One of the common misconceptions about Linux is that there isn't a lot
of software available. This of course is totally untrue. You won't
find many software titles for Linux in your local computer store however
there is definitely a large selection available online. Below you will find a
list of various popular software titles for Linux, the majority of them
are open source projects and are free.
We have tried our best to include the popular software titles below
however please keep in mind that there are thousands upon thousands of
titles and maintaining an up-to-date list is beyond the scope of Linux
Help. If your thirst is not satisfied by this page please try searching
one of the software repositories listed below. If you would like to have
software added to this list simply contact us.
Most of the software listed below can be downloaded from the following
software repositories.
Audio / Video
- BladeENC
is a MP3 encoder for Linux.
- CDParanoia
extracts audio from compact discs directly as data and writes them to a
file in either WAV, AIFC, AIFC or raw 16 bit linear PCM. You can then use
an encoding tool to turn them into MP3's.
- mpg123
mpg123 is a real time MPEG Audio Player for Layer 1,2 and Layer3. (MPEG
2.0 with Layer1/2 not heavily tested) Tested with Linux, FreeBSD,
SunOS4.1.3, Solaris 2.5, HPUX 9.x and SGI Irix. Note: this player is for
non-commercial use only. It is a great player for the console/terminal
environment. It's also a wise choice for systems that are lacking RAM.
- Mplayer
is a movie player for LINUX (runs on many other Unices, and
non-x86 CPUs, see the documentation). It plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI,
OGG/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, FLI, RM, NuppelVideo, 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, too (without the avifile library).
- Xine
is a free multimedia player. It plays back CDs, DVDs, and VCDs. It also
decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and MP3 from local disk
drives, and displays multimedia streamed over the Internet. It interprets
many of the most common multimedia formats available - and some of the
most uncommon formats, too.
- XMMS
is a grapical MP3 player for Linux that looks pretty
similar to Winamp. XMMS supports playlists and skins.
Games
- Hopkins FBI
is a game drawing on American comic-strip cartoons. It is an adventure
game which offers many 3D cinematics scenes, hand drawn animations, sounds
and great musics. Special Agent Hopkins has just been put on the biggest
case of his life : find and kill Bernie Berkson, the most vicious and
dangerous criminal in years. Hostage showdowns, murders terrorist acts:
Special Agent Hopkins has to get around a nightmare of traps and twisted
surprises in the course of his investigations if he wants to find Berkson
and save the planet form certain doomsday.
- Linux Half-Life
- Quake (v. 1, 2 & 3)
is available for Linux. If you already have Quake for windows you can
simply download the Linux executables from
http://www.linuxquake.com.
Instant Message / IRC Clients & Tools
- BNC is a
simple program designed to Proxy IRC sessions. It is user configurable
using the file bnc.conf and includes multiple users, passwords, logging
and other basic necessities. It also has virtual host support, a
non-spawning daemon, with a supervisor mode for seeing who is on the proxy
and killing users on the proxy.
- BitchX is a very popular console
based IRC client for Linux. It has a ton of built in features such as
flood protection, nick completion, an away system, and more.
- Eggdrop Bots are very
popular on the EFnet IRC Network. They run in the background and sit in a
designated IRC Channel and provide OPs, enforce bans and other neat
features. There are also hundreds of tcl scripts that can add usefull
features.
- Gaim is a multi-protocol
instant messaging client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is
compatible with AIM (Oscar and TOC protocols), ICQ, MSN
Messenger, Yahoo, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and Zephyr networks.
Gaim users can log in to multiple accounts on multiple IM networks
simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on AOL
Instant Messenger, talking to a friend on Yahoo Messenger, and sitting in
an IRC channel all at the same time.
- IRC Servers
- Licq is a multi-threaded ICQ clone
written mostly in C++. It uses an extensive plugin system to manage many
different functions. The main gui is written using the Qt widget set.
Licq is distributed under GPL with some special QPL exceptions for Qt. is
another version of ICQ built that uses the QT toolkit. To run Licq you
must have QT installed.
- Kicq
is an ICQ (I seek you) client, specifically designed for the KDE desktop.
kicq has a simple, clean interface very similar to the original Windows
ICQ client, and includes all of the most commonly used ICQ features such
as messaging, real-time chat, and file transfer.
- Xchat is a graphical IRC client.
It runs under the X Window System and uses the GTK+ toolkit. Optionally
it can be compiled to use Gnome.
Internet Connectivity
- Eznet is a program that
simplifies PPP setup for Linux. Using eznet, all a user has to do is
specify the name of their ISP, a login name, a password and a phone
number to dial. Eznet takes care of the rest. There are no configuration
files to edit and no chat scripts to design.
- kppp is a dialer and
front end for pppd. It allows for interactive script generation and
network connection setup.
- ppp-up is a simple
chatscript that will get you connected to your ISP fast. It comes with an
easy-to-follow guide.
- rp-pppoe is a
very popular PPPoE client. This is great for those of you who have ADSL
and need a PPPoE to connect to your ISP.
- X-ISP is a visual, X11/XForms
based, user-friendly interface to pppd/chat, i.e. a dialup TCP/IP tool
with an X11 interface. It is also a small ISP and phone company (PTT)
database manager, and a dialup costs and usage logging/statistics tool.
