Recommended Software List
The following are some popular software applications. It's a mixture of free and non-free software.
We have included commercial and community software as well.
Commercial software requires purchasing and community software can be downloaded at gratis.
Some of these are preloaded on your Linuxvillage Computer Packages (see Preloaded Computers for details.)
Most can be downloaded through Debian's Synaptic Package Manager, more....
Debian repository comes with over 18,000+ precompiled software bundles. Others may need to be downloaded and compiled from source.
Read more about Debian distribution in Kernel.
We hope you enjoy your experience with Debian GNU/Linux as much as we did.
All material presented are licensed under The GNU Free Documentation License.
- Productivity Software
- Office
- Finance
- Educational and Research
- Graphic Software
- Multimedia Software
- Media Players
- Media Production
- Musician's Corner
- Examples of Ogg Media Productions
- Internet Software
- Games Software
- Linux Games
- Windows® Games
- Programming Tools
- Programming Languages.
- IDEs and other Development Tools
- GUI
- Services
- Operating System
- Desktop
- Kernel
- User space program
- Networking
- references
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Productivity Software
Office
- Openoffice
- Calc - a spreadsheet application that is compatible with MS Excel® except for the macros.
- Draw - a graphic program.
- Write - a word processor program that can read and write in other formats. e.g. MS Word®, Adobe® PDFs, etc.
- Impress - a presentation generator compatible with MS Power Point® 97/2000/XP.
- Math - an excellent formula composer for inserting mathematical formula in your documents.
- OOoLilyPond for inserting music scores into your writing.*
- CALC2QIF is the OpenOffice version of XL2QIF.
It is a Calc (OpenOffice spreadsheet) macro that converts data to QIF format, the format used by Money, Quicken, GNUCash.... to import transactions.
Not part of OpenOffice package.
- AbiWord - a native word processor.
- gnumeric - a spreadsheet application.
- gLabel is a label and business card maker. Convenient.
- Planner - a project management application.
- Evolution - a email reader, calendar, contact, memo and tasks management application.
With GNOME Spell - a GNOME/Bonobo component for spell checking. It's based on aspell.
- GnoTime - The Gnome Time Tracker is a general purpose to-do list/diary/journal tool that can track the amount of time spent on projects, and, among other things, generate reports and invoices based on that time.
Finance
- GnuCash - a financial management program for personal or small businesses.
- Grisbi is a personnal financial management program with multiple currencies. An alternative to GnuCash.
- Moneydance is a commercial personal financial management program with professional support.
- Canadian Payroll is a collection of python functions which calculates Canadian payroll tax withholdings based on the most recent major federal publication. (note. installation is a little technical.)
- AIOTrade (former Humai Trader) is a free, open source stock technical analysis tool built on pure java.
Humai Trader will also be a platform for custom indicators and charts. The main interest will be W.D. Gann's approach.
(note: requires Java 1.5.)
- SA+PR Stock Analysis + Portfolio Review (formerly known as SASS) is a commercial tool for financial analysis and portfolio management.
Educational and Research
- GNU TeXmacs is a nice little ysiwyw editor with special features for scientists.
- Proof General is used by many people for organizing large proof developments,
and also for teaching interactive proof.
- GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations.
It provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab.
- Gnu R is for statistical computing and graphics.
It provides a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques: linear and nonlinear modelling, statistical tests, time series analysis, classification, clustering, etc.
For more read R project homepage. Similar to S, alternative to SAS to those who are familiar with statistical packages.
- Rmetrics is for financial market analysis and valuation of financial instruments.
With hundreds of functions build on modern and powerful methods Rmetrics combines explorative data analysis and statistical modeling with object oriented rapid prototyping.
Rmetrics is a collection of R functions, both building an environment which creates especially for students and researchers in the third world a first class system for applications in statistics and finance.
- gretl Is a cross-platform software package for econometric analysis.
- Geniustrader is a collection of perl functions for creating trading systems.
It consists of a bunch of perl modules associated to a few perl scripts.
It has no graphical user interface since it's absolutely not needed to achieve its goals
- BeanCounter portfolio performance toolkit. Tools that work with databases to track performance. No gui.
- Gnome Chemistry Utils is a collection of utilities with GTK widgets and C++ classes related to chemistry. It includes a chemical calculator, a molecular viewer and a periodic table of elements.
- GChemPaint is a 2D chemical structures editor for the display of chemical formulas.
- Ghemical is a computational chemistry package.
It supports quantum mechanical and molecular mechanic models, with geometry optimization, molecular dynamics, and a large set of visualization tools.
