8 Great Linux Apps Worth Bragging About, part 2
By: Carla Schroder
Wednesday, May 27, 2009 04:40:28 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/6759/1/
4 More To Be Proud Of
Last week we took a look at four great Linux/FOSS applications that are as good as any of their competitors, FOSS or proprietary. Today I'll wrap up with four more fine applications that I think are excellent and bragworthy, and that have not already been reviewed to death:
gLabels Label, Business Card, and Postcard Creator
gLabels is a great lightweight, easy label and business card creator. You don't have to fire up big ponderous OpenOffice to create labels; by the time it opens you'll be sending your gLabels job to the printer. gLabels supports every Avery label and card template in existence, which is a lot, and you can create custom templates. With a bit of ingenuity you can also make invitations and greeting cards. Making a page of labels that are all the same takes a couple of minutes, and it also supports mail merge for doing mass mailings or other kinds of labels that you want to pull from a database. License: GPL.
Hugin, Photo Panorama Creator
Hugin is a slick photo panorama stitcher. It includes a large and useful assortment of abilities: simple panoramas, fisheye perspective, exposure blending, and HDR (High Dynamic Range) support for pulling details out of shadowed areas. It corrects perspective errors, and fixes banding and other common defects. It is a high-quality, powerful application that doesn't require a PhD to use competently. License: GPL.Blender, Cross-Platform 3D Creator
Blender is an amazing professional-level graphics creator. You can make animations and beautiful still images with all kinds of depth, texture, and realistic lighting. Talk is cheap; to get an idea of what you can do with Blender take a look at these links:Big Buck Bunny
Elephant's Dream
Honorable Mentions
Celestia Space Exploration
Celestia is a gorgeous 3D astronomy program. Your perspective is not limited to the traditional planetarium view of what can be seen from Earth, but you can actually "travel" up close and personal to objects in the solar system, and far-away deep-space objects. It requires OpenGL, so for Linux users this means any 3D video card with decent Linux drivers. License: GPL.More Great Linux Apps
Sweet Home 3D is a Java-based interior design application that runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows. You need 3D video acceleration and Java 6, and the Java browser plugin so you can test-drive it inside a Web browser. On Ubuntu you can get these by running$ sudo aptitude install sun-java6-plugin
Sweet Home 3D license: GPL.
RecordMyDesktop is a nice desktop session recorder that captures both audio and video. In other words, everything that you see on your screen can be captured by RecordMyDesktop, which makes it a great tool for tutorials of all kinds. Currently it is only sort-of maintained, so if you use it and like it consider supporting it in some way. License: GPL.
sshfs is my workhorse for wandering around the house during my workday. sshfs mounts any remote directory on your local machine, so you can work on remote files just as though they were local. It's faster than using something like VNC or FreeNX because you're not exporting an entire X session and running applications over the network; you're using local applications on remote files. It's like a Samba or NFS share except it's faster and easier to set up.
Carla Schroder is the author of the Linux Cookbook and the Linux Networking Cookbook (O'Reilly Media), the upcoming "Building a Digital Sound Studio with Audacity" (NoStarch Press), a lifelong book lover, and the managing editor of LinuxPlanet and Linux Today.