Topic: Freely available and legal software.

[Bonk]

More software that starts with "g".

GnuCash

GnuCash is personal and small-business financial-accounting software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows.

Designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible, GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. As quick and intuitive to use as a checkbook register, it is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports.

[Nemesis]

Input Director

About Input Director

Input Director is a Windows application that lets you control multiple Windows systems using the keyboard/mouse attached to one computer. It is designed for folks who have two (or more) computers set up at home and find themselves regularly sliding from one system to the other (and wearing out the carpet in the process!). With Input Director, you can share a single keyboard/mouse across a set of systems. You switch which system receives the input either by hotkey or by moving the cursor so that it transitions from one screen to the other (in a very similar fashion to a multi-monitor setup). The idea being that you can position the monitors from two or more systems in a row and use a shared keyboard/mouse to control all of them.

Courtesy of Stephen.

[Bonk]

I notice SLAX is not on our list. I just booted it from a USB flash stick for the first time this week and was very impressed, much better than booting a live distribution from CD. SLAX is already quite a bit tighter than Knoppix. It is a minimalist live distribution of Slackware with a modular build system.

Slax

Slax is a modern, portable, small and fast Linux operating system with a modular approach and outstanding design. Despite its small size, Slax provides a wide collection of pre-installed software for daily use, including a well organized graphical user interface and useful recovery tools for system administrators

[Nemesis]

Here is one provided by Stephen.  It isn't software but it is a free online service.

TinEye

What is TinEye?
    TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. For some real TinEye search examples, check out our Cool Searches page.

[Nemesis]

Xena

Xena
Software for Digital Preservation

Xena is free and open source software developed by the National Archives of Australia to aid in the long term preservation of digital records. Xena is an acronym meaning 'Xml Electronic Normalising for Archives'.

Xena is written in Java and is therefore cross-platform, running on Linux, Windows and OS X.

Xena software aids digital preservation by performing two important tasks:

    * Detecting the file formats of digital objects
    * Converting digital objects into open formats for preservation

[Nemesis]

Courtesy of Stephen:

ScummVM

ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed!

Some of the adventures ScummVM supports include Adventure Soft's Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2; Revolution's Beneath A Steel Sky, Broken Sword 1 and Broken Sword 2; Flight of the Amazon Queen; Wyrmkeep's Inherit the Earth; Coktel Vision's Gobliiins; Westwood Studios' The Legend of Kyrandia and games based on LucasArts' SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) system such as Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max and more. You can find a thorough list with details on which games are supported and how well on the compatibility page. ScummVM is continually improving, so check back often.

Among the systems on which you can play those games are Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Dreamcast, PocketPC, PalmOS, AmigaOS, BeOS, OS/2, PSP, PS2, SymbianOS and many more...

[Bonk]

This looks like a good one. I'll report once I've checked it out.

Avogadro

Avogadro is an advanced molecular editor designed for cross-platform use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas. It offers flexible rendering and a powerful plugin architecture.

    * Cross-Platform: Molecular builder/editor for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
    * Free, Open Source: Easy to install and all source code is available under the GNU GPL.
    * International: Translations into French and German, with more languages to come.
    * Intuitive: Built to work easily for students and advanced researchers both.
    * Fast: Supports multi-threaded rendering and computation.
    * Extensible: Plugin architecture for developers, including rendering, interactive tools, commands, and Python scripts.
    * Flexible: Features include Open Babel import of files, input generation for multiple computational chemistry packages, crystallography, and biomolecules.

[Nemesis]

Ext2 Installable File System For Windows

Features

Detailed list of features:

    * Supports Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista and Windows 2008.
    * Supports both the 32 bit x86 and the 64 bit x64 platform.
    * Includes drivers with a digital signature for Windows Vista x64.
    * All operations you would expect: Reading and writing files, listing directories, creating, renaming, moving and deleting files or directories, querying and modifying the volume's label.
    * UTF-8 encoding.
    * Files larger than 2 GBytes. (Please read the FAQ section, too.)
    * Supports hash indexed (htree) directories (utilizes the so-called dir_index feature of Ext3).
    * Full plug-n-play functionality. When a drive is removed, the corresponding drive letter is deleted.
    * Supports use of the Windows mountvol utility to create or delete drive letters for Ext2 volumes (except on Windows NT 4.0). This is useful for scripts. (Please read the FAQ section, too.)
    * A global read-only option is provided.
    * File names that start with a dot "." character are treated as hidden.
    * Supports GPT disks if the Windows version used also does.
    * Paging files are supported. (A paging file is a file "pagefile.sys", which Windows swaps virtual memory to.) Users may create paging files at NT's control panel at Ext2 volumes.
    * Specific functions of the I/O subsystem of NT: Byte range locks, notification of changes of directories, oplocks (which are required by the NT LAN manager for sharing files via SMB).

