Free to grow software for linux

Packet Garden is a project that allows you to grow a world from network traffic.

Packet Garden captures information about how you use the internet and uses this stored information to grow a private world you can later explore.

To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access.

Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself.

The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received.

Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an HTTP plant is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a Peer to Peer plant is grown, and so on.

Contact Book is a simple contact book manager.

Simple Contact that could be compared to Mac OS Xs simply address book application. I plan on making the initial release with very basic functionality but it will certainly grow from there.

Although it is in a deb it does net check dependancies so make sure you have mono, GTK# (2.4), and sqlite installed to use it.

Why you might be interested:

- Simple Address Book so you dont have to use evolution (this was my main reason for starting this project)
- Easy to use (not pop up dialog boxes)

Elmo is a feature-rich, highly configurable and fast mail client. You could call it a Mail User Agent, but it offers much more than traditional MUAs.
Elmo should be easy and pleasant to use.
- The user should not be forced to configure many options before using it, nor read a long users manual. We provide a short script, elmoconf.pl (in the src/ directory) which will create a configuration file for you, providing reasonable defaults. You can start using the full power of Elmo in half a minute!
Elmo should be very fast and efficient.
- Elmo uses very efficient algorithms for several tasks. You shouldnt be surprised when you discover how fast it opens your mail folder with hundreds or even thousands of mail. For example, opening a folder with 7,000 mails lasts only four seconds!
You should be able to modify Elmo as you like.
- You, as a user of Elmo, are the most important in our project. You should be able to configure your mail client as you like, and nothing should constrain you. Thats why our configuration file has so many options: as your needs grow, you will be able to make Elmo behave exactly as you wish.
- Moreover, if you have suggestions, special wishes and advice, we would like to hear from you! If time allows, we will gladly incorporate your suggestions into a future version of Elmo.
Elmo will not require special external software.
- With traditional MUAs, such as Mutt, you usually have to set up an SMTP server, such as Sendmail, and often use additional tools like fetchmail to get your mail. With Elmo you can use this traditional approach but you dont have to: Elmo can send and receive mail on its own, which means you are less dependent.
Elmo should have a good, modular design.
- While it may not seem important to you, it does influence our ability to add new features to Elmo. We worked hard to make Elmo easily extensible, using best software-development methodologies.
Main features:
- SMTP support (with authentication support)
- POP3 support
- a Bayesian mail filter!
- an address-book
- colors
- threads
- keymaps and hooks
- maildir and (partial) mbox support
- MIME support (including support for encoded headers)
- partial GPG support (decoding, and signature verification)
- OpenSSL support
- partial UTF-8 support
- interactive search

Gentoo Linux, a special flavor of Linux that can be automatically optimized and customized for just about any application or need. Extreme configurability, performance and a top-notch user and developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience.
Thanks to a technology called Portage, Gentoo Linux can become an ideal secure server, development workstation, professional desktop, gaming system, embedded solution or something else -- whatever you need it to be. Because of its near-unlimited adaptability, we call Gentoo Linux a metadistribution.
Portage is the heart of Gentoo Linux, and performs many key functions. For one, Portage is the software distribution system for Gentoo Linux. To get the latest software for Gentoo Linux, you type one command: emerge --sync.
This command tells Portage to update your local "Portage tree" over the Internet. Your local Portage tree contains a complete collection of scripts that can be used by Portage to create and install the latest Gentoo packages. Currently, we have more than 8000 packages in our Portage tree, with new ones being added all the time.
Portage is also a package building and installation system. When you want to install a package, you type emerge packagename, at which point Portage automatically builds a custom version of the package to your exact specifications, optimizing it for your hardware and ensuring that the optional features in the package that you want are enabled -- and those you dont want arent.
Portage also keeps your system up-to-date. Typing emerge -u world -- one command -- will ensure that all the packages that you want on your system are updated automatically.
Portage will keep your Gentoo Linux system as "up-to-date" as you desire. And because of this, experienced Gentoo users dont pay too much attention to "new versions" of Gentoo Linux -- after all, the latest and greatest version of Gentoo Linux is always available by typing an emerge --sync command.
Theres no need to wait several months for a "new version" of Gentoo Linux to be released because Gentoo Linux is continually updated and refined and these improvements are immediately made available to you.
Main features:
- Support for x86, AMD64, PowerPC, UltraSparc, Alpha and MIPS processors
- LiveCD-based installation for x86, AMD64, PowerPC, UltraSparc and Alpha
- Latest stable KDE and GNOME
- Various optimized Linux kernels
- Very modern GNU development environment
- Excellent filesystem support: ReiserFS, XFS, ext3, EVMS, LVM
- Excellent hardware support: NVIDIA, Creative Labs Live! and Audigy
- Modular OpenGL and compiler sub-system (supports multiple co-existing versions)
- Clean, dependency-based system initialization scripts
- New "hardened" Gentoo security initiative
- more than 8000 packages of the latest and greatest software
- Enhanced Portage capabilities
It all began with Extra Time. Time to explore, Time to discover, Time to experiment. Thats how the creator of Gentoo, Daniel Robbins stepped into the world of Linux. He started with Debian Linux, setup a couple of applications, learnt the ins & outs of Linux and as most Linux users do, tried out a couple of distributions and settled to help out with a distro called Stampede Linux.
Soon he was into Stampede development and working on their package management system. After a period of time and due to certain issues, he moved on and decided that he would create his own distribution.
Thus, Enoch was born. Daniel wanted Enoch to be a blazingly fast distro with capabilities to completely automate the package creation and upgrading process. Soon there was a #enoch on irc.freenode.net and 10 developers helping with the distro. Over a period of time, as Enoch started improving, they felt that it needed a new name.
They called it Gentoo Linux. Around about the time Gentoo was moving to its 1.0 release, Daniel bought a new, fast machine. The motherboard model had a faulty chip that caused Linux to lock up when idle and because of that, Gentoo Linux development came to a complete halt.
Since there wasnt anything going on with Gentoo, Daniel switched to FreeBSD. He liked what he saw. Especially the "Ports" system. And he returned to the Linux world. Along with the help of other developers like Achim Gottinger, Gentoo was back on track & charging ahead.
The whole package management system was redesigned & called Portage. Gentoo has been in active development ever since, with tons of features being continually added over the years. Teams of volunteers help keep Gentoo on the bleeding edge and patched to ensure maximum security & stability.
The Gentoo development model was extended with a complete project-based approach where each project develops independently but cooperatively with other Gentoo projects. Regular meetings between the project leads (called "project managers") keep the development high-paced. The Gentoo Foundation has been created to provide financial caretaking, juridical protection and oversee general Gentoo development to keep it in line with the Social Contract.
In April 2004, Daniel decided to resign from his development responsibilities within Gentoo. We are all very grateful for all the work that Daniel has put in Gentoo and wish him the best.
Gentoo still continues to grow, evolve and improve itself - new projects are added, new developers are joining, new packages are added every day. The Gentoo developer and user community is undoubtedly Gentoos strongest value.
Enhancements:
- After several delays, the Gentoo Release Engineering team is proud to announce the release of Gentoo Linux 2007.0, code named Secret Sauce. This release includes a completely rewritten version of the Gentoo Linux Installer on the AMD64 and x86 live CD and live DVD images. It also includes GNOME 2.16.2, KDE 3.5.5, Xfce 4.4, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3, OpenOffice.org 2.1.0, and the 2.6.19 Linux kernel. Updated hardware support is among the highlights of the x86 release. Besides the many updated office and productivity packages x86 also brings an update to glibc 2.5. On amd64 you can enjoy updated 32-bit emulation libraries improving support for many closed source applications and browser plugins.

