Click here to view the embedded video.

It would show up when I run fdisk -l and in dmesg but when I try to mount the drive it would return with the error ’special device does not exist’.  The only way I could get it back online was to reboot the machine, until now!

I tried installed usbmount and pmount but neither fixed the problem.

After some research I discovered the MAKEDEV command.  So what I tried was to run MAKEDEV from inside of /dev/ and it would give me an error: “.udevdb or .udev presence implies active udev.  Aborting MAKEDEV invocation.”

So I went on and looked into /dev/.udev/ and found a /failed/ directory which had a blocked file in there referring to the hard drive that wasn’t mounting.  For some reason I ran the MAKEDEV [device] command here and VIOLA, it worked.  Apparently it just needs to be run in a directory that doesn’t have a .udev subdirectory in it

So for me the command was MAKEDEV /dev/sdd and it created sdd1 through sdd10.  Not sure what the other ones are for but I was able to mount sdd1 properly and access my hard drive.  I mean this is a pretty backwards work around but I can access my hard drive without rebooting, so I’m good to go!

So to sum it up, if you have a device that isn’t mounting properly but you can see the device with #sudo fdisk -l then:

1. try creating a temporary directory for your new mount points
2. Then run MAKEDEV [device] inside of that directory.  So if the partition your trying to mount is say /dev/sda1 then you’ll want to run MAKEDEV /dev/sda and hopefully that gives you access without needing to reboot.

If you are using Evolution and are getting fed up of the little bugs and instabilities here and there then check out the article below on how to switch to Thunderbird:

http://maketecheasier.com/how-to-migrate-from-evolution-to-thunderbird-in-ubuntu-intrepid/2008/12/04

A quick highlight :

Migrate local mail from Evolution

First, we will migrate the Evolution mails that are stored locally in your hard disk.

Open up two Nautilus windows (if you like, you can open two tabs instead of two windows). Press Ctrl + H to reveal the hidden folders. In one window, navigate to the .mozilla-thunderbird folder. You should see a folder with name similar to i7bqvbzk.default. Click on that folder, followed by Mail and Local Folders. You should see some files like Inbox, Trash, Unsent Message etc.

In the second window, navigate to .evolution -> mail -> local folder. Similarly, you will find files such as Inbox, Outbox, Sent, Trash etc.

Now copy the five files Inbox, Outbox, Drafts, Templates, Sent from the Evolution folder to the Thunderbird folder. If it prompts you whether to replace the existing files, click Replace All.

If you have used any subfolders in your Evolution, you should see a folder with a .sbd extension (such as #evolution.sbd). In your Thunderbird folder, create a similar folder with the same name. Back to your Evolution folder, copy and paste all the files in the subfolder that don’t have a file extension to the Thunderbird subfolder.

That’s it. Restart your Thunderbird. You should see all your Evolution mails imported over.

I find it interesting just to sit and watch this man talk, such an unassuming guy that I’ve really not seen a lot of in close and personal videos.  You have to almost remind yourself that ‘oh ya, this is one of the most powerful men in the world’.

Enjoy

Graphic Applications

ACDSee 9

Imgv is a unique and feature rich Image Viewer. It is released as free software with full source code. Imgv is portable and can run on Windows, Linux, BSD, OSX, and other operating systems. Features include a GUI that doesn’t get in the way of viewing your images, a file browser, slideshows, zooming, rotating, on-the-fly Exif viewing, histograms, fullscreen support, wallpaper setting, the ability to view 4 images on the screen at once, adjustable thumbnail sizes, playlists, view and download images from Web sites, movie playing, file searching/filtering, multiple directory loading, transitional effects, image hiding and more.

Cornice is a cross-platform image viewer written in Python + wxPython + PIL. It doesn’t pretend to be complete, fast, or even useful, but I like it and it is the viewer I use on both Linux and Windows. It has been inspired by the famous Windows-only ACDSee.
Adobe After Effects

Jahshaka is an editing and effects system. It allows to edit with flexibility and speed, create effects in real time, animate with unlimited features, paint and design on moving video, create music with all the tools the pros use, work in any format at any resolution.
Adobe FrameMaker and QuarkXPress

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
KWord is a frame-based word-processing and desktop publishing application. KWord is capable of creating demanding and professional looking documents. Whether you are a corporate or home user, production artist or student, KWord will prove a valuable and easy to use tool for all your word processing and layout needs. KWord is a wordprocessor based on frames. This can be used to place components in precise locations, as with many professional DTP applications. KWord can also handle huge amounts of texts and allows you to do professional markup with ease.
Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw

Xara Xtreme for Linuxis a powerful, general purpose graphics program for Unix platforms including Linux, FreeBSD and (in development) OS-X.

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.

Skencil is an interactive vector drawing appliction. Known to run on GNU/Linux and other UNIX-compatible systems, it is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes. A somewhat unique (for a drawing program) feature of Skencil is that it is implemented almost completely in a very high-level, interpreted language, Python. Python is powerful, object-oriented and yet easy to use.
Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

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. It’s been used on many feature films, including The Last Samurai where it was used to add flying arrows. It’s also being used by pro photographers who need greater color fidelity than is available in other tools.

Krita is a painting and image editing application for KOffice. Krita is part of KOffice since version 1.4. It contains both ease-of-use and fun features like guided painting (never before has it been so easy to airbrush a straight line!) and high-end features like support for 16 bit images, CMYK, L*a*b and even OpenEXR HDR images. Krita supports many managed colorspaces, like rgb, grayscale, cmyk, lab, ycbcr and lms, in 8 and 16 bits per channel. Some colorspaces even support 32 bits per channel.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

Gimpshop is a free graphics editor for Mac OS X 10.3/10.4, Linux, Solaris/SPARC and Windows. GIMPShop is a Gimp modification that features menu layouts, dialogs and naming conventions similar to those found in Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop users should feel right at home using Gimpshop. (This is a better alternative to GIMP if you are used to using PhotoShop.)
Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw

Unidentified Flying Raw (UFRaw) is a utility to read and manipulate raw images from digital cameras. It can be used on its own or as a Gimp plug-in. It reads raw images using Dave Coffin’s raw conversion utility – DCRaw. UFRaw supports color management workflow based on Little CMS, allowing the user to apply ICC color profiles. For Nikon users UFRaw has the advantage that it can read the camera’s tone curves.
Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro and Microsoft Movie Maker

Kino is a non-linear DV editor for GNU/Linux. It features excellent integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR control, and recording back to the camera. It captures video to disk in Raw DV and AVI format, in both type-1 DV and type-2 DV (separate audio stream) encodings. You can load multiple video clips, cut and paste portions of video/audio, and save it to an edit decision list (SMIL XML format). Most edit and navigation commands are mapped to equivalent vi key commands. Kino can export the composite movie in a number of formats: DV over IEEE 1394, Raw DV, DV AVI, still frames, WAV, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. Still frame import and export uses gdk-pixbuf, which has support for BMG, GIF, JPEG, PNG, PPM, SVG, Targa, TIFF, and XPM. MP3 requires lame. Ogg Vorbis requires oggenc. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 require mjpegtools or ffmpeg. MPEG-4 requires ffmpeg.
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. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities. Avidemux is available for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows under the GNU GPL license.
VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.
Cinelerra is a free and open source software non-linear video editing system for the Linux operating system. (However, it has also been successfully ported to Mac OS X.) It is produced by Heroine Virtual, and is distributed under the GNU General Public License. Cinelerra also includes a video compositing engine, allowing the user to perform common compositing operations such as keying and mattes.