The file system driver Ext2fs.sys caches file data and the file system's meta data such as directories and all the on-disk structures of the Ext2 file system. (It uses the file cache of the Windows NT operating system.) Therefore it is performant. The level of sophistication of the Ext2 file system driver's implementation is indeed comparable to Windows NT's native file system drivers.

[Bonk]

Oooh, that looks like good one, ext3 would be better though.

This one was a BIG help to me recently in cleaning out my mother's laptop:

RootkitRevealer

RootkitRevealer is an advanced rootkit detection utility. It runs on Windows NT 4 and higher and its output lists Registry and file system API discrepancies that may indicate the presence of a user-mode or kernel-mode rootkit. RootkitRevealer successfully detects many persistent rootkits including AFX, Vanquish and HackerDefender (note: RootkitRevealer is not intended to detect rootkits like Fu that don't attempt to hide their files or registry keys). If you use it to identify the presence of a rootkit please let us know!

I guess I should let them know it helped me find one not listed...

[Nemesis]

Oooh, that looks like good one, ext3 would be better though.

From the FAQ

Does the Ext2 driver access Ext3 volumes, too?

The Ext3 file system is the Ext2 file system which has been extended by journaling. Ext3 is backward-compatible to Ext2 - an Ext3 volume can be mounted and used as an Ext2 volume. Just as older Linux Kernels which do not know the Ext3 file system can mount Ext3 volumes (as Ext2 volumes), the Ext2 file system driver ext2fs.sys for Windows incorporated in this software package can do it without any problems, too. Of course you do not take advantage of the journaling of the Ext3 file system if you mount it as an Ext2 file system.

If you mount an Ext3 file system as an Ext2 file system and the file system is not cleanly dismounted, (e.g. due to a system crash), you have to run the e2fsck tool. (Linux does it automatically.) Running e2fsck can take several hours on large volumes. You do not benefit from journaling the Ext3 file system, because you have to run e2fsck.

If you mount an Ext3 file system as an Ext3 file system (journaling) and the file system is not cleanly dismounted due to a system crash, things are much better: When the volume is mounted next time as an Ext3 file system, a replay of the journal will be done, after which the file system will be consistent. You need not run e2fsck. (If you run e2fsck nevertheless, it won't find any errors of the Ext3 file system, because there will not be any errors after replaying the journal.)

If a volume is mounted as Ext3 file system, any new data is first completely written into the journal, and then into the file system. This is also called a transaction. Finally, the data is removed from the journal. So a journal only contains data when you are writing to the file system. After a clean dismount of the Ext3 file system, the journal is empty.

When the Linux kernel mounts an Ext3 file system, it first checks whether the journal contains complete transactions (not written yet due to a prior crash). If there are any, it does the already mentioned replay of the journal, which means that all data of the journal is written to the file system, and any data will be removed from it. So a replay always repairs any damage caused by a prior crash.

With the described way of writing the journal and the file system's data and with a replay of the journal after a crash, consistency of the file system is always achieved. Thus, e2fsck will not find any error.

The Ext2 file system driver of the Ext2 IFS software will refuse mounting an Ext3 file system which contains data in its journal, just like older Linux kernels which have no Ext3 support. In this way data loss and damaging the file system is avoided when the journal is subsequently replayed. So you can access only those Ext3 volumes with the Ext2 IFS software which have been cleanly dismounted beforehand.

[Bonk]

Cool! Thanks for the info Nemesis, I did not really know the difference between ext2 and ext3, now I do!

[Nemesis]

Cool! Thanks for the info Nemesis, I did not really know the difference between ext2 and ext3, now I do!

I hadn't known either.  I just recalled reading a mention that it could read Ext3 as well and went looking to find out if I was right. 

[Bonk]

I've been using this one a lot lately, I don't think it is on our list:

pdftk

If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents.

DO NOT download it from accesspdf.com - that site is out of date, it has not kept pace with the author.

Direct link to downloads on pdfhacks: http://www.pdfhacks.com/pdftk/index.html#packages

Note it is GPL.

