30 Cool Open Source Software I Discovered in 2013 – nixCraft

These are full-featured open source software products, free as in beer and speech that I started to use recently. Vivek Gite picks his best open source software of 2013.

Replicant is entirely free and open source distributions of Android on several devices including both phones and tablets. I have installed it on an older Nexus S. You can install apps from F-Droid store a GPLv2 client app that comes configured with a repository hosting only free as in freedom applications.

This is an open source, cross-platform application to convert videos from and to various formats, including formats suitable for devices such as Android/iOS phones. It is simple and easy to use software to convert almost any video to MP4, WebM (vp8), Ogg Theora format. Miro Video Converter is based on FFMPEG and act as a front end to FFMPEG command line tools.

I was looking for an alternative to Dropbox to run cloud on my own server at home and office. This software is open source software, and it is self hosted. I dont have to trust third party with my data. I found this software easy to install and quite useful. I started to use it for syncing files and other data. I have been using for couple of months and it has been proven reliable alternative to Dropbox. There are clients available for MS-Windows, OS X, Linux, and mobile apps for iOS and Android devices (or simply access data using the ownCloud web frontend).

The FreeBSD jail provides an operating system-level virtualization partition a FreeBSD-based serve into several independent mini-systems. You can do the same with Linux using OpenVZ. Linux Containers (LXC) is a virtualization method for running multiple isolated Linux systems. Docker extends LXC. It uses LXC, cgroups, Linux kernel and other parts to automate the deployment of applications inside software containers. It comes with API to runs processes in isolation. With docker I can pack WordPress (or any other app written in Python/Ruby/Php & friends) and its dependencies in a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient container. I can deploy and test such container on any Linux based server.

Adminer is a full-featured database management tool written in PHP. Conversely to phpMyAdmin, it consists of a single file ready to deploy to the target server. Adminer is available for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MS SQL and Oracle. I usually install this for clients who are new to PostgreSQL/MySQL. The software acts as a drop-in-replacement for phpMyAdmin with a better user interface, better support for MySQL features, higher performance and more security.

MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL server. MariaDB is going to be default in many popular Linux distro and open source project. Red Hat will switch the default database in its enterprise distribution, RHEL (including its clones such as CentOS), from MySQL to MariaDB, when version 7 is released in 2014. I started testing MariaDB and found no problems at all. The speed is same or better in some cases.

I wish I discovered RackTables earlier. It is is a datacenter asset management system. With this software one can document hardware assets (such as server, workstations, routers, switches and more), network addresses, space in racks, networks configuration and more:

Apache Cordova is a free and open source framework that allows you to create mobile apps using standardized web APIs. You can create apps that work on iOS, Andriod, BlackBerry, Windows, Ubuntu and other phone based operating systems. You write code once and run on selected mobile platforms with little or no change at all. PhoneGap uses Apache Cordova.

Nmap is an open source security tool for network exploration, security scanning and auditing. ipscan (Angry IP Scanner) is an alternative to nmap command. It is also an open-source and cross-platform network scanner designed to be fast and simple to use. It scans IP addresses and ports as well as has many other features.

Drupal, Typo3, WordPress and many other content management system (CMS)/blogging software dynamically create feature rich content. However, you may not need all the all features and complexity offered by modern CMS based systems. For example, a WordPress based blog like nixCraft requires multiple VMs, CDN for static assets, caching engine such as memcached, PHP, mysql database, comment moderation, and on going updates. A growing trend is to keep your blog simple by avoiding CMS and use static HTML generators that offers the following benefits:

You can setup a open source software such as WordPress, Drupal, ZenCart, and over 100+ other software easily with TurnKey Linux. It is a virtual appliance library that integrates and polishes the very best open source software into ready to use solutions. Each virtual appliance is optimized for ease of use and can be deployed in just a few minutes on bare metal, a virtual machine and in the cloud/in physical server. TurnKey Linux is based on Debian 7.2 with automatic security updates for all packages. It also includes a web management interface, web shell, and simple configuration console. I often use this to deploy development server in the cloud.

