Open Source Software Reviews

rsync is an open source file transfer program for UNIX systems. It is a replacement for rcp and scp. The program uses the "rsync algorithm" to provide a very fast method for transferring remote files into sync. This is done by sending just the differences in the files across the links. It doesn’t require knowing that both sets of files are present at one of the ends of the link beforehand.

GNU Make is an open source tool to control the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program’s source files. GNU Make gets the knowledge of how to build a program from a file called the makefile. This file lists all the non-source files and the ways of computing them from other files. While writing a program, the programmer requires to write a makefile for the program so that it becomes possible to use GNU Make to build and install the program.

Star is a very fast, POSIX-compliant tar archiver. The software can read POSIX compliant tar archives as well as non-POSIX GNU tar archives.

Star saves many files together into a single tape or disk archive, and can restore individual files from the archive. It includes command line interfaces for the "tar", "Sun-Tar", "cpio", "pax", and "gnutar" command-line syntax.

Blender is open source software for creating 3D modeling, animation, rendering, postproduction, interactive creation and playback. The source code is written in Python and the software offers consistent interface across all platforms.

John Ripper is a password cracking software. Presently this software is available for different versions of Unix platform. The officially supported versions are John Ripper 11. It is mainly used to detect the weak passwords in the Unix system. John Ripper also works on Windows platform with different patches. This software is able to crack several crypt (3) passwords.

Horde is mainly a framework, which is used to develop PHP based web applications. It is fully based on object oriented architecture and gives user the privilege to use classes to incorporate much more modularity in developing the web application. Apart from English, Horde supports a number of other popular languages.

Directory Administrator is a directory management tool. It is mainly used in Unix based system to manage the user accounts. It works on a single sign-on setup, helps the user in advanced routing of emails and creating corporate address book information.

BigBrother helps the users to monitor the network. The status of the network is displayed in the format of the web pages with color coded, which makes the user to distinguish the errors. This report is generated in almost real time. The difference of BigBrother with SNMP is that in SNMP the information about the devices are collected in a centralized location. But in BigBrother local devices convey their own information in a centralized location and from there it polls the devices. This feature enables BigBrother to provide an efficient network monitoring system.

SYSLINUX is a boot loader for the Linux operating system, which operates on an MS-DOS or Windows FAT file systems. SYSLINUX was developed aiming to simplify the first time installation of Linux and for creation of rescue and other special purpose to boot disks.

The libjpeg package is a library for manipulating JPEG (JFIF) image formats as well as simple client programs for accessing the libjpeg functions. It is entirely written in C programming language. The libjpeg package comes with libraries that allow compression of image files based on the Joint Photographic Experts Group standard. It is a “lossy” compression algorithm.