Open Source Software

Another name for this bunch is Free Software but since that term can be misunderstood, I have plumped for the open source moniker instead. The idea behind this page is that it is a listing of open source software that is extended and updated periodically. Therefore, it will start small for it to grow from here. Let’s get things going.

Operating Systems

Linux is the mainstay here but there are other UNIX alternatives out there too and you’ll find them below along with the Linux contingent. Ubuntu is my choice of the bunch but the openSUSE line (including SuSE 6.x & 7.x) has taken my fancy in the past and Fedora might have been what I would be using were it not for the rise of a certain other Linux distribution.

CrunchBang

Debian

Fedora

FreeBSD

gNewSense

Linux Mint

Mandriva

OpenBSD

OpenSolaris

openSUSE

PC-BSD

PCLinuxOS

SimplyMEPIS

Slackware

Ubuntu

Desktop Environments

These are primarily a Linux bunch though I have seen their escape to the UNIX world too. GNOME gets my vote but that’s never a reason not to examine the merits of KDE. Were it not for doubts in the minds of some regarding its freedom from proprietary constraints, I and others might never have the option of using it as much as I do.

GNOME

KDE

Databases

The first of these, a recent acquisition of the behemoth that is Sun Microsystems (itself now to be swallowed up by Oracle so who knows what’s going to happen), powers an awful lot of the web while the second continues to lurk too.

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Programming and Scripting Languages

Many of the computer languages that power the web are themselves open so here are the bigger players. Others will join them as I find them.

Perl

PHP

Python

OpenJDK

Publishing Platforms

This edifice is powered by WordPress but there are other blogging options out there and a number of these appear below. Also joining the list is the software that powers Wikipedia and a smattering of Content Management Systems. With regard to the latter, OpenSourceCMS is a good place to try them before you go about downloading them. For those having Python available on their web server and wanting more customisability than what you find on offer below, there’s always Django as well.

Chyrp

Drupal

Difficult to disentangle CSS was what put me off this when I tried it. Otherwise, it’s an impressive offering but Textpattern’s greater simplicity gets my vote.

Gallery

This seems to be that rare thing, a fully featured photo publishing platform for the web. Themes, comment handling and even shopping carts are all here so there’s no need to entrust your photos to Flickr and its kind if you’re not willing to build it all yourself.

Habari

It’s tempting to wonder if there really is a need for another blogging tool these days but someone clearly has and this stripped-down offering is the result. If WordPress ever does something that really gets in my way, it might even be what I choose to use. Saying that, it has a little way to go until feature maturity is reached but that’s never to say that it’s not usable right now.

Joomla!

MediaWiki

Movable Type

This was king of the blogging hill until it upset its users but it remains very much out there having users like the BBC. In spite of the fact that it’s been around for what now feels like an age, the Open Source edition is a recent development. That may have something to do with Six Apart’s focus of the enterprise market and paid blogging services.

Pivot

PivotX

Serendipity

This uses the Smarty templating engine as the backbone of its blogging capability and very well it seems to work too. Of course, there is the need to learn a new of doing things but that’s always the way with unfamiliar technology. In this case, it is the templating language that really supplies the learning curve though a day’s effort is all that’s needed to get going. With all that’s going for it, it’s a pity that the calendar widget (or nugget as these things get called in the Serendipity world) doesn’t stop when it should and lands you one month into the future! Let’s hope that they get as far as addressing that one.

SilverStripe

Symphony

You can base a CMS around XML and XSLT too on the evidence of this offering. Their claims regarding simplicity and ease of use aren’t things that I have had opportunity to test but there’s a PHP/MySQL backbone needed here too.

Textpattern

It may not feel as slick or as swish as others but I have made it do what I want for A Wanderer’s Miscellany. With its only Textile mark up language and the way that content is organised, it may come across as being more for technical folks but that can be tamed too. Plugins help on that front and I have grown to respect the flexibility. As you might have gathered, I quite like it.

TiddlyWiki

TikiWiki

WordPress

Started out as a fork from b2 and is moving along a path from dedicated blogging tool to more general content management system. Though I am always concerned that some succeeding version will foist something upon me that I don’t want or need, it so far has avoided this state of affairs. That’s just as well given that it turns up on nearly every website that I currently run.

XWiki

Web Development Frameworks

The idea behind this piece is to collect any open source web development coding frameworks regardless of the scripting language used. Here are few to get the thing going and give you an idea as what may yet come.

Django

If one of the above publishing platforms is too restrictive for you, then this might suit. Apparently, it’s effectively a CMS construction kit. I have yet to give it a look but that may change. If there’s any caveat, it’s that it uses Python as its scripting language and that may not be available with every web hosting package. Other than that, it should be fine.