Anime Studio and Toon Boom Studio

KToon is a 2D Animation Toolkit designed by animators (Toonka Films ) for animators, focused to the Cartoon Industry. This project is covered by the GPL License using G++, OpenGL and QT as programming resources from KDevelop as the development platform. By now, KToon is only available for Unix systems but we expect to make it works on Windows systems too someday.

Synfig is a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources.
Autodesk 3ds Max

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.
Autodesk AutoCAD

QCad is an application for computer aided drafting in two dimensions (2d). With QCad you can create technical drawings such as plans for buildings, interiors, mechanical parts or schemas and diagrams. QCad works on Windows, Mac OS X and many Linux and Unix Systems. The source code of the QCad community edition is released under the GPL.

BRL-CAD package is a powerful Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) solid modeling system with over 20 years development and production use by the U.S. military. BRL-CAD includes an interactive geometry editor, parallel ray-tracing support for rendering and geometric analysis, path-tracing for realistic image synthesis, network distributed framebuffer support, image-processing and signal-processing tools. The entire package is distributed in source code form.
Autodesk Maya

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.
Corel Trace

Potrace is a utility for tracing a bitmap, which means, transforming a bitmap into a smooth, scalable image. The input is a bitmap (PBM, PGM, PPM, or BMP format), and the default output is an encapsulated PostScript file (EPS). A typical use is to create EPS files from scanned data, such as company or university logos, handwritten notes, etc. The resulting image is not “jaggy” like a bitmap, but smooth. It can then be rendered at any resolution. Potrace can currently produce the following output formats: EPS, PostScript, PDF, SVG (scalable vector graphics), Xfig, Gimppath, and PGM (for easy antialiasing).
Adobe Flash Professional (formerly Macromedia)

OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software. OpenLaszlo programs are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash and, with OpenLaszlo 4, DHTML. The OpenLaszlo APIs provide animation, layout, data binding, server communication, and declarative UI. An OpenLaszlo application can be as short as a single source file, or factored into multiple files that define reusable classes and libraries.

IMPRESS is a truly outstanding tool for creating effective multimedia presentations. Your presentations will stand out with 2D and 3D clip art, special effects, animation, and high-impact drawing tools. IMPRESS has a complete range of easy-to-use drawing and diagramming tools to spice up your presentation. Slide show Animation and Effects bring your presentation to life. Fontworks provides stunning 2D and 3D images from text. Create lifelike 3D images with astounding speed and response.
Macromedia Freehand MX

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.

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.

Skencil is an interactive vector drawing appliction. Known to run on GNU/Linux and other UNIX-compatible systems, it is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes. A somewhat unique (for a drawing program) feature of Skencil is that it is implemented almost completely in a very high-level, interpreted language, Python. Python is powerful, object-oriented and yet easy to use.

Xara Xtreme for Linuxis a powerful, general purpose graphics program for Unix platforms including Linux, FreeBSD and (in development) OS-X.
Microsoft Publisher

DRAW – from a quick sketch to a complex plan, DRAW gives you the tools to communicate with graphics and diagrams. You can manipulate objects, rotate in two or three dimensions; the 3D controller puts spheres, rings, cubes, etc. at your disposal. Arrange objects: group, ungroup, regroup, and edit objects while grouped. Sophisticated rendering let you create photorealistic images with your own texture, lighting effects, transparency, perspective, and so on. Smart connectors make short work of flowcharts, organisation charts, network diagrams, etc. Define your own ‘glue points’ for connectors to ’stick’ to.

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
Microsoft Visio

ArgoUML is the leading open source UML modeling tool and includes support for all standard UML 1.4 diagrams. It runs on any Java platform and is available in ten languages. ArgoUML provides constraint modeling support on UML Classes and Features. The Dresden OCL toolkit enables ArgoUML to perform syntax and type checking on those constraints. Diagrams can be saved as GIF, PNG, PostScript, Encapsulated PS, PGML and SVG.

Dia 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. It can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format (gzipped by default, to save space), can export diagrams to a number of formats, including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG, and can print diagrams (including ones that span multiple pages).

DRAW – from a quick sketch to a complex plan, DRAW gives you the tools to communicate with graphics and diagrams. You can manipulate objects, rotate in two or three dimensions; the 3D controller puts spheres, rings, cubes, etc. at your disposal. Arrange objects: group, ungroup, regroup, and edit objects while grouped. Sophisticated rendering let you create photorealistic images with your own texture, lighting effects, transparency, perspective, and so on. Smart connectors make short work of flowcharts, organisation charts, network diagrams, etc. Define your own ‘glue points’ for connectors to ’stick’ to.

Kivio is an easy to use diagramming and flowcharting application with tight integration to the other KOffice applications. It enables you to create network diagrams, organisation charts, flowcharts and more. Features: scriptable stencils using Python, support for Dia stencils, plugin framework for adding more functionality.

StarUML is an open source project to develop fast, flexible, extensible, featureful, and freely-available UML/MDA platform running on Win32 platform. The goal of the StarUML project is to build a software modeling tool and also platform that is a compelling replacement of commercial UML tools such as Rational Rose, Together and so on.
Pixar RenderMan

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

Pixie is an open source RenderMan renderer for generating photorealistic images. You can compile Pixie on Windows (using Visual Studio 2005), Linux and on OSX (using XCode or unix style configure script). Pixie now has a new raytracing engine that automatically tesselates surfaces on the fly to a desired accuracy determined using the ray differentials. This means rays tracing blurry reflections or computing global illumination are faster to trace and sharp reflections and shadows are more accurate. Pixie also contains a memory manager that keeps the memory that is used to keep these tesselations around under control. Similar to texture caching, Pixie will maintain a set of active surfaces and only those surfaces will consume raytracing memory.

Ayam is a free 3D modeling environment for the RenderMan interface, distributed under the BSD license. This means that neither the author nor any contributors make money out of this software. We need your (yes your!) feedback to keep this project alive. If you use Ayam, please submit your pictures, bug reports, or comments.

The current stable version is 1.14, released 4. Apr 2008.

Ayam currently runs on Unix (Linux, IRIX, FreeBSD tested), Win32 (Win95-Win2000, XP), and Mac OS X (Aqua and X11).

