Free drives software for linux

CDriveBack project is a backup system.
CDriveBacks design goal is to make a backup system so easy to use that the end users with no backup, eighty percent of XP Home users and thirty percent of home XP Professional users, take backups and can easily restore their system.
For example, backing up the C: drive to an area on the C: drive takes two steps:
- Boot the CDriveBack CD, when the first screen shows,
- Hit enter to backup the C: drive.
CDriveBack is:
- A Live CD, one that you can boot, requiring no installs, using,
- Linux 2.6.x, a recent version of the Linux operationg system, to run
- Dialog screens that manage backup files on your drives and
- Use DAR to backup the partition or drive to files, in turn using, when needed,
- Backing up older Windows drives as well as Linux formatted drives is built-in
- NTFS-3G, the NTFS Drive handling package. is used for NTFS drives.
Enhancements:
Bug fixes, all repaired:
- A full restore from a backup area with no differential backup files still asked for diff files with an akward message.
- Documentation dates and releases out of date.
- Startup session screen still referred to the release candidate.
Added:
- An optional "Force" setting for mounting NTFS disks from a Windows that is using chkdsk to always call the partition "dirty"

driveplugger is a removable storage manager that safely puts control into the hands of the user. driveplugger project makes devices such as USB drives, CDROMs, or any other removable media easy to use. The user can assign names to devices. Browsing, ejection, and other operations can be done through a tray icon.
How it Works
DrivePlugger uses the linux hotplug mechanism to pass information about plug/unplug events (and a secure tag) on to the user agent.
The user agent will then either ask the user what to do, or run an action previously chosen by the user. If the device is to be mounted, the user agent will run a suid script to add an entry to fstab, and then mount the drive under ~/Devices/< devicename >.
Through a tray icon, you can easily change user preferences and device settings, as well as unmount media or see (and kill) processes locking the media.
If youre a security expert, youre probably freaking out by now. Included in the package is a SECURITY file, detailing the risks associated with running DrivePlugger, as well as what Ive done to reduce them.
Enhancements:
- Fixed a bug where multiple group numbers were listed in fstab
- Corrected uid/gid entries for unsupporting filesystems

rdesktop is an open source client for Windows NT Terminal Server and Windows 2000/2003 Terminal Services, capable of natively speaking Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in order to present the users NT desktop. Unlike Citrix ICA, no server extensions are required.
rdesktop currently runs on most UNIX based platforms with the X Window System, and other ports should be fairly straightforward.
rdesktop project was initially written by Matthew Chapman based on various scarce documentation, wire sniffs, and trial-and-error.
Enhancements:
- SeamlessRDP - seamless windows support
- Keymap fixes
- Fix connection issues with Windows XP RTM
- Keyboard handling improvements and fixes
- SGI/Irix sound-driver fixes
- Support for clipboard INCR protocol
- Session Directory support (patch from Brian Chapeau )
- Support for long filenames on redirected drives
- XOR ellipse drawing fix
- Clipboard unicode support (Ilya Konstantinov)
- Fix display issues with exotic color depths (30bpp, 32bpp, etc) (Ilya Konstantinov)
- Large file support
- The default color depth is now the depth of the root window
- Basic support for Windows Vista Beta 2
- Fix high cpu-usage in OSS-driver

GliBench is a Gui based benchmarking tool to check your computers CPU and hard disk performance. The software is based on the benchmarks I developed for CliBench Mk III SMP a SMP enabled benchmark program for Win32.
There were several tries to port it to other architectures than Win32, but this was not that easy. So I decided to to a Linux port, based on the GTK toolkit with Gnome support, as Linux runs on almost every hardware around and GTK is quite easy to port to other OSs.
The CPU tests are all ported to ANSI C. They run fully multithreaded using posix threads. You can already use the program for benchmarking your hardware.
Enhancements:
- The application was completely rewritten for GTK+ 2.x and Glib 2.x.
- New stress tests and threaded I/O tests for benchmarking hard drives are available.
- Both console and GUI interfaces are available.

Prima::Utils are miscellanneous routines.

The module contains several helper routines, implemented in both C and perl. Whereas the C-coded parts are accessible only if use Prima; statement was issued prior to the use Prima::Utils invocation, the perl-coded are always available. This makes the module valuable when used without the rest of toolkit code.

API

alarm $TIMEOUT, $SUB, @PARAMS

Calls SUB with PARAMS after TIMEOUT milliseconds.

beep [ FLAGS = mb::Error ]

Invokes the system-depended sound and/or visual bell, corresponding to one of following constants:

mb::Error
mb::Warning
mb::Information
mb::Question

get_gui

Returns one of gui::XXX constants, reflecting the graphic user interface used in the system:
gui::Default
gui::PM
gui::Windows
gui::XLib
gui::OpenLook
gui::Motif

The meaning of the return value is somewhat vague, and might be deprecated in future releases.

get_os

Returns one of apc::XXX constants, reflecting the platfrom. Currently, the list of the supported platforms is:

apc::Os2
apc::Win32
apc::Unix

ceil DOUBLE

Obsolete function.