Xoops

It’s billed as a web application framework but there’s content management there too. All in all, this modularised PHP/MySQL driven offering probably needs checking out before being defined more explicitly.

jQuery

MooTools

Prototype

Both these are JavaScript libraries and they must find a use in many a web application (WordPress itself comes to mind). If you want more, it might be an idea to check the round ups at  Open Source Tecnnology and DevX.com.

Other Website Tools

Here are a few pieces that would fall into the category of website accessories. To date, I haven’t come across so many of these but will that change?

OpenX

The point of this tool is to manage advertising. While that means that I may never get to using it, that’s never to say that there aren’t others who might.

Piwik

This is something that I use: a self-hosted website analytics engine. Using Google Analytics and Woopra is all very fine but they are implemented using JavaScript scripts hosted on other parts of the web and that can slow down page loading as well as giving blockers of JavaScript something else to do. The latest version may not work on the servers hosting websites for me but, given that the previous provides all that I need, there’s no incentive in upgrading.

More Desktop Software

Eclipse

It’s the PHP variant that I use but its roots are in Java development and there seems to more to the project than might be expected at first. If it seems sluggish on Linux, it might be worth checking out the JRE that is on you system because what comes as default with Debian certainly was suboptimal and changing the Sun JRE really did speed up things.

Emacs

A long standing UNIX/Linux text editor that has been doing battle with Vi for longer than many can remember. Like the alternative, it has keyboard shortcuts that do anything but make concessions to Windows conventions, add needless steepening of any learning curve unless you find the appropriate option (CUA) that allows for some emulation of mainstream keyboard shortcuts. Nevertheless, there is a GUI variant too that makes life easier and I have to concede that it has a history that is longer than even Microsoft itself. As if that weren’t enough compensation, it is a powerful piece of software whose functionality goes much further than text editing whose surface I have only barely begun to scratch. The logic of the interface may be different to that to which many are accustomed but it is consistent and well thought out nonetheless.

Filezilla

This my FTP client of choice and its advent has made the need to buy such software extinct. That it works on both Windows and Linux is a bonus.

GIMP

The ubiquitous Photoshop challenger is maturing nicely though its interface may not please some.

ImageMagick

Using a command line tool for image processing may seem counterintuitive but there are operations where you need not have much user intervention. Included among these is image resizing and conversion between file formats and yours truly has done both. Processing many files at a stroke comes naturally to this very useful and talented piece of software too.

Mozilla Fennec

Describing it as Firefox for mobile phones should be all that you need to know. There’s a PC emulator available too.

Mozilla Firefox

There’s no way that I could not what might the de facto standard web browser for Linux….

Mozilla Seamonkey

The original Mozilla suite still lives on and this is how it’s called nowadays.

Mozilla Sunbird

Mozilla’s contribution to the personal organiser scene.

Mozilla Thunderbird

An email client that I might have been using were it not for Evolution’s being more to my liking.

NEdit

UNIX/Linux offers plenty of text editors so here’s another of the less well known ones that I have encountered. Syntax highlighting is part of the offer and some menu customisation is possible too. In essence, it is a straightforward text editor that works with Windows keyboard shortcuts but that can be no bad thing.

NetBeans

You cannot feature Eclipse in a software listing without having NetBeans too. In fact, it was NetBeans that I first encountered and that was many moons ago. There is a PHP variant available but that seemed very sluggish when I tried it and turned back to Eclipse, with which I have stuck ever since. That poor performance may have been caused by the variant of Java that was available to it so I may give it another ago when I have the time.

OpenOffice.org

Is this the office suite of choice for Linux? It certainly feels like it.

Privoxy

Here’s the description from the website:

Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk.

It’s available for a number of platforms, including Linux and UNIX, and offers a way of blocking ads in Google Chrome, which is how I got to hear about it. Ubuntu users can snag a copy from the usual repositories too.

Configuration is by means of editing text files but the default settings have sufficient so far. Setting a browser to use it means searching through settings for the means of making it use IP address 127.0.0.1 and port 8118 for ordinary and secure HTTP connections.

Songbird

Sadly, this project no longer officially supports Linux but a community support option remains. Quite why they are concentrating with providing software for Windows and OS X is beyond me because it based on the guts of Firefox. That may come as a surprise to some and the latest version (1.4.3) certainly looks good in the flesh and there’s 7digital and Last.fm integration too. Now that it doesn’t work on Ubuntu 10.04, I am using Banshee instead but hey ho…

UFRaw

This reader and manipulator of raw digital camera image formats acts either alone or as a plugin. It also can be used via the command line or using a GUI. That makes it flexible for those times when you need things to happen without much input from yourself.

VirtualBox

Apart from the fact that 64-bit operating systems are not supported in the OSE version, this is an excellent piece of virtualisation software that makes you wonder why you’d pay for something like VMware Workstation. There is also a closed source variant but the open source equivalent has what you’d want for personal use anyway.