Internet & Networking

Check Point VPN-1

OpenVPN is a full-featured SSL VPN solution which can accomodate a wide range of configurations, including remote access, site-to-site VPNs, WiFi security, and enterprise-scale remote access solutions with load balancing, failover, and fine-grained access-controls. OpenVPN implements OSI layer 2 or 3 secure network extension using the industry standard SSL/TLS protocol, supports flexible client authentication methods based on certificates, smart cards, and/or 2-factor authentication, and allows user or group-specific access control policies using firewall rules applied to the VPN virtual interface. OpenVPN is not a web application proxy and does not operate through a web browser.
Citrix Presentation Server and Microsoft Remote Desktop for Windows

Vine Server(OSXvnc) is a robust, full-featured VNC server for MacOS X. It allows any VNC client to remotely view or control the machine. It is provided by Redstone Software, for use with Vine Viewer and Eggplant for cross-platform testing and automation.
CommView

Wireshark is the world’s foremost network protocol analyzer, and is the standard in many industries. Wireshark’s powerful features make it the tool of choice for network troubleshooting, protocol development, and education worldwide. Wireshark was written by an international group of networking experts, and is an example of the power of open source. It runs on Windows, Linux, UNIX, and other platforms.
CuteFTP and WS_FTP Professional

Cyberduck is an open source FTP and SFTP (SSH Secure File Transfer) browser licenced under the GPL with an easy to use interface, integration with external editors and support for many Mac OS X system technologies such as Spotlight, Bonjour, the Keychain and AppleScript. Protocols: FTP (File Transfer Protocol), FTP/TLS (FTP secured over SSL/TLS) and SFTP (SSH Secure File Transfer).

WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client and FTP client for Windows. Legacy SCP protocol is also supported. Its main function is safe copying of files between a local and a remote computer.

FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive interface. The features of FileZilla include the following: it’s easy to use, supports FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). Runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, OSX and more. FileZilla is available in many languages.
FeedDemon

RSSOwl is an applications that collects data from RSS-compliant sites . RSSOwl lets you gather, organize, update, and store information from any compliant source in a convenient, easy to use interface, save selected information in various formats for offline viewing and sharing, and much more. It’s easy to configure, available in many many languages and the best of all: It’s platform-independent.
Mozilla’s Thunderbird email application features many new enhancements to help you better manage your unruly inbox, and stay informed. Thunderbird 2 scales to the most sophisticated organizational needs while making it easy to find what you need. Thunderbird allows you to customize your email to suit your specific needs whether it’s how you search and find messages or listening to music right out of your inbox.

GroundWork Monitor Open Source

“GroundWork Monitor” is an open source systems and network management suite that ensures IT infrastructure uptime by identifying issues before they become real problems. It unifies open source tools including Nagios, Nmap, SNMP TT, PHP, Apache, MySQL and more — through PHP/AJAX-based components and an integrated user interface to deliver the extensible functionality you require.
HP OpenView Network Node Manager

Pandora FMS is a monitoring Open Source software. It watches your systems and applications, and allows you to know the status of any element of those systems. Pandora could detect a network interface down, a defacement in your website, a memory leak in one of your server app, or the movement of any value of the NASDAQ new technology market. If you want, Pandora could send out SMS message when your systems fails.

OpenNMS is the world’s first enterprise grade network management platform developed under the open source model. It consists of a community supported open-source project as well as a commercial services, training, and support organization.

NeDiis an open source network management framework which uses scheduled discovery to examine your network. All data is store in a SQL database and through the web-based user interface your can access maps of your network and query for current status. Syslog messeges and SNMP-traps are also available through this interface. Management of device configuration is also possible.

Nagios is an Open Source host, service and network monitoring program. It is designed to inform you of network problems before your clients, end-users or managers do. It has been designed to run under the Linux operating system, but works fine under most *NIX variants as well. The monitoring daemon runs intermittent checks on hosts and services you specify using external “plugins” which return status information to Nagios. When problems are encountered, the daemon can send notifications out to administrative contacts in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, SMS, etc.). Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.
ICQ, MSN Messenger and Trillian Pro

Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X, released under the GNU GPL and developed by the Adium team. With Adium, you can connect to any number of messaging accounts on any combination of supported messaging services and then chat with other people using those services.

Miranda IM is a multi protocol instant messenger client for Windows. Miranda IM uses very little memory and is extremely fast. It requires no installation and can be fitted on a single floppy disc. Its powerful plugin system makes Miranda IM very flexible. Only the most basic features are built in, but there are currently more than 350 free plugins available for download that allows users to extend the functionality of Miranda IM.

Pidgin is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once. Pidgin can work with: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo!, Zephyr. Pidgin can log in to multiple accounts on multiple IM networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on AIM, talking to a friend on Yahoo Messenger, and sitting in an IRC channel all at the same time.

Psi is the premiere Instant Messaging application designed for Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X and GNU/Linux. Built upon an open protocol named Jabber, Psi is a fast and lightweight messaging client that utilises the best in open source technologies. The goal of the Psi project is to create a powerful, yet easy-to-use Jabber/XMPP client that tries to strictly adhere to the XMPP drafts and Jabber JEPs. This means that in most cases, Psi will not implement a feature unless there is an accepted standard for it in the Jabber community. Doing so ensures that Psi will be compatible, stable, and predictable, both from an end-user and developer standpoint.
Microsoft Exchange Server

Zimbra is open source server and client software for messaging and collaboration – email, group calendaring, contacts, and web document management and authoring. The Zimbra server is available for Linux, Mac OS X, appliances, and virtualization platforms. The Zimbra Web Ajax client runs on Firefox, Safari, and IE, and features easy integration / mash-ups of web portals, business applications, and VoIP using web services.
Microsoft Internet Explorer

Image:SeaMonkey.png

SeaMonkey project is a community effort to deliver production-quality releases of code derived from the application formerly known as “Mozilla Application Suite”. It provides Web-browser, advanced e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editing made simple — all your Internet needs in one application.

Firefox is the award-winning Web browser which is is now faster, more secure, and fully customizable to your online life. You can choose from over a thousand useful add-ons that enhance Firefox. It’s easy to personalize Firefox to make it your own.
Microsoft Internet Information Services

Apache HTTP Server is a collaborative software development effort aimed at creating a robust, commercial-grade, featureful, and freely-available source code implementation of an HTTP (Web) server. The project is jointly managed by a group of volunteers located around the world, using the Internet and the Web to communicate, plan, and develop the server and its related documentation. This project is part of the Apache Software Foundation. In addition, hundreds of users have contributed ideas, code, and documentation to the project. This file is intended to briefly describe the history of the Apache HTTP Server and recognize the many contributors.
Microsoft Outlook

Evolution provides integrated mail, addressbook and calendaring functionality to users of the GNOME desktop. With Evolution’s junk filtering, you’re free to read the email you want and not see much of the email you don’t. Bayesian-based junk filtering with optional remote rules get rid of all of the emails which bug you most. Evolution includes support for signing and encrypting mail via GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) and S/MIME. Encrypting mail helps you protect your privacy and helps those receiving your mail know its really from you. Evolution 2.0 includes a handy interface to help you manage your GPG keys and S/MIME certificates as well as a place to manage keys and certificates which have been shared to you.