Returns stdlibs ceil() of DOUBLE

find_image PATH

Converts PATH from perl module notation into a file path, and searches for the file in @INC paths set. If a file is found, its full filename is returned; otherwise undef is returned.

floor DOUBLE

Obsolete function.

Returns stdlibs floor() of DOUBLE

getdir PATH

Reads content of PATH directory and returns array of string pairs, where the first item is a file name, and the second is a file type.

The file type is a string, one of the following:
"fifo" - named pipe
"chr" - character special file
"dir" - directory
"blk" - block special file
"reg" - regular file
"lnk" - symbolic link
"sock" - socket
"wht" - whiteout

This function was implemented for faster directory reading, to avoid successive call of stat for every file.

path [ FILE ]

If called with no parameters, returns path to a directory, usually ~/.prima, that can be used to contain the user settings of a toolkit module or a program. If FILE is specified, appends it to the path and returns the full file name. In the latter case the path is automatically created by File::Path::mkpath unless it already exists.

post $SUB, @PARAMS

Postpones a call to SUB with PARAMS until the next event loop tick.

query_drives_map [ FIRST_DRIVE = "A:" ]

Returns anonymous array to drive letters, used by the system. FIRST_DRIVE can be set to other value to start enumeration from. Some OSes can probe eventual diskette drives inside the drive enumeration routines, so there is a chance to increase responsiveness of the function it might be reasonable to set FIRST_DRIVE to C: string.

If the system supports no drive letters, empty array reference is returned ( unix ).

query_drive_type DRIVE

Returns one of dt::XXX constants, describing the type of drive, where DRIVE is a 1-character string. If there is no such drive, or the system supports no drive letters ( unix ), dt::None is returned.

dt::None
dt::Unknown
dt::Floppy
dt::HDD
dt::Network
dt::CDROM
dt::Memory

sound [ FREQUENCY = 2000, DURATION = 100 ]

Issues a tone of FREQUENCY in Hz with DURATION in milliseconds.

username

Returns the login name of the user. Sometimes is preferred to the perl-provided getlogin ( see "getlogin" in perlfunc ) .

xcolor COLOR

Accepts COLOR string on one of the three formats:

#rgb
#rrggbb
#rrrgggbbb

and returns 24-bit RGB integer value.

Wipe is a file and block device wiping utility. It is based on work by Peter Gutmann.
There are some low level issues that must be taken into consideration. One of these is that there must be some sort of write barrier between passes. Wipe uses fdatasync(2)
(or fsync(2)) as a write barrier, or if fsync(2) isnt available, the file is opened with the O_DSYNC or O_SYNC flag.
For wipe to be effective, each pass must be completely written. To ensure this, the drive must support some form of a write barrier, write cache flush, or write cache disabling. SCSI supports ordered command tags, has a force
media access bit for commands, and write cache can be disable on mode page 8. IDE/ATA drives support write cache flushes and write cache disabling.
Unfortunetly, not all drives actually disable write cache when yjhis is set up.Those drives are broken. Write caching should always be disabled, unless your system is battery backed and always powers down cleanly.
Enhancements:
- typo in Makefile.in (Ricardo Branco)

cdrtools (formerly cdrecord) creates home-burned CDs with a CDR/CDRW recorder. It works as a burn engine for several applications.
cdrtools supports CD recorders from many different vendors; all SCSI-3/mmc- and ATAPI/mmc-compliant drives should also work.
Supported features include IDE/ATAPI, parallel port, and SCSI drives, audio CDs, data CDs, and mixed CDs, full multi-session support, CDRWs (rewritable), TAO, DAO, RAW, and human-readable error messages.
cdrtools includes remote SCSI support and can access local or remote CD writers.
Enhancements:
- A +-1 size realloc() problem was fixed in TOC handling for cdda2wav.
- A workaround was added for a double free problem in mkisofs, introduced with multi-extent file support, that caused it to dump core on Cygwin.

cdspeed is an application that can decrease the speed of you cdrom. Modern cdrom drives are too fast. It can take several seconds on a 60x speed cdrom drive to spin it up and read data from the drive. The result is that these drives are just a lot slower than a 8x or 24x drive. This is especially true if you are only occasionally (e.g every 5 seconds) reading a small file. This utility limits the speed, makes the drive less noisy and the access time faster. cdspeed is also very good if you prefer to listen to the musik on your mp3 CDs rather then the noise of your CD drive.
Note: recent versions of the eject command include the functionallity of cdspeed (via the -x option).
Installation instructions:
to compile type:
make
to install cdspeed to /usr/bin type:
make install
You can copy the script cdmount to /usr/bin,it will first reduce the speed and then mount the cd. See the explanations inside the cdmount script for further details.
Enhancements:
- 2004-03-31 Roberto Foglietta added the init script for Mandrake distributions