Category: Open Source

Free and Open Source Software Listing

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Photorec – Recover files from corrupted Hard Disk (filesystem) with Linux

Today I want to introduce you to Photorec, one of the open source data recovery software available in Linux. Photorec was designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks,CDRom and lost photos from Digital camera memory card.

Originally written to recover lost pictures (hence the name), PhotoRec now supports recovering more than 80 files types including zip, bz2, rar, 7z tar, microsoft office files (*.doc,*.ppt, *.xls), jpg, pdf, html, midi,mp3,wav and many more.

PhotoRec ignores filesystems and read raw data directly from block devices, this makes Photorec works well with various filesystem including fat32,fat16,HFS+, NTFS, ext2/3.

PhotoRec is known to not work very well with ReiserFS however.

Here’s the screenshot of PhotoRec in action (which i uses it to test my corrupted MMC) :

From the screenshot, you can see that PhotoRec is able to recover 263 files from my MMC.

PhotoRec is safe to use, it will never attempt to write to the drive or memory support you are about to recover lost data from. All recovered file is stored in your /home directory and not withing the recovered disk itself, thus preserving the data contained within it.

For ubuntu users, you may find PhotoRec listed under the ‘testdisk’ package in Universe repository.

You can find out more about PhotoRec and testdisk at : http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

[tags]data recovery,linux,ubuntu,recovery,hard disk data recovery,data-recovery,photorec[/tags]

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Iceweasel – a completely free alternative to Mozilla Firefox


Iceweasel is a fork of one of the popular browser, Mozilla Firefox with the main aim to provide a completely free browser alternative to the latter.

You might wonder why we need to fork Firefox since it is already free and open source?

The answer is a bit complicated.

Although Mozilla Firefox has been release by the Mozilla Foundation as an open source browser, part of the software is non-free such as the talkback crash reporting system, the artwork, the icons and the name of the browser.

To add to the problem, Mozilla didn’t give permission to use their trademarked name Firefox to be used on unofficial builds. Due to this complication of having proprietary component in foss application, IceWeasal was forked from Firefox code base.

IceWeasel is functionality is essentially the same with Mozilla Firefox but without the proprietary component. Debian is one of the first distro to use IceWeasal as its default browser starting by Debian Etch.

The current IceWeasel release are based on Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.7, and each of it will be syncronised with the latest release of Firefox.

You can get Iceweasel from it’s project website (currenly available as source and GNU/Linux binaries only)

[tags]mozilla,firefox,mozilla firefox,iceweasel,debian,opensource,freesoftware[/tags]

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gobby – Collaborative programmers text editor with chat function

gobby is a cross-platform programmers text editor which supports real-time editing with another user. Gobby features syntax highlighting for most programming languages (c, perl, python, java, ruby, etc) and has IRC-like chat interface for communicating with your partners while coding.


Gobby functionality as a collaborative text-editor makes it possible to work on the same code with your partners remotely, combining coding efforts while working on the same application.

Additionally, gobby also has document synchronisation feature that allow both you and your partner keep documents updated in an efficient manners.

gobby was developed using GTK+ library and available in GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and *BSD operating system.

Gobby Project Website

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Sun has Open Source Java under GNU/GPL

After a long wait, Sun has finally released its key Java implementations – Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE – OpenJDK), Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME – phoneME) and Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE – Glassfish) under the GNU General Public License version 2.0.

Maybe this news is insignificant for some, but finally i can run a completely free (as in free speech) Java platform in my operating system. I use a lot of Java in my hobby of developing mobile phone apps, and yes, I’d like to see the open sourced phoneME feature MR1 (JavaME implementation) running on my Ubuntu.

Hopefully by the end of next year, I’ll be able to install Sun OpenJDK on my GNU/Linux workstation from my distro’s software repositories.

p/s: Additionally, James Gosling – Father of Java has announced in his blog that they have made Duke the Java mascot images free under the revised BSD License. You can get Duke’s images at https://duke.dev.java.net/.

[tags]java,open source, openjdk, javame, j2me,gnu/gpl[/tags]

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Mozilla Firefox 2.0 Released!

Finally, the official Mozilla Firefox 2.0 has been released, after a brief commotion about “Early Release” link provided from a digg post. I guess some people has learnt valuable lessons about downloading things before the official release.

I won’t repeat improvements that has been already stated on Mozilla? website as I want to stress on my personal opinion about this release.

First of all, I don’t like the shiny ‘visual improvement’ on the Firefox tab but I do feel that browsing internet with firefox is a lot smoother, although it still eats a lot of memory compared to other browsers.

The anti-phising warning is a nice addition to browser which dispense friendly warning of possible phishing site (fake website) that designed to harvest your personal information on the web.

Beside that, two of my extensions were disabled by Firefox 2.0 (PageRank, LiveHttpHeaders), i don’t care much about PageRank, the extension is pretty old anyway, but I do use a lot of LiveHttpHeaders extension for web development. Hope the extension author will take note of this.

Well that’s all that I noticed about Mozilla Firefox 2.0 for now, if you’re a firefox fan, then you should probably get it at : http://mozilla.com (Unless you’re using extensions that isn’t supported by the new release)

[tags]firefox,mozilla, mozilla firefox, web browser, open source, opensource, bon echo[/tags]

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Elinks : the best text-based web browser

If you like to browse the internet, and suddenly have to work in a text-based only environment, then I suggest that you use the Elinks web browser.

It is the best text-based web browser i ever used besides the infamous lynx. I has features that can be found in other GUI-based popular browser like :

  • Table and frames rendering
  • Tabbed Browsing
  • IPV6 support
  • CSS support
  • Javascript support
  • Colour support
  • Support http, https, ftp and smb protocol
  • History browsing

With these kind of features, I dont think you will miss browsing from a GUI based browser much. In Ubuntu, Elinks also available as a lite or normal package, the normal package is part of the Ubuntu main repository while the lite package without extra scripting support is available in the Universe repo.

I recommend Elinks for hardcore internet surfers that have to work under text-based environment, because I’m sure they’ll appreciate every bit that elinks has to offer.
[tags]browser,internet browser,elinks,linux,ubuntu,internet,surf[/tags]