SeaMonkey project is a community effort to deliver production-quality releases of code derived from the application formerly known as “Mozilla Application Suite”. It provides Web-browser, advanced e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editing made simple — all your Internet needs in one application.

Thunderbird
mIRC

XChat is an IRC chat program for both Linux and Windows. It allows you to join multiple IRC channels (chat rooms) at the same time, talk publicly, private one-on-one conversations etc. Even file transfers are possible. XChat also support DCC – a method for transferring file between users on IRC. And for the more advanced users plug-ins can be written and implemented to perform different automated tasks. The scripts can act as bots, which look like normal users on a channel – but a actually a computer program that e.g. keeps an eye out for your friends and forward messages to them if you are offline. Note: XChat for Windows costs money!
Skype

WengoPhone is an open source softphone for telephony over the internet also know as ip telephony and voip. It provides free PC-to-PC calls as well as chat and video conferencing. Through Wengo it provides both SMS and call-out features that allows you to call/communicate with any phone at extremly reasonably prices. WengoPhone uses SIP for it’s voip service.
Symantec Norton Personal Firewall

WIPFW is a firewall for Windows based on IPFW for FreeBSD unix and it provides virtually the same features, functionality and user interface.
VanDyke SecureCRT

PuTTYis a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. PuTTY is light-weight and simple. It only provides the features you need.

Poderosais an open source tabbed based terminal emulator. Poderosa allows you to work with split windows, so that you can easily run multiple sessions at once. It can be used as a local shell for cygwin. All typical terminal protocols are supported: telnet, SSH1/SSH2 and serial ports. Poderosa also provides a plug-in architecture allowing 3rd party developers to easily contribute new features and functionality.

Multimedia & Audio

Adobe Soundbooth (formerly Adobe Audition)

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to: record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs, edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files, cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together, change the speed or pitch of a recording, and more

Ardour is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. You can produce your own CDs, mix video soundtracks, or just experiment with new ideas about music and sound. Ardour capabilities include: multichannel recording, non-destructive editing with unlimited undo/redo, full automation support, a powerful mixer, unlimited tracks/busses/plugins, timecode synchronization, and hardware control from surfaces like the Mackie Control Universal.
Adobe Encore (formerly Adobe EncoreDVD)

DVDStyler is a cross-platform DVD authoring application that makes possible for video enthusiasts to create professional-looking DVDs. You can drag and drop MPEG files directly, create NTSC/PAL menus, import image file for background, place text and images anywhere on the menu screen, change font/color, put buttons, change font and colors, copy and paste any menu object you can set chapters for each movie, change post command for each movie.
Apple iTunes, Microsoft Windows Media Player and Winamp

Amarok is the music player for Linux and Unix with an intuitive interface. Amarok utilizes your existing album covers and displays them nicely in Context browser. If you do not have a cover, Amarok can download the appropriate one from the internet. It automatically downloads and stores lyrics for your songs, thanks to the advanced and flexible scripting system. Amarok is one of the first applications which featured Wikipedia integration.

musikCube is an mp3 player for the modern generation. It helps you just listen to what you want to hear, while offering innovative features not seen elsewhere. For the technical user, musikCube is based on an embedded SQL database engine known as sqlite. For the non technical user, that means its fast. Really fast. “Dynamic playlists” allow fully automatic, randomized playback of songs based on your observed listening habits. The more you listen, the smarter it gets. It also features browsable, user reorderable playlists. Cube also makes transferring audio between home and work very easy with it’s unique support for removable storage devices. A “removable storage device” is any flash memory, thumb drive, or portable mp3 player that acts as a hard disk when you plug it in.

Banshee allows to import, organize, play, and share your music using its simple, powerful interface. Rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs. Most portable music devices are supported. Banshee also 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.
CyberLink PowerDVD and InterVideo WinDVD

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

MPlayer is a movie player which runs on many systems (see the documentation). It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5 and even WMV movies. Another great feature of MPlayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, DirectFB, but you can use GGI, SDL (and this way all their drivers), VESA (on every VESA compatible card, even without X11!) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and ATI), too! Most of them support software or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen. MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the Siemens DVB, DXR2 and DXR3/Hollywood+.
Fraps

Taksi is a utility that allows you to take screenshots and record video clips of your favourite games and other 3D-graphics applications. Taksi aims to provide an open source alternative to that great tool. Taksi can support live video compression with any VFW video codec your system has installed (i.e. XVid, DivX, MS Mpeg4, etc). Supports user-specified key mapping, allowing user to assign almost any key to a particular function (such as video start/stop, screenshot trigger, etc.). Runtime re-mapping of the keys is supported via GUI: user can change keys without having to restart the game.
Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition

MythTVis a homebrew PVR project that I’ve been working on in my spare time. It’s been under heavy development for almost four years, and is now quite useable and featureful. It has support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings. It compresses video in software using rtjpeg (from Nuppelvideo) or mpeg4 (from libavcodec). Full support for Hardware MPEG-2 encoder cards (Hauppauge PVR-250 / PVR-350). Preliminary support for DVB cards and the new pcHDTV tuner card.

MediaPortal is an Open Source application ideal for turning your PC / TV into a very advanced Media Center. MediaPortal allows you to listen to your favorite music & radio, watch and store your videos and DVDs, view, schedule and record live TV as a digital video recorder and much much more. You get MediaPortal as Open Source software. This means you can help in developing MediaPortal or tweak it for your own needs with lots of innovating plugins from our great community.

Freevo allows you to manage your entire digital media collection – music, videos, photos etc. via a remote controlled TV interface and through the built in web interface you can also access your media, view your TV guide and schedule recordings from anywhere in the world. The benefit of freevo above other HTPC solutions is that freevo is 100% DRM free, plays video in 99.99% of formats, and most of all puts you in control of the television. As an open-source home theatre PC platform, Freevo employs a number of open-source audio/video tools, MPlayer and/or Xine are used to play audio and video files in most popular formats. Freevo can be used both for a standalone HTPC computer with a TV+remote, as well as on a regular desktop computer or laptop using the monitor and keyboard.
Nero Recode

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. Supported sources:any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (encrypted or unencrypted, but protection methods other than CSS are not supported and must be handled externally with third-party software), and some .VOB and .TS files, PAL or NTSC, AC-3, DTS, LPCM or MPEG audio tracks.
Steinberg Cubase

Ardour is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. You can produce your own CDs, mix video soundtracks, or just experiment with new ideas about music and sound. Ardour capabilities include: multichannel recording, non-destructive editing with unlimited undo/redo, full automation support, a powerful mixer, unlimited tracks/busses/plugins, timecode synchronization, and hardware control from surfaces like the Mackie Control Universal. If you’ve been looking for a tool similar to ProTools, Nuendo, Pyramix, or Sequoia, you might have found it.

