[height<=1080]' $URL
                                           # Limit rate to 1MB/s, pick best HD video, pick best audio

Disk Usage

Some disk usage report and monitoring tools.

Tools using treemaps:

• Baobab aka Gnome Disk Usage Analyser (package gnome-utils)
• gdmap
• kdirstat, very similar to WinDirStat under windows

Other GUI-based tools:

• xdiskusage

Command-line tools:

• di
• dstat
• durep
• filelight
• gt5, also displays what has happened since gt5 last ran.
• procmeter3qsdf
• dut

A new fast directory analyzer.

Audio File Tagger

EasyTAG aac

Can edit & download cover art.

Mp3tag

Probably the best audio file tagger under Windows. Works under Wine.

PuddleTag

As referenced on UbuntuGeek, PuddleTag looks like the ultimate choice for audio tagger under Linux. PuddleTag is inspired from Mp3tag.

Download the package from the website, and install it with:

sudo dpkg -i puddletag_0.9.11-1_all.deb
sudo apt-get install python-qt4 python-pyparsing python-mutagen python-configobj python-musicbrainz2
sudo apt-get -f install                            # Solve automatically unmet dependencies and install pending packages

Audio Players

foobar2000

foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform. It also works on Linux under Wine

Amarok

The Media Player for the KDE desktop

Rhythmbox

Music player and organized for GNOME

Banshee

Media management and playback application for the GNOME desktop

MOC (Music on Console)

A terminal-based music player with an interface similar to Midnight Commander.

Video editors

Openshot

Simple tool for editing, transcoding video. Builtin profile for youtube video editing.

Games

Playing on Linux

• See PlayOnLinux.
• Use Ubuntu Mate?
• See Lutris.
• Use Steam.

Minecraft

• It is recommanded to use *SUN / ORACLE* java JRE' (see [3]).
• Download Minecraft.jar from download page and copy it into /usr/local/games/minecraft:

wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftDownload/launcher/minecraft.jar

• My startup script (note the lowercase to minecraft.jar, unlike what is indicated on the download page):

/usr/local/games/minecraft/launch-minecraft.sh ([{{#filelink: launch-minecraft.sh}} download])

{{#fileanchor: launch-minecraft.sh}}

#! /bin/bash
# nohup $(dirname $0)/minecraft.jar >/dev/null&
WHICHJAVA=$(readlink -f $(which java))
if [[ $WHICHJAVA == *java-7-oracle* ]]; then
    if [ "$(arch)" = "x86_64" ]; then
        export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${WHICHJAVA%%/bin/java}/lib/amd64
    else
        export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${WHICHJAVA%%/bin/java}/lib/i386
    fi
    echo "LD_LIBRARY_PATH set to '$LD_LIBRARY_PATH'"
    if ! [ -a "$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" ]; then
        echo >&2 "'$LD_LIBRARY_PATH' not found. Is java correctly installed for this machine?"
        exit 1

    fi
fi
if [ -a /usr/bin/dropbox ]; then
    # dropbox found - let's start and wait for it to Idle

    # First, start it first if needed
    if ! pgrep dropbox; then
        dropbox start
        for i in seq 1 5; do dropbox status; sleep 1; done
    fi

    # Wait for Idle state

    while [ "$(dropbox status)" != "Idle" ]; do
        dropbox status
        sleep 2
    done
fi
java -Xmx1024M -Xms512M -cp $(dirname $0)/minecraft.jar net.minecraft.LauncherFrame >/dev/null
exit 0

• My desktop script to copy to /usr/local/share/applications:

/usr/local/share/applications/minecraft.desktop ([{{#filelink: minecraft.desktop}} download])

{{#fileanchor: minecraft.desktop}}

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.2
Terminal=false
Exec=/usr/local/games/minecraft/launch-minecraft.sh
Icon=/usr/local/games/minecraft/minecraft-icon.png
Type=Application
Categories=Game;LogicGame;
Name=Minecraft
Comment=Play Minecraft !

• Copy minecraft-icon.png icon to /usr/local/games/minecraft.
• BLACK SCREEN after loging, due to LD_LIBRARY_PATH not defined (see [4])

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-oracle/jre/lib/amd64

Dropbox

• Use dropbox to sync saves, mods... between computers
• Install

sudo dpkg -i dropbox_....deb               # pick i386 / amd64 as necessary
sudo apt-get install python-gpgme
dropbox start -i                           # As user that will play minecraft

Use custom username in offline instead of Player:

One can change the username that appears on multi-player servers as follow (only if they accept offline clients) (see [5]):

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-oracle/jre/lib/amd64           # adapt as necessary
java -Xms512m -Xmx1024m -cp "$HOME/.minecraft/bin/*" -Djava.library.path="$HOME/.minecraft/bin/natives" net.minecraft.client.Minecraft "$USERNAME"

Toboclic

• Create the following files /usr/local:

/usr/local/games/toboclic/launch-toboclic.sh (<file name="launch-toboclic.sh" tag="source">download</file>)

#! /bin/bash

TOBOCLIC=$(find /media -maxdepth 2 -path "/media/*/index.swf")
if [ -n "$TOBOCLIC" ]; then
    firefox "$TOBOCLIC"
else
    TOBOCLIC=$(find /media -maxdepth 2 -path "/media/*/*.swf")
    if [ -n "$TOBOCLIC" ]; then
        firefox "$TOBOCLIC"
    fi
fi

/usr/local/share/applications/toboclic.desktop (<file name="toboclic.desktop" tag="source">download</file>)

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.2
Terminal=false
Exec=/usr/local/games/toboclic/launch-toboclic.sh
Icon=/usr/local/games/toboclic/toboclic.ico
Type=Application
Categories=Game;
Name=Toboclic
Comment=Play with Toboclic!

Note: if /usr/local/share/applications did not exist, it will not be scanned automatically unless reboot.

• The .desktop file requires an icon file at /usr/local/games/toboclic/toboclic.ico
• Mark these files as executable

sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/games/toboclic/launch-toboclic.sh
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/share/applications/toboclic.desktop

Panda glGo

• Does not work anymore on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric 64-bit
• Requires packages libsdl-image1.2 libsdl-ttf2.0-0. Also this is a 32-bit package, so on amd64 architecture, it requires package ia32-libs).
• Download the package from the website and install:

wget http://www.pandanet.co.jp/English/glGo/downloads/glGo-1.4.1.deb
sudo apt-get install libsdl-image1.2 libsdl-ttf2.0-0 libpython2.6
#on amd64 arch:
sudo ln -s libpython2.6.so.1.0 /usr/lib32/libpython2.5.so.1.0       
#on i386 arch:
sudo ln -s libpython2.6.so.1.0 /usr/lib/libpython2.5.so.1.0         
sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture glGo-1.4.1.deb

• Start glGo, and enter /usr/games/gnugo for location of gnugo

Development

Oracle / Sun Java

Reference:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Java
• http://www.webupd8.org/2012/01/install-oracle-java-jdk-7-in-ubuntu-via.html
Easiest method to install Oracle Java 7 on Ubuntu Precise 12.04:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

java -version

sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-7-oracle         # If current java is not oracle's

sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-set-default          # To set up env. var by default

sudo apt-get remove oracle-java7-installer             # To *REMOVE*

• On Oneiric and before:

# On Oneiric, we first need to add this repository since
# ... java is no longer in 'partner' repository
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/java
sudo apt-get update

# Install SUN Java 6
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre

# Select SUN java as the default JRE:
sudo update-alternatives --config java
sudo update-alternatives --config javac

C/C++ IDE

QtCreator + FakeVim

See https://pagefault.blog/2017/02/01/my-editor-of-choice-for-c-cpp-qtcreator-fakevim/.