Free and Open Source Software, howtos and Installations

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Sep 26, 2026

• TermSVG - record and export terminal sessions

  The software is particularly useful for creating demonstrations of command-line applications, documenting workflows, showing shell commands in action, or producing terminal animations for websites and project documentation. Unlike tools centred on hosting recordings remotely, TermSVG can keep the complete workflow local: capture the session, review it and generate a finished animation.

  Recording takes place inside a pseudo-terminal and defaults to the user’s shell, although another command can be specified. Recording can also be paused temporarily, which is useful when commands or information should not appear in the finished capture.

  This is free and open source software.

• OpenStreetBrowser - browse OpenStreetMap data by thematic category

  Rather than concentrating on turn-by-turn navigation, its purpose is to expose mapped objects and their metadata in a form that encourages exploration. The project is split across repositories for the main software, standard content definitions and tag translations, keeping the application logic separate from its data-oriented presentation.

  This approach makes it useful for people who want to inspect what OpenStreetMap knows about an area instead of simply using OSM as a conventional background map. The main codebase uses JavaScript, with supporting web technologies handling deployment and data access in depth.

  This is free and open source software.

• Tanko - CLI Manga Reader and Downloader

  Tanko has particularly good support for displaying manga artwork within compatible applications. It can render images using the Kitty Graphics Protocol, Sixel and iTerm2 image protocols. When none of these graphical protocols is available, images can instead be represented as ASCII art. Chapters can also be downloaded as PDF, ZIP or CBZ files, or stored as individual images.

  The software keeps reading history and reading progress locally. It also includes preliminary AniList integration and provides interfaces in English, Spanish and French.

  This is free and open source software.

• Giant Log Viewer - view extremely large log files

  The application deliberately caps the JVM heap at a comparatively small size and accesses file content as needed. This makes it useful on systems where opening a multi-gigabyte log in a conventional text editor would require excessive memory or take a long time before the file becomes usable.

  Giant Log Viewer provides familiar navigation through its graphical interface while also supporting key bindings inspired by the less pager. Files can be opened with drag and drop and users can move through their contents using either the keyboard or pointer.

  This is free and open source software.

• Helvum - graphical patchbay for PipeWire

  Helvum follows the patchbay model familiar from JACK tools such as Catia. It deliberately concentrates on connections rather than attempting to become a comprehensive audio control panel. PipeWire itself can represent more than conventional desktop audio, so the graph can include audio, video and MIDI objects where applications expose them.

  This is free and open source software.

• podman-tui - terminal user interface for Podman environments

  The program uses Podman’s Go bindings and can communicate with either a local Podman installation or a remote Podman machine over SSH. This makes it useful both for administering containers on the current host and for keeping an eye on Podman workloads elsewhere without switching to a browser-based management interface.

  Its interface is divided into dedicated screens for the main Podman resource types. Navigation is heavily keyboard oriented, with familiar vi-style movement available alongside cursor keys and function-key shortcuts. podman-tui requires the Podman system service socket to be available for the account being used.

  This is free and open source software.

• fblog - view and filter JSON logs

  Filtering is one of fblog’s more powerful features. Filters are written using Lua expressions, allowing conditions to operate on fields from each JSON record. Nested JSON objects are converted into Lua records and arrays become Lua tables, so filters can work with structured data rather than treating an entire log entry as an opaque line of text.

  fblog can also handle prefixed output produced when tools such as Kubernetes utilities combine logs from multiple pods. It supports message placeholder substitution, configurable mappings for log levels and shell completion generation. The default severity levels include trace, debug, info, warn, error and fatal, with corresponding colorization.

  This is free and open source software.

• Building the PH4NTXM ISO on CachyOS

  PH4NTXM is a Debian-based live Linux distribution designed specifically for cybersecurity, privacy and operational security.

  PH4NTXM is intended to be built and independently reviewed from source. Its build instructions are written for Debian 13 “trixie” on amd64.

  We use CachyOS for most of our work, so we wanted to see whether we could build the ISO there without setting up a separate Debian machine. We could, but we had to account for a couple of differences in where CachyOS keeps its tools. These are the steps we followed to build the Abyss edition. CachyOS is only the build host; the finished ISO is still Debian-based.

• SuperHTML - HTML validator, formatter and language server

  Its validator aims to understand HTML according to the WHATWG living specification rather than merely checking whether markup is syntactically well formed. This lets it detect problems involving element nesting and attribute values as well as basic parsing errors. The same executable provides checking, formatting and language-server functionality, making it suitable for interactive editor use and automated project checks. SuperHTML concentrates on HTML5 and deliberately makes some stricter choices where permissive browser behaviour could conceal likely authoring mistakes. It also includes a separate templating-language library, although full validation of documents containing popular third-party template syntaxes remains more limited than validation of ordinary HTML.

  This is free and open source software.

• ROSboard - lightweight web dashboard for visualizing ROS topics

  ROSboard is a lightweight web dashboard for visualizing ROS topics directly from a robot. Running the ROS node starts a web server, after which the dashboard can be opened from a desktop, tablet or phone on the same network. Its design is deliberately simple and resource-conscious, making it suitable for robots where a full desktop visualization environment would be inconvenient or unnecessarily heavy.

  ROSboard is especially useful for field diagnostics, telemetry and quickly checking sensor output without setting up a separate operator workstation. It can also be run on a desktop when examining recorded robot data.

  This is free and open source software.