Rosegarden is a professional audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and editing environment. Rosegarden is an easy-to-learn, attractive application that runs on Linux, ideal for composers, musicians, music students, and small studio or home recording environments.

Frinika is an open source (GPL), complete music workstation software for Linux, Windows, Mac OSX Tiger and other operating systems running Java 1.5 (J2SE5.0). It features sequencer, soft-synths, realtime effects and audio recording. Frinika is compact, self-contained and simple – yet powerful enough to boost your musical creativity. Launch Frinika now!

Security & Privacy

CommView

Wireshark is the world’s foremost network protocol analyzer, and is the standard in many industries.
Kaspersky Anti-Virus Personal, Symantec Norton AntiVirus

ClamWin is a Free Antivirus program for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP and 2003.ClamWin Free Antivirus comes with an easy installer and open source code. You may download and use it absolutely free of charge. It features: high detection rates for viruses and spyware; scanning Scheduler; automatic downloads of regularly updated Virus Database; standalone virus scanner and right-click menu integration to Microsoft Windows Explorer;

Clam AntiVirus is an open source (GPL) anti-virus toolkit for UNIX, designed especially for e-mail scanning on mail gateways. It provides a number of utilities including a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner and advanced tool for automatic database updates. The core of the package is an anti-virus engine available in a form of shared library.

Winpooch is a Windows watchdog, free and open source. Anti spyware and anti trojan, it gives a full protection against local or external attacks by scanning the activity of programs in real time. Associated with ClamWin antivirus, Winpooch keeps safe your computer against virus. Winpooch uses the API Hooking method. It spies programs when they are running and gives to the user a powerful control of their activity.For example, you can forbide a program to write in a system directory or in the registry, or else to connect to internet. That makes the difference between others anti spywares using a database of known signatures.
Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE

Winpooch is a Windows watchdog, free and open source. Anti spyware and anti trojan, it gives a full protection against local or external attacks by scanning the activity of programs in real time.

Spybot Search & Destroy is great for removing spyware and other malware.

Windows Defender is the Microsoft free anti-spyware program which when used in conjunction with another spyware scanning software can improve spyware removal chances.

PGP Desktop

GnuPG is the GNU project’s complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC2440 . GnuPG allows to encrypt and sign your data and communication, features a versatile key managment system as well as access modules for all kind of public key directories. GnuPG, also known as GPG, is a command line tool with features for easy integration with other applications. A wealth of frontend applications and libraries are available. Version 2 of GnuPG also provides support for S/MIME.

Email Cryption (Thunderbird)

Enigmail is an add-on you can utilize for encrypting email once you’ve installed PGP.

PGP Whole Disk Encryption

TrueCrypt is free open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP/2000 and Linux. Main Features: creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk, encrypts an entire hard disk partition or a storage device such as USB flash drive. Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.

FreeOTFE is a free, open source, “on-the-fly” transparent disk encryption program for PCs and PDAs. Using this software, you can create one or more “virtual disks” on your PC/PDA. These disks operate exactly like a normal disk, with the exception that anything written to one of them is transparently, and securely, encrypted before being stored on your computer’s hard drive.
Sunbelt iHateSpam

Mozilla’s Thunderbird email application features many new enhancements to help you better manage your unruly inbox, and stay informed.

The Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy (ASSP) Server project aims to create an open source platform-independent SMTP Proxy server which implements whitelists, Bayesian, and basic anti-virus filtering to rid the planet of the blight of unsolicited email (UCE).

System Utilities

Acronis Partition Expert

GParted is the Gnome Partition Editor application. Before attempting to use it, here is some basic background information. A hard disk is usually subdivided into one or more partitions. These partitions are normally not re-sizable (making one larger and the adjacent one smaller) The purpose of GParted is to allow the individual to take a hard disk and change the partition organization therein, while preserving the partition contents. GParted is an industrial-strength package for creating, destroying, resizing, moving, checking and copying partitions, and the filesystems on them. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganizing disk usage, copying data residing on hard disks and mirroring one partition with another (disk imaging).
Adobe Acrobat Reader

Xpdf is an open source viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files. (These are also sometimes also called ‘Acrobat’ files, from the name of Adobe’s PDF software.) The Xpdf project also includes a PDF text extractor, PDF-to-PostScript converter, and various other utilities. Xpdf runs under the X Window System on UNIX, VMS, and OS/2. The non-X components (pdftops, pdftotext, etc.) also run on Win32 systems and should run on pretty much any system with a decent C++ compiler. Xpdf is designed to be small and efficient. It can use Type 1, TrueType, or standard X fonts. Xpdf should work on pretty much any system which runs X11 and has Unix-like (POSIX) libraries.

Foxit Reader Foxit Reader is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size (only 2.1 M download size), breezing-fast launch speed and amazingly rich feature set. Foxit Reader supports Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.7.

Sumatra PDF is a slim, free, open-source PDF viewer for Windows. Sumatra has a minimalistic design. Simplicity has a higher priority than a lot of features. It’s small and starts up very fast. It’s designed for portable use: it’s just one file with no external dependencies so you can easily run it from external USB drive.

Ghostscript is an interpreter for the PostScript language and for PDF, and related software and documentation.
Camtasia Studio and Macromedia Captivate

xvidcap is a small tool to capture things going on on an X-Windows display to either individual frames or an MPEG video. On Windows machines there are commercial tools like Lotus ScreenCam or Camtasia which do a very good job esp. for the purpose I was needing such a tool for: Software documentation, esp. installation procedures and such.

CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)
Google Desktop Search

DocFetcher is a desktop search application: It allows you to quickly access documents on your computer by typing keywords. – You can think of it as Google for your local document repository. The application is currently available for Windows and GTK-based Linux distributions.
Hummingbird Exceed

Xming is the leading free unlimited X Window server for Microsoft Windows (XP/2003/Vista). Xming is fully featured, light and fast, simple to install and because it is standalone native Microsoft Windows, easily transported portable as a Pocket PC X server. It is totally secure when used with SSH and optionally includes an enhanced PuTTY Link SSH client and a portable PuTTY replacement package.
Macrovision InstallShield

Inno Setup is a free installer for Windows programs. First introduced in 1997, Inno Setup today rivals and even surpasses many commercial installers in feature set and stability. It supports all versions of Windows in use today: Vista, XP, 2003, 2000, Me, 98, 95, and NT 4.0. (No service packs are required.)

InstallJammer is a multiplatform GUI installer designed to be completely cross-platform and function on Windows and most all versions of UNIX with eventual support for Mac OS X. It features a very powerful install builder with support for multiple themes and a high level of configurability for installers. Installers are built as single executable files for easy distribution over the web and handle installing everything you need for your application in a simple, cross-platform way.