Very cool!
- Chemtool is a small program for drawing chemical structures.
References:
Updated: 2006-11-25
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Graphics Software
- Art.gnome.org is a collection of art work and themes for GNOME Desktop.
Publish your art work and let others use it as a desktop background or just download download and enjoy photos and art work from around the world.
- Open Clip Art Library is a collection of 100% license-free, royalty-free, and restriction-free art that you can use for any purpose. png and svg format is also available.
- Dia Diagram Editor - a Vector diagram editor.
- Gimp - a bitmap graphics editor.
- Inkscape SVG Vector Illustrator - a vector base drawing program.
- Skencil is another vector base drawing program. Some unique features includes:
- Rectangles, ellipses and bézier curves can be used as guides.
- Blend Groups: Automatically updated interpolations of arbitrary objects
- Text can be converted to bézier curves. (This works only if Skencil has access to the PostScript Type 1 font files (pfa or pfb)).
- Text along a path.
- Sodipodi uses W3C SVG as its native file format.
Features include finely anti-aliased display, alpha transparencies, vector fonts and so on.
- Camorama - a webcam capture program. click, click, click - moon planet earth.
- Scribus is a professional desktop publishing application. With a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.
- QCad is a commercial version of 2D CAD program. The professional version is available at an affordable price. A community version is also available with limited functions.
- Xsane is a graphical frontend to SANE image scanner software.
Updated: 2006-11-21
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Multimedia on Linux is a controversial topic. While the technology is available to play and encode almost any kind of media such as mp3 or mpeg.
Unfortunately, many of the popular formats have patent restrictions which prevents any commercial entites from distributing them without paying complicated patents and royalty fees.
Linuxvillage Inc. does not distribute these technologies.
Instead we encourage the use of high quality patent free technology such as Ogg Vorbis for lossy audio, Ogg Flac for lossless audio and Ogg Theora for video encoding.
However, for completeness of discussion we have listed other formats here for your perusal. For more reading and discussions, please follow the reference links...
Media Players
- Rhythmbox is an integrated music management application.
Listen to Internet radio stations, podcasts or your CDs. You can also sync to your iPod and then listen later.
- Totem Movie Player - a movie player.
- VLC - the cross-platform media player and streaming server.
For more read feature list.
- Helix Player - a non commercially distributed multimedia player. For those who like to live off-grid. It will play ...
- Theora (content must be encoded with Alpha3 or greater)
- Vorbis
- Ogg
- Basic SMIL 2.0
- H263
- RealPix
- RAM and RPM playlist formats
- RTSP streaming with RTP
- HTTP streaming
- RealText
- RealEvents
- Uncompressed audio (wav, au, aiff)
- RealPlayer® for Linux. - a commercially distributed multimedia player.
It plays all of the Helix Player's media types and protocols. In addition, it plays...
You can download it from the www.real.com website.
- iTunes. Using Wine, you can download and use an older version of iTunes on Linux.
There are limitations though e.g. you cannot burn CD with it.
Media Production
- Ardour is a digital audio workstation. Use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio and produce your own CD's. Mix video soundtracks. For the budding musicians and sound engineers.
- Audacity is an amature audio editor and recorder with many features:
- 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.
- GNUsound is a sound editor supporting multiple tracks, multiple outputs, and 8, 16, or 24/32 bit samples. It can read a number of audio formats through libaudiofile, but can only saves them as WAV files.
It also supports many high-quality audio effects through the LADSPA plugin architecture. Read more about wav file in wiki.
- Cinelerra is a professional video editing suite for capturing, compositing, and editing audio and video with sample level accuracy.
This is an excellent tool for schools or young aspiring film makers living in a first or third world country who wants to reach a wider community but don't have the means to purchase commercial software.
- Kino is an amature non-linear DV editor.
This is ideal for those of us who just wanted a simple family video to record our children's growth, embarass them when they grow up and as side benefit - torment our house guest. Among its features:
- 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.
- Also, 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/Theora, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. **
- Icecast is a streaming media server which supports Ogg Vorbis and other audio streams. Create your own talk radio station on the Internet and impose the world with your rantings 24/7/365.
- For content producers, there are Ogg plugins available for Windows Media® Player, RealPlayer® and Quick Time/iTunes® Player.
You can tell your audience where to get them if you are distributing to Windows® platform. Mac OS X users have choices too, please read more....
A sample instruction page can be found in Ogg Media in support section.
Musician's Corner
- Denemo is a GUI front end for LilyPond for those intimated by ASCI inputs. See following for details.
