Best Free and Open Source Software, howtos and Installations

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Apr 17, 2025

• Perl Screenshot Tool - LinuxLinks

  Perl Screenshot Tool is a screenshot utility for Linux that works best on X11. It also supports Gnome Wayland through the gnome-screenshot backend.

  This is free and open source software.

• 8 Best Free and Open Source Command-line FTP clients - LinuxLinks

  File Transfer Protocol (FTP) used to be a popular and time-honored method of transferring files to and from a remote network site. The need for FTP has declined significantly; many consider FTP to be an unfriendly protocol when it comes to accessing data. Further, it is an insecure protocol as it sends your credentials in plain text to the server. However, there are still occasions where transferring files via this protocol has been useful; the time to put FTP to bed has not yet come. SFTP and FXP are also supported by these clients.

  This article provides our pick of the best open source command line file transfer programs. The software featured here supports a number of different protocols, not just FTP. They offer shell-like command syntax, and are great for scripting purposes.

  Here’s our verdict captured in a legendary LinuxLinks.com chart. Only free and open source software is eligible for inclusion.

• runrestic is a wrapper script for restic - LinuxLinks

  runrestic is a simple Python wrapper script for the Restic backup software that initiates a backup, prunes any old backups according to a retention policy, and validates backups for consistency.

  The script supports specifying your settings in a declarative configuration file rather than having to put them all on the command-line, and handles common errors.

  This is free and open source software.

• SuppaFTP is an FTP/FTPS client library for Rust - LinuxLinks

  SuppaFTP is an FTP/FTPS client library for Rust with support for both passive and active mode. It supports all the FTP protocol features. SuppaFTP also comes with a built-in command-line FTP client. This CLI application provides all the commands to interact with a remote FTP server and supports FTPS too.

  This is free and open source software.

• Quick Lookup is a dictionary application powered by Wiktionary - LinuxLinks

  Quick Lookup is a simple GTK dictionary application powered by Wiktionary.

  This app only supports the English version of Wiktionary. This means that you can lookup all words of all languages and find their definitions and descriptions in English.

  This is free and open source software.

• atftp is a client/server implementation of the TFTP protocol - LinuxLinks

  atftp stands for Advanced Trivial File Transfer Protocol. It is called “advanced”, by contrast to other TFTP servers, for two reasons. Firstly, it is intended to be fully compliant with all related RFCs. This include RFC1350, RFC2090, RFC2347, RFC2348 and RFC2349. Secondly, atftp is intended for serving boot files to large clusters. It is multi-threaded and supports multicast (RFC2090 and PXE), allowing faster boot of hundreds of machines simultaneously.

  The server is multi-threaded and the client presents a friendly interface using libreadline.

  This is free and open source software.

• tap v0.5.1 - audio player for the terminal - LinuxLinks

  I love tap. So much so, it’s the #1 TUI based music player for Linux together with musikcube.

  The addition of shuffle play and a config file are good steps in the right direction too! The slow startup times over a network (with mechanical disks) might be down to the vagaries of my network. If you have a large music collection accessed over a network share, please let us know in the comments section whether tap’s startup time is slow for you.

  The ps_mem utility reports tap’s memory usage is around 12.6MB, retaining its frugality with system resources.

• File Shredder permanently deletes files - LinuxLinks

  File Shredder is a file deletion program designed to permanently remove sensitive files from your computer, enhancing data privacy.

  Within a certain limit, it is effective. However, modern SSDs use certain technologies to extend its lifetime, which has the side effect of ensuring that shredding is never perfect, and no software can fix that. But shredding significantly increases the difficulty of data recovery since it requires specialized software and hardware.

  This is free and open source software.