Launch4j is a cross-platform tool for wrapping Java applications distributed as jars in lightweight Windows native executables. The executable can be configured to search for a certain JRE version or use a bundled one, and it’s possible to set runtime options, like the initial/max heap size. The wrapper also provides better user experience through an application icon, a native pre-JRE splash screen, a custom process name, and a Java download page in case the appropriate JRE cannot be found.

NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) is a professional open source system to create Windows installers. It is designed to be as small and flexible as possible and is therefore very suitable for internet distribution. NSIS is script-based and allows you to create the logic to handle even the most complex installation tasks. Many plug-ins and scripts are already available: you can create web installers, communicate with Windows and other software components, install or update shared components and more.
Nero Burning Rom and Roxio RecordNow

K3b is the CD/DVD creator for Linux – optimized for KDE – licensed under the GPL.

InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration.

Burn is a burning application for Mac OS X

Cdrdao records audio or data CD-Rs in disk-at-once (DAO) mode based on a textual description of the CD contents.
StarNet X-Win32 version

Xming is the leading free unlimited X Window server for Microsoft Windows (XP/2003/Vista).
Symantec Norton Ghost

Partimage is a Linux utility which saves partitions having a supported filesystem to an image file. Most Linux and Windows filesystems are supported. The image file can be compressed with the gzip / bzip2 programs to save disk space, and they can be splitted into multiple files to be copied on CDs / DVDs. Partitions can also be saved across the network since version 0.6.0 using the partimage network support, or using Samba / NFS. If you don’t want to install Partimage, you can download and burn SystemRescueCd. It’s a livecd that allows to use Partimage immediately even if your computer has no operating system installed (useful to restore an image), and it allows to save an image on a DVD on the fly.

g4u (“ghosting for unix”) is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server, the other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk. Network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as an image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is also supported.
Symantec Veritas NetBackup

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. Bacula is relatively easy to use and efficient, while offering many advanced storage management features that make it easy to find and recover lost or damaged files.

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. Amanda uses native dump and/or GNU tar facilities and can back up a large number of workstations running multiple versions of Unix. Amanda uses Samba or Cygwin to back up Microsoft Windows desktops and servers.

StorageIM is an open source monitoring and reporting tool for storage systems and storage networks built around the CIM/SMI-S industry standards and is designed for use as a development aid within the IT vendor community. StorageIM is the first storage configuration and resource monitoring tool in the industry to be built with these rapidly emerging standards as its core. As a result StorageIM supports HBAs, Arrays, Switches, and Tape Libraries across vendor’s products with a high degree of interoperability and reliability. StorageIM uses the highly scalable xIM architecture as its core and thus, can be rapidly expanded with new capabilities.
UltraEdit-32

Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment. This project, based on the Scintilla edit component (a very powerful editor component), written in C++ with pure win32 api and STL (that ensures the higher execution speed and smaller size of the program), is under the GPL Licence.

SciTEis a SCIntilla based Text Editor. Originally built to demonstrate Scintilla, it has grown to be a generally useful editor with facilities for building and running programs. It is best used for jobs with simple configurations – I use it for building test and demonstration programs as well as SciTE and Scintilla, themselves. SciTE is currently available for Intel Win32 and Linux compatible operating systems with GTK+. It has been run on Windows 95, NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and on Red Hat Linux 8 and 9 with GTK+ 1.2 and 2.0.

jEdit is a text editor with hundreds (counting the time developing plugins) of person-years of development behind it. To download, install, and set up jEdit as quickly and painlessly as possible, go to the Quick Start page. While jEdit beats many expensive development tools for features and ease of use, it is released as free software with full source code, provided under the terms of the GPL 2.0.
VMware Server ESX

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux and Macintosh hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.

Cooperative Linux is the first working free and open source method for optimally running Linux on Microsoft Windows natively. More generally, Cooperative Linux (short-named coLinux) is a port of the Linux kernel that allows it to run cooperatively alongside another operating system on a single machine. For instance, it allows one to freely run Linux on Windows 2000/XP, without using a commercial PC virtualization software such as VMware, in a way which is much more optimal than using any general purpose PC virtualization software.

OpenVZ is an Operating System-level server virtualization solution, built on Linux. OpenVZ creates isolated, secure virtual environments — VEs (otherwise known as virtual private servers, or VPSs) on a single physical server enabling better server utilization and ensuring that applications do not conflict. Each VE performs and executes exactly like a stand-alone server; VEs can be rebooted independently and have root access, users, IP addresses, memory, processes, files, applications, system libraries and configuration files.
WinRAR and WinZip

7-Zip is open source software. Most of the source code is under the GNU LGPL license. The AES code is under a BSD LICENSE. The unRAR code is under a mixed license: GNU LGPL + unRAR restrictions.

Business Applications

SAP, Sage, Microsoft Dynamics, Infor, Netsuite, Lawson, Epicor

Compiere is the leading provider of open source and cloud-based ERP solutions to enterprises of all sizes around the globe. It delivers a rich set of integrated business functionality on a global-ready platform. Manage any number of organizations, warehouses, languages, currencies, and accounting rules. The scalable and adaptable Compiere platform handles the high volumes and business complexity required by demanding businesses of all sizes. With a highly interactive, web-based user experience, our software provides secure access from any web browser. Integration with other applications is easy using Compiere’s service oriented architecture (SOA) and web services. Compiere’s revolutionary design enables applications to be easily customized and extended without programming – a first in the ERP industry. Applications are defined as objects in an Active Data Dictionary rather than programmed as 3GL code. Your IT staff will easily embrace the techniques required to extend Compiere. Our software’s innovative design reduces the cost and effort associated with upgrading business applications; letting you automatically deploy the latest Compiere software versions while preserving all your business-specific extensions. Try Compiere ERP Today.
Salesforce.com and Siebel SFA

SugarCRM is an open source CRM software targeted for small to medium size business. Sugar Community Edition 5 adopted the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3. The software is available in three separate editions: enterprise, professional and community. It is designed around Sales Force Automation and allows creating marketing campaigns, maintaining accounts, contacts and leads and processing of incoming emails and web forms. Download it with the wizard or directly: Download Sugar OSS.
Remedy, Vantive and Sage

Queplix is an enterprise grade open source Customer Care software targeted for small to large enterprise. Queplix QueWeb is built in Java 2 Enterprise Edition and is based on the Google engine (GWT: Google Web Toolkit). GWT allows a clear separation between application core, its business and presentation layers which utilize variety of Google widgets. Because Queplix QueWeb 3.1 uses AJAX and WEB 2.0 technology it presents feature-rich and intuitive interface with powerful searches, intuitive navigation and tons of Customer Care features. Queplix software integrates with most back office software as well as Google Portal. You can download Queplix Open source edition from Google Code site. Enterprise edition also offers a migration tool for automated conversion of most legacy CRM software to open source QueWeb. Queplix QueWeb OSS is based on QPL (Mozilla Open Source License).
PeopleSoft HCM

OrangeHRM is an open source Human Resource Management software targeted for small to medium size business. The software covers employee information management, employee self service, leave, time & attendance, benefits, and recruitment. OrangeHRM is developed on SourceForge, and is under the GNU General Public License.
Microsoft Sharepoint

OpenGoo is an open source web-based solution focused on improving productivity, collaboration, communication and team management. One of the main objectives of the project is to focus on usability and user-friendliness. The software covers task management and sharing of all kinds of information such as documents, contacts, e-mail and calendars. Users can manage project progress, track time, and bill customers. OpenGoo is developed and serviced by Feng Office using SourceForge as its main repository. OpenGoo’s license is GPL-compatible.