- LilyPond takes ASCII input and produces musical scores (this is a standalone version.)
- Solfege is a free music education software. Use it to train your rhythm, interval, scale and chord skills. Smarten your ears!
- Rosegarden is an application which provides a mixed Audio/MIDI sequencer (for playback and recording),
a multi-track editor, music editing using both piano-roll and score notation, MIDI file IO, lilypond and Csound files export, etc.
Examples of Ogg Media Productions
- Jamendo.com is a commercial on-line music store supporting Ogg Vorbis codec.
- Mindawn is a commercial on-line music store supporting Ogg Vorbis/Flac codecs. You won't find major label releases. Mostly independent artists.
- Quirks & Quarks is a CBC production hosted by Bob McDonald.
It features a weeky episode of the latest in science, technology, medicine and the environment. You can find ogg audios in its archive.
- PBS's NerdTV provides Ogg Vorbis as an option for its audio segments.
- WPCE classical streaming Internet radio station.
- Additional list of sites that uses Ogg Vorbis. Vorbis is the alternative to mp3.
References:
- Ogg is a multimedia transporter format, and the native file and stream format for audio and video like Vorbis and Theora. Read more in wiki.
- Flac is a patent free lossless audio codec. It is an alternative to patented lossy audio like mp3. Read more in wiki.
- Vorbis is the alternative to mp3. Like mp3 it is also a lossy audio. But unlike mp3, it is patent free. Read more in wiki.
- Theora - the patent free video compression codec. Read more in wiki.
- RealMedia® is a patented media available only through the commercial player RealPlayer. Read more in wiki .
- Mpeg LA is the licensing authority for patent required for use of the MPEG-2, MPEG-4, IEEE 1394, DVB-T, and AVC/H.264 standards.
- mp3licensing.com is the licensing authority for patent required for use of MP3.
- Via Licensing is the licensing authority for MPEG-4/ACC.
- CRIA is a non-profit trade organization representing the interests of Canadian companies that create, manufacture and market sound recordings. Read about their perspective in issues.
- EFF is a nonprofit group of passionate people - lawyers, technologists, volunteers, and visionaries - working to protect your digital rights. Read more in The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User's Guide to DRM in On-line Music.
- Read about Digital Rights Management in wiki.
- Creative Commons provides free tools for authors, artists and educators to mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry.
- Professional Video Editing on Linux with Cinelerra by by Howard Wen 12/30/2003
- Cinelerra CV is a community version of Cinelerra which maintains the debian binary package, manuals and tutorials.
- **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/Theora requires oggenc. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 require mjpegtools or ffmpeg. MPEG-4 requires ffmpeg.
- For licensing restrictions, please read MP3,
MPEG4, FFmpeg License and Legal Considerations
- Linux Audio Developer's Simple Plugin API (LADSPA) provides a standard way for `plugin' audio processors to be used with a wide range of packages.
Updated: 2006-11-26
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Internet Software
- Iceweasel - Community version of Firefox, next generation Internet Browser from Mozilla. Plugins required for Flash©*, PDF**.
- Mozilla Suite consists of a web browser, composer, e-mail and newsgroup client with junk filter.
- Opera is a fast and feature rich commercial application for web browsing, e-mail, irc, etc.
See wiki for more.
- Evince is a simple multi-page document viewer for
PostScript (PS), Encapsulated PostScript (EPS), DJVU, DVI and Portable Document Format (PDF) files.
- Gaim - a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client
- Kopete - another multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client. Supporting AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, IRC, Gadu-Gadu, Novell GroupWise Messenger, and more. This one also support video in Yahoo.
- gFTP - a ftp client.
- GNOME Bittorent is a front end for downloading BitTorrent files.
- Putty - a SSH client useful for logging into school to do assignments or home computers remotely to get forgotten assignment. Putty is available for both Linux and Micorosoft Windows®.
- GnomeMeeting or Ekiga -Ekiga (formerly known as GnomeMeeting) is an open source VoIP and video conferencing application for GNOME. Ekiga uses both the H.323 and SIP protocols. It supports many audio and video codecs, and is interoperable with other SIP compliant software and also with Microsoft NetMeeting.
- Gnome SSH Tunnel Manager, is a graphical front-end for managing ssh tunnelled port redirects.
- Skype - subscribe to a commercial VOIP service. Debian package is available in the download section.
- Evolution, Icedove or Sylpheed Claws - excellent Email clients with spam filter feature.
- SpamAssassin - Spam filter software.
References:
- *Download of Flash© plugin for mozilla browsers (Firefox and Mozilla browser.)