It provides maximum feedback from dialing and login phases on a message
browser, versatility in interrupting a call in progress, a manual login
terminal window, as well as call-back and per-ISP DNS selection
capabilities.
Miscellaneous
- Eterm is a color vt102 terminal
emulator intended as a replacement for xterm. It is designed with a
Freedom of Choice philosophy, leaving as much power, flexibility, and
freedom as possible in the hands of the user. It is designed to look good
and work well, but takes a feature-rich approach rather than one of
minimalism while still maintaining speed and efficiency.
- Gnutella is a popular file
sharing program. When you run Gnutella software and connect to the
Gnutella Network, you bring with you the information you wanted to make
public. And you choose what information to share. You can choose to share
nothing; you can choose to share one file, a directory, or your entire
hard drive (we do not recommend this option).
- Pine is a great mail
client that comes bundled with a simple to use text editor called
pico.
- The Gimp is the GNU Image
Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software
suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image
authoring.
- Wine is an Open Source
implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix.
Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer. Wine does not require
Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation
consisting of 100% Microsoft-free code, but it can optionally use native
system DLLs if they are available. Wine provides both a development
toolkit (Winelib) for porting Windows sources to Unix and a program
loader, allowing many unmodified Windows binaries to run on x86-based
Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris.
Office / Productivity
- Abiword is a free word
processing program similar to Microsoft Word. It is suitable for typing
papers, letters, reports, memos, and so forth.
- Adobe
Acrobat allows you to view, navigate and print .pdf files.
-
Phone Book is a great little program that allows you keep
track of all your phone numbers and addresses. It's simple to use and
quick to look up numbers.
- OpenOffice
gives you everything you'd expect in office software. You can create
dynamic documents, analyse data, design eye-catching presentations,
produce dramatic illustrations, and open up your databases. You can
publish your work in Portable Document Format (.pdf), and release your
graphics in Flash (.swf) format - without needing any additional software.
International users are not forgotten, with support for complex text
layout (CTL) languages (such as Thai, Hindi, Arabic, and Hebrew) and
vertical writing languages.
- Ximian Evolution is the
award-winning personal and workgroup information management
solution for Linux and UNIX-based systems. The software seamlessly
integrates email, calendaring, meeting scheduling, contact management, and
task lists, in one powerful, fast, and easy-to-use application. Ximian
Evolution is also powerful collaboration software that connects to popular
corporate communications architectures like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus
Notes, and other messaging systems. Ximian Evolution supports a broad
range of leading Linux distributions and UNIX variants.
- 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.
Server Software / Tools
- Analog is a program to measure
the usage on your web server. It tells you which pages are most popular,
which countries people are visiting from, which sites they tried to
follow broken links from, and all sorts of other
useful information.
- Apache is the defacto-standard
web server for Unix. It has support for SSL, Server Side Includes, plug-ins,
database APIs, and various other extensions.
- mySQL is a true multi-user,
multi-threaded SQL database server. SQL is the most popular database
language in the world. MySQL is a client/server implementation that
consists of a server daemon mysqld and many different client programs and
libraries.
- PHP is a widely-used
general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web
development and can be embedded into HTML.
- ProFTPd is a great FTP server
and a more secure replacement for wu-ftpd. ProFTPd also has an easy to
follow configuration file.
- OpenSSH is a FREE version of the
SSH protocol suite of network connectivity tools that increasing numbers
of people on the Internet are coming to rely on. Many users of telnet,
rlogin, ftp, and other such programs might not realize that their
password is transmitted across the Internet unencrypted, but it is.
OpenSSH encrypts all traffic (including passwords) to effectively
eliminate eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other network-level
attacks. Additionally, OpenSSH provides a myriad of secure tunneling
capabilities, as well as a variety of authentication methods.
- Qmail is a secure mail server.
It seems to be a little difficult to set up, but in the end it's worth
it.
- Sendmail is an easy to configure
mail server. It generally comes with most Linux distributions.
- Tripwire is a must have
for anyone who is big on system security. Tripwire will watch your system
for any critical changes to system files and email you which ones have
changed etc.
Web Browsers
- Galeon
is a GNOME Web browser that is based on Gecko.
- Konqueror is
a web browser that normally comes packaged with the
KDE desktop.
- Links
is a text-based browser with support for HTML tables and frames.
- Lynx is another popular
text-only web browser.
- Mozilla
is world-class open source browser that is designed from the
ground up to support open internet standards across a variety of platforms
including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, OS/2, Solaris, and many more. Mozilla
provides users with acclaimed browsing convenience along with power
features such as pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing. Mozilla also
provides a sophisticated platform for developing web and intranet
applications using cutting edge technologies such as XML, SOAP and XSLT.
Mozilla is an open-source web browser and toolkit, designed for
standards compliance, performance and portability.
Mozilla.org provides
binaries for testing and feedback.
-
Netscape
- Opera has been hailed as the
fastest browser on earth by users and press worldwide. Opera uses less
memory and less space on your hard drive than competing browser
applications, making you more productive on the Web.