Recreational Applications

Civilization

FreeCiv is a Free and Open Source empire-building strategy game inspired by the history of human civilization. The game commences in prehistory and your mission is to lead your tribe from the stone age to the space age… Windows/Mac/Linux

Dance Dance Revolution

StepMania is a free dance and rhythm game for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It features 3D graphics, keyboard and “dance pad” support, and an editor for creating your own steps.
Doom

Nexuiz is a free open-source first person shooter that runs on Windows, Linux and OSX. Nexuiz is a 3d deathmatch game that has been in development since the summer of 2002. The goal of the project is to create a high quality first person shooter that can be played freely across all platforms in one package: PC, Mac, and can be even included in Linux distributions. The game is entirely open source, with the sources of the engine, gamecode, map files, and compiling tools, all included with the download, all under the GPL license. The gameplay is deathmatch with the most excessive possible speeds and weapons, giving incredibly intense fast paced action. Along with deathmatch, there are muitple gamemodes such as team deathmatch, capture the flag, domination, and many mutators and weapon options like rocket arena and instagib. The user can fight through the single player campaign, going through over 20 levels, or play online with our server browser. Nexuiz is based on the Darkplaces engine, built on OpenGL technology. The darkplaces engine is an advanced Quake1 based engine developed mainly by Forest “LordHavoc” Hale, who has been working with the Quake1 engine for many years. A few of Darkplaces main features are Quake3bsp support, realtime lighting and shadowing, new particle effects, advanced menu system, and Md3 model support.
Dungeons & Dragons

The Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme. Build up a great army, gradually turning raw recruits into hardened veterans. In later games, recall your toughest warriors and form a deadly host against whom none can stand! Choose units from a large pool of specialists, and hand-pick a force with the right strengths to fight well on different terrains against all manner of opposition. Fight to regain the throne of Wesnoth, of which you are the legitimate heir, or use your dread power over the Undead to dominate the land of mortals, or lead your glorious Orcish tribe to victory against the humans who dared despoil your lands … Wesnoth has many different sagas waiting to be played out. You can create your own custom units, and write your own scenarios – or even full-blown campaigns. You can also challenge your friends – or strangers – and fight in epic multi-player fantasy battles. Windows/Mac/Linux

Freelancer

Vega Strike is an Open Source 3D Action-Space-Sim that lets you trade, fight, and explore in a vast universe. Vega Strike is built on top of OpenGL and runs on Win/Lin/Mac platforms. Vega Strike (the game) is currently in a playable state, but both game engine and dataset are under continued development. Windows/Mac/Linux

Flight Simulator X

The FlightGear flight simulator project is an open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight simulator development project. Source code for the entire project is available and licensed under the GNU General Public License. The goal of the FlightGear project is to create a sophisticated flight simulator framework for use in research or academic environments, for the development and pursuit of other interesting flight simulation ideas, and as an end-user application. We are developing a sophisticated, open simulation framework that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing. There are many exciting possibilities for an open, free flight sim. We hope that this project will be interesting and useful to many people in many areas. Windows/Mac/Linux

GT Pro Series

T.O.R.C.S. is The Open Racing Car Simulator. TORCS is a highly portable multi platform car racing simulation. It is used as ordinary car racing game, as AI racing game and as research platform. It runs on Linux (x86, AMD64 and PPC), FreeBSD, MacOSX and Windows. The source code of TORCS is licensed under the GPL (“Open Source”).

The Marathon Trilogy

Aleph One is an open-source descendant of Bungie’s Marathon 2 first person 3D shooting game. Aleph One supports Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity data files (available below). A conversion of Marathon 1 called M1A1 and many third party scenarios and net maps are also available. Aleph One features software and OpenGL rendering, Internet play, Lua scripting, and much more. It is available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). To play, download the engine and some game content and copy the engine into the directory with the game content. Windows/Mac/Linux

Singstar

UltraStar Deluxe is Karaoke Software for PC like Singstar for PS2. It evaluates your singing by analyzing your voice pitch. Songs can be created with integrated Editor. This is a Fork of the UltraStar Project with many massive improvements. (Windows ONLY) seo training

“Films like Star Wars use terms like empire and rebellion, but they are bandied about in bland ways — powerful words used to describe nothing,” Rivera said. “One of the original propositions of my film is that we (create that sense) of a world divided between wealth and power.”

“I love gnomes and goblins and elves,” said Rivera, who’s made a name for himself touring museums and festivals with his award-winning shorts. “But what I’m really interested in is speculative fiction. I wanted to use this film to ask the question, ‘Where are we going?’”

- Wired Article

Sci-fi has for a very long time served the purpose of framing current sensitive social and political issues and putting them into a clear perspective without making people feel preached to.  It was a way to get people to think about issues that they normally wouldn’t or didn’t want to think about for various psychological reasons.  I feel that this has always been the greatest strength of the genre and during the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, with the exception of Star Wars and a few other more trivial pieces, the genre as a whole set out to bring a multitude of social issues into the spotlight.  It was like film directors and authors realized this magic lamp where they could very surreptitiously put these unquestioned injustices into peoples minds and make them question them for the first time.  I wouldn’t call this a ‘golden age’ of sci-fi but it certainly was a purer age.  There was less science fiction being produced(as there were less movies in general being produced) but on a per capita basis they were overwhelmingly more thought provoking and taking full advantage of the above-mentioned strength of the medium.

Today however that is changed, and not that it is necessarily a bad thing as the more Sci-fi blockbusters we have the more

The porno of the sci-fi world

interest and acceptance the genre has as a whole and the easier it will be for true science fiction to get funded, but today is certainly a different age where Sci-fi is big business.  We have more and more pieces of strictly eye candy, where the strength of the medium to affect change in our thinking and society in general is thrown out for the ability to create big explosions and satisfy the increasingly shrinking attention span and ever expanding mental laziness of the developed world.  People don’t want to think, they want to be distracted from thinking by exploding starships and revenge seeking Romulans(referring of course to the latest Star Trek Film – thanks Abrahms).

However this isn’t a doom and gloom article, this is an article of hope for as I mentioned the more play these pieces of porno-graphic eye-candy get the more interest there will be in the genre overall and we are starting to see more and more thought provoking sci-fi than ever before.  While it may seem like the 60’s,70’s and 80’s were pumping out great sci-fi at a faster rate, it certainly wasn’t so.. There were so many classics made in this era no doubt but they were certainly spaced out over a long period separated by years at times.