bBlog is a powerful, elegant personal publishing system written in PHP and released as free, Open Source software under the GPL. It is a flexible but simple way to blog that works for blogging beginners, and can grow into a more advanced users needs.
bBlog is used by thousands of bloggers world wide and has not only the features you would expect from a modern blogging system, but also advanced capabilities including advanced comment spam prevention and threaded comments. Perhaps bBlogs most distinctive feature is that it is built around a templating system called Smarty, which makes customizing your blog as easy as editing any web page, no programming skills required.
Our development process is open, with an active and growing community expanding our capabilities with new modules and improving our core software. Everyone is welcomed to contribute and input.
Main features:
- Fast, easy installation gets you up and running in minutes
- Complete control of look and feel of your blog
- Easier customization through Smarty templating
- Modular architecture makes it easy to drop in a new plugin developed by our active development community
- Threaded comments
- Advanced trackbacks, Blogrolling, XML/RPC, spam protection
- Comprehensive support for web standards
- Uses PHP/MySQL

Adamantix project aims to become a highly secure but usable Linux distribution. A standard Linux distribution is not very secure, despite the fact that it may be more secure than other operating systems.
The underlying problem is that most of Linux as we know it today was designed for speed and features, but not for security. Adding security to a system which is not designed to be secure will not solve most of the current and future problems.
This means that the whole system needs to be redesigned from the ground up to make it really secure. And that is what the Adamantix project is going to accomplish.
Adamantix v1.0 (known as Trusted Debian v1.0 back then) was the first Linux distribution to integrate support for PaX and SSP (Stack Smashing Protector, aka. Propolice). PaX is a kernel patch which protects against a number of buffer overflows and other memory corruption attacks. SSP is a GCC patch which provides protection of the stack, which makes stack overflows harder to exploit.
Currently work is going on to integrate RSBAC support in Adamantix. RSBAC is a kernel patch which provides a flexible and extensible security framework. This framework is very powerful and can be used to implement almost any security feature. A number of modules which use this framework have been implemented on top of it, such as:
- An improved chroot (jail) module
- On-access virus scanning module
- Linux capabilities management module
- Linux resource management module
- User ID changing management module
- Role based access module
- Access Control Lists (ACLs) module
- And others.
All these modules can be combined to form a whole which is greater than the sum of the individual modules. In the future the number of modules is likely to grow, including modules for gr-security RBAC and SELinux, to provide backwards compatibility for legacy systems. RSBAC is a toolkit, in the same spirit as Linux is a toolkit.
It takes quite some time to learn and understand RSBAC, just like learning Linux takes quite some time. But this time is well invested and will give similar rewards as learning Linux.