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

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.

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.

Personal review:

• (+) Quite fast query results
• (+) Can index IMAP Maildir directly, even attachments!
• (+) also return files matching similar keywords (stemming).
• (-) Indexing hangs on some .zip files (with 5G+ memory, and lot of swapping). Removed *.jar, *.zip, *.tgz, *.gz, *.tar from list of files to index.
• (-) Only 10 results / page! This can't even be changed!
• (-) Relevance low. Aggravated with the point above. Files with search keywords in the filename, or title, or at beginning of the file are not returned first. Stemming makes it even worse.
  • Fix: From the documentation, stemming can be disabled by keyword if they are capitalized (like floor will find flooring, floored, but Floor will only return floor). Stemming can also be disabled from the menu.
• (-) No way to narrow down the results by PDF only or DOC only (both is considered text). Only way to do so is to perform a new advanced search.

The version in Ubuntu 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 (to allow indexing office files, etc.)

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

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
• Custom geometry terminator --geometry=1220x720+100+100 (in application menu)

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

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.
• procmeter3

Audio File Tagger

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

Multimedia

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.

Games

Minecraft

• Minecraft requires *SUN* java JRE (see [1]):

# On Ubuntu before Oneiric
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre
# On Oneiric, sun java was removed from 'partner' repository
# ... but we can still obtain it via this repository
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/java

• Install and select SUN java as the default JRE:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre
sudo update-alternatives --config java

• 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&
nohup java -Xmx1024M -Xms512M -cp $(dirname $0)/minecraft.jar net.minecraft.LauncherFrame >/dev/null&
exit 0

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

/usr/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.

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