Turn on your brain

Whereas we are seeing 2-3 fairly profound films coming out almost yearly now and even some of the frivolous eye candy such as Avatar will have an obvious and simplistic thought provoking message behind it.

Here’s a great resource that lays out a timeline of the SF era of the past: http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline1960.html
http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline1970.html
http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline1980.html

Because of this evolution of the genre I feel that we are going to see a clear divide coming down between Sci-fi action flicks such as the last Star Trek, or Avatar and then the sci-fi that attempts to shine light on these dark recesses of our mind that we so conveniently block out such as District 9 or Soylent Green.

Alex Rivera, in the linked article at the top of this post mentioned ‘Speculative Fiction‘ which is a great term to show the other greatest strength of this medium.  As apposed to regular fiction or fantasy Sci-fi and speculative fiction forces us to look forward instead of being stuck in the mud of the past or present, but more importantly it forces us to look forward to where we are going and ask ourselves ‘Is that really where we want to go?’ .  I think that is where we are going to see a divide forming even stronger than before between Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction.  The latter intending to provoke debate and thought about our evolving society and the former meant to simply turn off your brain and take you on a mini-vacation from your everyday.  Both certainly having merits but I feel it is going to be incredibly dangerous to undervalue the importance of the former over the latter.

What cliff?

We live in a world that is incredibly frightening for a growing portion of the population because of the exponential rate of change and development we are experiencing.  So much so that some scientists playfully predict the emergence of a species of humans, homo evolutis, engineered by us. Our world is changing so fast now that we often don’t have time to contemplate the full ramification that come with the increasingly rapid adoption of new technologies and social changes.  Most often this is simply because these changes are being introduced almost one after another after another without any time to breath.  Speculative fiction however, if widely adopted makes it almost instinctive that we think about these situations and possible outcomes before they even arise.  It puts our brains into a future simulator of sorts where we are running through countless of possible outcomes for our society every week, culminating to subconscious database of sorts of ‘what if’ scenarios that we carry around with us.  Without this database in our heads we blindly charge forward through the jungle of our progress without any regard of potential cliffs that lay ahead until it is too late.  With a mind that is constantly being challenged with deep thought-provoking what if scenarios we will hopefully be able to recognize some of the signs of these impending cliffs before we are spinning our tires in mid air about to drop 1000 meters to our doom.

Clearly I am not saying that Speculative Fiction is going to single-handedly save this world however with the current rate of adoption of technology, a rate which is increasing exponentially, we can no longer afford to live in the past or even the present for that matter.  The logical part of our brains must exist 100% in the future at all times, not just one future but many possible futures.  A failure to do this could very likely destroy our future all together.

]]> http://blog.netflowdevelopments.com/2010/01/24/science-fiction-tool-survival/feed/ 13 http://blog.netflowdevelopments.com/2010/01/15/the-dire-situation-in-haiti-what-can-you-do/ http://blog.netflowdevelopments.com/2010/01/15/the-dire-situation-in-haiti-what-can-you-do/#comments Sat, 16 Jan 2010 03:36:11 +0000 admin http://blog.netflowdevelopments.com/?p=393

According to recent stories we may be seeing up to 200,000+ people dead in Haiti and over 1/3 of their capital city needing to be rebuilt, which ranks it in as one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history and in the top 10 deadliest earthquakes ever recorded.  With the advent of microbloggin and the explosive use of SMS in recent years we are witnessing an almost immediate outpouring of support in amounts never before seen in comparable time frames.

So I wanted to just share some of the ways that you can give to those survivors in Haiti to help the Red Cross and other organizations do their part.  It is good to know that this money isn’t going to the Haitian government, which has devolved to a sess pool of corruption, in large part responsible for the death tolls being as high as they are.  I can only hope that this event will push the people of Haiti over the edge to stand up for their long corrupt government that has been profiteering off of their hardship while keeping the entire country at sub-human conditions for far too long.

1. From your Mobile phone simple text  HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to RedCross relief
2. Through the Yele Campaign you can donate online to a more customizable amount:  Go here for more info: https://co.clickandpledge.com/advanced/default.aspx?wid=23093

The UN is saying they need over 500 million dollars to adequately handle relief efforts in Haiti so that gives us a goal to shoot for, if you are able do your part and chip in to help these extremely unfortunate souls who are surviving the post-apocalyptic aftermath of this tragic event.

Email this to friends and family, retweet it or repost it on facebook to get more of the word out so people who want to help don’t feel helpless and do nothing.

Cheers

Ryan

What you do is with a new email open go into the insert menu (alt+i) and use the arrow keys to highlight(but don’t press enter) then with the command select press your hotkey combination.  Or in my case I simply press the ‘m’ key with add attachment selected and then it bound m to that action.

It’s an awesome way to handle shortcuts but there is a distinct lack of documentation on it so hopefully this article will find its way onto some google searches of people with a similar dilema.

The program is syndaemon and it can be enabled in shell by typing: syndaemon -i 3 -d

Where

• -i parameter defines number of seconds to wait after keyboard is used – ( 3 seconds suites me. )
• -d  parameter is used for running syndaemon in background mode ( as a daemon ).

If above command throws some error then you are using other than 9.04 release. To get it working type in terminal,

wget http://people.ubuntuwire.com/~fujitsu/syndaemon
chmod +x syndaemon
sudo mv syndaemon /usr/bin/
syndaemon -i 3 -d

Again type the syndaemon command in terminal, it shouldn`t give any error messages.

Above command has to be executed each time machine is rebooted. To execute above command automatically we can create a tiny bash script and add it to startup items.

1. Create a new file somewhere ( My BSD habits puts files like this in /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ but that’s just me ) and copy paste following into it.

#!/bin/bash
syndaemon -i 2.5 -d

2. To add above script to startup items, go to System > Preferences > Startup Applicaitons >  Add. In new  pop-up box name it something meaningful and type in the path and command.. After that click “Add”.

There you go, done like dinner    Enjoy not having the hell of your cursor selecting 2 paragraphs of text and typing over it before you know what’s going on!

Found a concept design for tomorrow’s laptop today and thought it was cool enough to share.  What I like about this is that it doens’t just look cool and look pretty in a futuristic way but it incorporates common sense technology that not only makes sense but will be feasible very very shortly if not already.  The design was created by Orkin Design, a german design firm.  Either way very cool

Orkin Design has unveiled the rolltop concept with the support of Schlagheck-Design and the device comes with a flexible display which can be rolled and carried wherever you want.

Thanks to its OLED-Display technology and a multi touch screen, it can be used a laptop while it weighs as much as mini notebook. It comes with a 13 inch screen while being used a laptop and when being used as a monitor, you could get a cool 17 inches screen. Power supply, multi media integrated pen and even a holding belt are integrated in the ROLL TOP and it certainly is an all-in-one gadget.

Click here to view the embedded video.