DokuWiki is a simple to use and highly versatile open source wiki software that doesnt require a database. Easy to install on Linux or Unix-like operating systems with the following features:

I use this on my laptop to keep notes about various projects.

GNU MediaGoblin is free software, decentralized media publishing platform. You can host and share videos, music, and images using MediaGoblin. It is an alternative to major media-publishing services such as Flickr, deviantArt, YouTube, Soundcloud, etc. It is written in Python and SQL.

Scrollout F1 is easy to use and setup email firewall gateway system. It includes anti-spam and anti-virus protection for Microsoft Exchange, Postfix, Exim, Sendmail, Qmail and others. It runs on Debian and Ubuntu Linux operating systems. This is perfect software for filtering incoming messages and other features are as follows:

Observium is free and open source software written in PHP/MySQL. It collects data from devices using SNMP and presents it via a web interface. It includes support for a wide range of network hardware and operating systems including Cisco, Windows, Linux, HP, Dell, FreeBSD, Juniper, Brocade, Netscaler, NetApp and many more. I use this software along with Nagios to get better understanding of certain devices and technologies. It provides historical and current performance statistics, configuration visualization and syslog capture.

It is a web based invoicing system. It helps me to create quick and nice looking invoices without having to set up too much services on server. All you have to do is install the SimpleInvoices software, enter a biller, a customer details and go creating invoices. You can easily track your finances; send invoices as PDFs and more. It is the best invoicing set up for my independent IT consultancy business.

I sometime use and recommend the following software for MS-Windows/Linux users due to simplicity and ease of use features. Here is the list of the other best and FOSS apps of 2013:

This is a perfect open-source FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) client for Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux. It has the following features that new users might find useful:

It is an open source free SFTP client and FTP client for Windows. Its main function is the secure file transfer between local and server under your control. Most new MS-Windows user find WinSCP an easier to use as compare to putty and friends.

I give this software to many developers. They can easily setup Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl to deploy and write an application on their own desktop. No need to install virtual machine and Linux server. Just focus on development and skip real server management job to pros.

Many users only use 2% of the features of a program like Microsoft Word. No need to spend money or time on Microsoft Word. I personally use Abiword due to:

LESS extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. LESS can run on the client-side and server-side or can be compiled into plain CSS.

Cinnamon is a GTK+ based desktop environment and a fork of the GNOME Shell. It was initially developed by Linux Mint. It offers a user interface with the following features that I needed most:

Tmux is terminal multiplexers for Unix-like platforms. tmux offers several advantages over GNU/screen:

It is a simple and straightforward software that offers the following features:

Zentyal is a full-featured Linux server for small and medium businesses that you can set up in less than 30 minutes. It is a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Small Business Server and Microsoft Exchange Server. It is easy to use software. Zentyal is based on Ubuntu and it can be installed either from Ubuntu repositories or from Zentyals own installer.

ack-grep is a grep like tool, optimized for programmers. This tool isnt aimed to search all text files. It is specifically created to search source code trees, not trees of text files. It searches entire trees by default while ignoring Subversion, Git and other VCS directories and other files that arent your source code.

ditaa is a small command-line utility, that can convert diagrams drawn using ascii art, into proper bitmap graphics. I use this tool all the time to draw diagrams and forwarding them via email or chat session.

GNU parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one or more computers. If you like xargs command, try GNU/parallel utility. It can run command/script/job on all available CPUs or on multiple computers.

luckyBackup is an application for data back-up and synchronization powered by the rsync tool. It is simple to use, fast, safe, reliable and fully customizable backup software. I often set and recommend this too for new Ubuntu/Fedora desktop users to backup their own files.

OpenShot Video Editor is a free and open-source non-linear video editing software package for Linux. I use this tool to create videos for my youtube channel. It is a stable, free, and friendly to use video editor on Linux.

This is my personal FOSS software list and it is not absolutely definitive, so if youve got your own software, share in the comments below. Also dont forget to check out our previous years 15 greatest open source terminal applications of 2012.

[ Happy New Year to all nixCraft visitors. I hope that 2014 proves to be just as awesome for Linux & FOSS enthusiast everywhere. ]

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30 Cool Open Source Software I Discovered in 2013 - nixCraft