On Nov. 7, 2006 Adobe contributed source code for the ActionScript Virtual Machine, the scripting language engine in Adobe© Flash© Player, to the Mozilla Foundation.
Mozilla will host a new open source project, called Tamarin. read more ...
- **Adobe Acrobat Reader is available as debian package in its archive, please check synaptic package manager.
Updated: 2007-06-23
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Game Software
At last, this is a weak area in Linux. Comparing to MS Windows ®, you will find only limited games on Linux.
However, there are some ...
Linux Games
- eboard - a chess interface providing a chess board interface to ICS (Internet Chess Servers) like FICS and to chess engines like GNU Chess, Sjeng and Crafty. Lose to the computer or get beat up by little Russian girls over the Internet - your choice!
- qGo is a GUI client for playing the game of Go against another player by connecting to Go servers on the internet or alternatively go against the GNU Go engine.
- GNOME games- a collection of games for the GNOME desktop. There are sixteen games including card games, puzzle games, and arcade games. These games are designed to be simple but addictive - five minute games for when you need a break.
- Frozen Bubble - Frozen-Bubble is a clone of the popular "Puzzle Bobble" game.
- GCompris is an educational software which propose different activities to children from 2 to 10 years old.
Received the Free Software Awards in 24 May 2003, recognized by the Friends of the World Treasures.
You can find GCompris in the list of software maitained by the FSF and the Unesco.
- KStar is a Desktop Planetarium. It provides an accurate graphical simulation of the night sky, from any location on Earth, at any date and time. The display includes 130,000 stars, 13,000 deep-sky objects,all 8 planets, the Sun and Moon, and thousands of comets and asteroids.
- Child's Play is another collection of puzzle game for kids similar to GCompris.
- Battle for Wesnoth is a fantasy turn-based strategy game. It can be downloaded from Synaptic Package Manager.
- A few commercial 3D games requiring OpenGL are available. By far the most popular games are Doom3 or Quake4,
more available through special channels such as www.linuxgamepublishing.com,
Games4Linux, www.tuxgames.com and www.linuxgames.com.
- Check your Synaptic Package Manager in the Games section for non-commercial games, otherwise read wiki for other games not included in debian archive.
Windows® Games
Many MS Windows® and DOS games can be played through Wine or
Codeweaver's version of Wine called Crossover Office. There are
many more that does not play properly though.
Here are some popular games in the platinum list:
Check more in Wine database .. Sometimes, you can have your cake and eat it too.
References:
- More games for kids can be found in LinuxForKids.org.
- Cadega allows hundreds of Windows® games to run on Linux seamlessly and transparently.
Updated: 2006-11-25
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Programming Tools
Programming Languages.
- Perl - a multi purpose scripting programming language.
- Python is a general purpose object-oriented scripting programming language that is simple and easy to learn. Great for doing quick and dirty little one time tasks.
- TCL/TK is another scripting programming language with cross platform and GUI support as its main feature.
- gcc - for C programming.
- Java - various ports including Sun's:
- JDK (Java Development Kit)
- JRE (Java Runtime Environment)
- Java 3-D
- JAI
- JMF (Java Media Framework)
An alternative is GNU Java Compiler (gcj) where source and byte codes can be precompiled natively.
- Java Server Pages provides a simplified, fast way to create dynamic web content. It enables rapid development of web-based applications that are server- and platform-independent.
See Apache Tomcat for more detail on implementation.
- PHP is a scripting language most suitable for the web. It works like VBScript® in Microsoft®'s world.
Complimenting this is the pear repository.
- Less popular languages are also available such as Fortran,
Pascal, Ada, Lisp.
Open Cobol.
- Mono - a tools for running and developing with .NET client and server applications. Sponsored by Novell.
IDEs and other Development Tools
- Screem - a webpage editor and website management application with interface to CVS and ftp.
Use of template is similar to Macromedia's Dreamweaver. But instead of working directly with a WYSIWYG, you work with the source codes.
This website is build and maintained using it.
- Anjuta - an Integrated Development Environment.
- Eclipse - an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle.
You can use it as an IDE for Java, C/C++, php, Cobol, etc.
- ANT is the xml make utility.
- Struts is a framework for creating Java application in Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture.
- Various unit testing software such as JUnit, check, etc.
GUI
- Glade - a GTK+ or Gnome Interface Designer.
- Gazpacho is an alternative to Glade. Like Glade, it is a GUI builder for the GTK+ toolkit but designed to be ultra easy to use.
- Fast Light Tool Kit is a cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit.