[Bonk]

Modeling crowd might be interested in this one:

MeshLab

MeshLab is an open source, portable, and extensible system for the processing and editing of unstructured 3D triangular meshes.
The system is aimed to help the processing of the typical not-so-small unstructured models arising in 3D scanning, providing a set of tools for editing, cleaning, healing, inspecting, rendering and converting this kind of meshes.
The system is heavily based on the VCG library developed at the Visual Computing Lab of ISTI - CNR, for all the core mesh processing tasks and it is available for Windows, Linux (src) and MacOSX (intel only).

I thought the demo pdf was kinda cool: http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/wiki/images/c/cc/Laurana.pdf

[Bonk]

Some games:

Cube 2: Sauerbraten

Cube 2: Sauerbraten is a free multiplayer/singleplayer first person shooter, built as a major redesign of the Cube FPS.

Much like the original Cube, the aim of this game is not necessarily to produce the most features & eyecandy possible, but rather to allow map/geometry editing to be done dynamically in-game, to create fun gameplay and an elegant engine.

The engine supporting the game is entirely original in code & design, and its code is Open Source (ZLIB license, read the docs for more on how you can use the engine).

Planeshift

PlaneShift is a Role Playing Game immersed into a 3D virtual fantasy world which is FULLY FREE to play. Fully free means you will have no surprises of premium content which will limit your gameplay or unbalance the game. There are no limitations in skills, ranks, abilities, items you can gain with your free account. There are no time limits or additional constraints. Other similar games just advertize the "free" concept to sell you premium accounts. We don't. Servers and bandwidth will be donated by sponsors.

At the present state of development, PlaneShift is not a complete game, but what we call a "tech demo". With this definition we mean that the game is still under heavy development, so you may easily find bugs, glitches and missing features. We decided to open it to the public because we want to have your feedback on improving the game and because we have enjoyed seeing our progress being put into productive use from the beginning. Apart from this, the game is enjoyable and has hundreds of active players.

Nexuiz

Nexuiz is a free open-source first person shooter that runs on Windows, Linux and OSX.
See Nexuiz in action! Watch the video featured below!

Nexuiz is a fast paced 3d deathmatch game project created online by a team of developers called Alientrap. It is available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux (all the same archive).

The first version was released May 31st 2005, released entirely GPL and free over the net, a first for a project of its kind. Since then it has been downloaded over 1.5 million times, and the game is still being updated and developed, currently at version 2.5 and new releases being developed.

[Bonk]

Iron

SRWare Iron: The browser of the future - based on the free Sourcecode "Chromium" - without any problems at privacy and security

Google's Web browser Chrome thrilled with an extremely fast site rendering, a sleek design and innovative features.  But it also gets critic from data protection specialists , for reasons such as creating a unique user ID or the submission of entries to Google to generate suggestions. SRWare Iron is a real alternative. The browser is based on the Chromium-source and offers the same features as Chrome - but without the critical points that the privacy concern.

Posting from it now. Nice to be able to try Chromium without all that spyware crap. Performance is not really any better than Firefox (considerably worse in places), but it is pretty slick overall.

Too bad Google doesn't get it. Will SRWare be in it for the long haul? We know google is, why don't they just save us the trouble of rebuilding their browser??

Main complaint: CTRL-W = "go back"? - well anyway, don't accidentally hit CTRL-W mid post or you'll lose it. Nice to see it does have a spell check built in, as php has nuked aspell which will kill SMF's spell checker. (looks at IE users)


Edit(much later): Iron really shines on the webmap, the rendering performance is clearly far superior to IE and FF and a hair better than Opera.

[Bonk]

VPatch

VPatch is a free patch generator which can generate small patch files which can update old versions to new versions. This means that if the old version is installed on the user system, you can patch it to the new version, and you don't have to distribute the full new version, only the much smaller patch.

[Nemesis]

Not software but free for download books related to software.

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Some of these books are old some new. 

[Nemesis]

Sugar on a Stick

  What is Sugar?

Sugar is an educational software platform built with the Python programming language and based on the principles of cognitive and social constructivism.

  Introduction

Sugar Labs offers ubiquitous access to Sugar in a USB (Universal Serial Bus) flash memory drive (stick). The Sugar on a Stick project gives children access to their Sugar on any computer in their environment with just a USB memory stick. Taking advantage of the Fedora LiveUSB, it's possible to store everything you need to run Sugar on a single USB memory stick (minimum size 1GB). This small USB device can boot into the Sugar learning platform on different computers at home, at school, or at an after-school program, bypassing the software on the those computers. In fact, Sugar on a Stick will work even if the computer does not have a hard-drive. With Sugar on a Stick, the learning experience is the same on any computer: at school, at home, at the library, or an after-school center.

[Sirgod]

Input Director

Oops, just noticed I had already suggested this, my bad.

Stephen