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.

• 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

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

Search Tools

Links:

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

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.

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.

Recoll

Available in Ubuntu repository (package recoll). Favorite of TuxRadar.com's review, very very fast, very lightweight. Index can be build manually. Additional filters can be installed to support additional file types, support multiple indexes.

Ubuntu

The version in universe repository is an old version. Install back-port repositories from launchpad.net as follows::

# This is not necessary anymore...
# gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 9DA85604
# gpg --export --armor 9DA85604 | sudo apt-key add -
# gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv A0735AD0
# gpg --export --armor  A0735AD0 | sudo apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xapian-backports/ppa
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:recoll-backports/ppa

The following recommended package should be installed

sudo aptitude install antiword catdoc ghostscript libimage-exiftool-perl poppler-utils unrtf python-mutagen xsltproc

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.

Miscellaneous

Shutter

A feature-rich screenshot program

Gnome Terminator

A multipane terminal emulator based on Gnome Terminal.

Install it with

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome-terminator
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install terminator

My default configuration

• Set background to transparent 6% (through ~/.config/terminator/config)
• Set scrollback to infinite scrollback

Disk Usage

Some disk usage report and monitoring tools:

• di
• dstat
• durep
• filelight
• gt5
• kdirstat
• procmeter3
• xdiskusage