FLTK provides modern GUI functionality without the bloat and supports 3D graphics via OpenGL® and its built-in GLUT emulation.
- PyGTK MVC is a pattern/framwork for GUI programming set of tools.
Model View Controller (MVC) isolates presentation, flow control and application logic.
- Apache Struts is another MVC base on Java web applications.
Services
- Apache is one of the most popular web server on the Internet. Robust, flexible and efficient. Combining with php or perl and it can generate dynamic contents.
- Tomcat is a JSP server, it can be used standalone or complements Apache httpd as a multi-tier application server.
- JBoss is a Java 2 Enterprise Edition application server.
- PostgreSQL is the highly scalable, SQL compliant, open source object-relational database management system.
Read more in wiki.
- MySQL Community Edition is one of the most popular database server available. Read more in wiki.
- CVS is the indispensible version control system, part of Source Configuration Management (SCM).
Track history of sources files, and documents. It fills a similar role to the free software RCS, PRCS, and Aegis packages.
Libraries
Since Linux systems are open, there are huge number of libraries available. Here are some interesting ones.
- GnuPlot is a command line plotting program.
- Sphinx, Festvox are voice recognition libraries from Carnegie Mellon University.
References:
- Model View Controller (MVC) isolates presentation, flow control and application logic. Read more in wiki.
- For Software Development Life Cycles read more in wiki on Software Development Process and System Development Life Cycle.
- For the interested developer with Open Source in mind, check out Open Source Initiative (OSI) for certifications and licenses.
- The Free Software Foundation (FSF), is an organization advocating computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs thorugh the use of
free software, particularly the GNU operating system, used widely in its GNU/Linux variant. Read more about their philosophy...
- A common license is LGPL licenses which allows developers to distribute their work as FOSS. Read more about licenses in wiki.
Updated: 2007-06-23
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Operating System
Desktop
- GNOME - this is the default desktop in Debian Etch and is customized by us.
See Support Centre for more details.
- KDE- for those diehard kde fans, this is the alternative.
- Xorg - the window system Gnome or KDE is build on.
Kernel
- Debian GNU/Linux is a non-commercial Linux distribution that is stable, rich in its repository of software and totally accessible.
All Linux distributions share the same kernel, whether it is Red Hat/Fedora,
Novell's SUSE Linux, Slackware Linux, Unbuntu or Xandros. A Linux distribution is a collection of value added software bundled with the modified Linux kernel.
- Software Suspend2 allows for hibernation of computer without using any power.
Users can continue their work from the point which they entered into hibernation.
- Bootsplash is just some eye candy during loading of the operation system.
- GSPCA / SPCA5xx - webcam drivers.
- Ndiswrapper - Wireless interface for using wireless card, wireless pcmcia card or wireless USB (Desktop only).
User space program
- MS True Type Fonts - can be found in Synaptcs Package Manager. Contributed by Mirosoft®. Surprise!
- Compiz is a compositing window manager that uses 3D graphics acceleration via OpenGL.
It provides graphical effects and features on Gnome and KDE - eye candy. Watch video demos.
Interested users should check wiki.debian.org/Compriz for Debian specific instructions.
- VMware Workstation - virtualization software for running foriegn operating systems simultaneously under linux. Commerically supported.
- CodeWeaver's CrossOver Linux - for running Windows® applications. Commercially supported, non-free.
- Ipw3945 wireless a/b/g driver for ASUS Laptop or ndiswrapper for ASUS Desktops.
- 915resolution for 1280x800 non-native resolution on ASUS Laptops only.
- ClamAV/ Avscan - anti-virus software and its GUI frontend.
- Firestarter - A simple to use Linux firewall.
- FreeDOS - A DOS emulator.
- Mondo Rescue - disk backup utility for disaster recovery.
- Revelation is a password manager. It stores accounts and passwords as AES-encrypted XML. Put all your eggs in one basket.
- Seahorse is a front end for the Gnu Privacy Guard program. It is a tool for data encryption and digital signing.
- Win4Lin is a virtual machine software for Linux. It allows the user to run Windows® inside Linux.
- and many, many more...
Networking
- Samba provideds file and print services to all manner of SMB/CIFS clients, including the numerous versions of Microsoft Windows® operating systems such as Win95/98, Win2000, WinXP.
It can also act as a MS NT4® domain controller, play with Active Directory or combined with LDAP to serve and authenticate hundreds of users.
- Openssh is the free version of ssh providing encryption for secure shell, secure ftp.
References:
Updated: 2007-06-23
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Additional References: