Free tools for less software for linux

stic bundles a few Linux tools which are intended to support the task of collecting an unreasonable amount of pictures (preferrably in JPEG format).
similar
a program for detecting duplicate or very similar images. It maintains a
database of characteristic color samples which it compares with submitted
pictures. similar depends on libjpeg and ImageMagick s convert (on a
modern Linux desktop system these components should already be present).
Storage medium may be a usual filesystem or a MySQL database. There
also is a MySQL UDF extension to compare image samples within SQL queries.
similar contains the communications module described at sagent.
simv
a core program to perform file management tasks on an image collection.
Its main purpose is to coordinate file movements with the content of
similars database. This applies to importing new files which get tested
against the existent collection, as well as to inform similar about moving
and deleting files within the collection.
simv depends on an external image viewer like ImageMagick s display
(should already be present on a modern Linux desktop system) or John
Bradleys xv (quite a fast one).
simv contains the communications module described at sagent.
sagent
a standalone version of the communications module used in simv and
similar. This software receives input from its start terminal and multiple
clients, distributes several types of output back to them, and is also
able to act itself as such a client.
Since communications mainly use TCP/IP there is an encryption layer
(Blowfish with 128 bit keys) which provides user authentication. Any
single activity of such a user may be particularly permitted or denied.
Secure connections should be possible that way as long as one can defend
the keyfiles and programs on client and server host against foreign
access.
Front-end connection software is available in C, Tcl/Tk and PHP3 to build
custom clients. In the most primitive case even telnet can act as a
client.
The standalone program sagent may be used as communications node in a tree
of clients. Another purpose is to be a shell frontend which sends commands
to a server and receives its replies.
snntpbatch
a command line based NNTP (newsgroups) client. It is mainly intended for
automatic download of images by use of a filter language. Nevertheless it
also downloads the message texts and converts them to HTML code which
includes the downloaded images. Also, it is capable of automatically
posting sets of images to the newsgroups.
The tools are designed to be very independent of the system flavor. On an
average Linux desktop there should be no need to update existing system
components. Actually one could use stic without having display equipment for
graphics.
Any program activity which is possible in dialog may also be performed in
batch runs. Therefore the tools are quite suitable for users who like to get
boring tasks automated and manual tasks simplified.
All tools code is open source and distributed under BSD license.
Example images Credit: U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service (see images/CREDITS)
Enhancements:
- The new encrypted protocol version 0.2 is standard now : SHA-1 seal, 256 bit keys, variable chaining initialization vector.
- The protocol of a connection is chosen by the client and may or may not be accepted by the server.
- See sagent command -security options clientprotocol , serverprotocol.

cz2cz tools is software for converting texts between various charset encodings that are used in the Czech language.
The most important feature is autodetection of the most-used encodings (UTF-8, ISO-8859-2, Win-1250, cp850, and Kamenickych). There are both console non-interactive (text-based) and interactive (curses) applications.
cz2cz also allows you to convert characters with diacritics to TeX (LaTeX) conventions. The interactive part of cz2cz tools can be used for quick manual complementing of diacritics to texts.
Enhancements:
- Automatic detection for the UTF-8 encoding was added.

QA Tools allow you to automatically generate regular releases and/or snapshots of your product. Your product can be distributed as a source code archive (typically .tar.gz) or as a binary distribution archive (.deb, .rpm, .exe).
QA Tools can be used to generate nighly-built source and binary packages suitable for continuous integration and testing.
QA Tools can handle very simple product dependencies (read: in order to build/package product A you first need to build/package product B).
QA Tools work currently with the software packages that have source code managed using Subversion and that are ./configured && make installed using autoconf/automake.
QA Tools can help the people who are developing set of dependent crossplatform products that need to be packaged for different distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora Core, Suse, Windows, ...).
You should be familiar with autoconf/automake (particulary `make dist), RPM package building, and DEB package building. You should know how to store source code in SVN (trunk, branches, tags). QA Tools will not do any of those for you, but will help you to automate certain things and consume less time doing them.
Enhancements:
- Fix swapped function calls in svn-release-{deb,rpm}

HA-Tools provide some programs to improve shell scripting in a High Availability environment.
The halockrun program provides a simple and reliable way to implement a locking in shell scripts. A typical usage for halockrun is to prevent cronjobs to run simultanously. halockrun uses a lock on a file via fcntl(2) which ensures the release of the lock even if the process gets killed via SIGKILL.
The hatimerun program provides a time-out mechanism which can be used from shell scripts.
Enhancements:
- This release features some extensions and clarifications about the exit codes returned by halockrun and hatimerun.

VK Toolset project is intended to aide MPEG developers and hobbyist in understanding and creating conformant MPEG streams.
The current version focuses on the MPEG system layer (MPEG-1 System, MPEG-2 Program Stream), and MPEG-2 Transport bitstreams).
Enhancements:
vk_tafe
- UI changes to PCR Analysis screen
- New PTS/DTS graph (graphs PTS/DTS values against current PCR)
- UI log for STD buffer analysis
- Updated HTML documentation
- Target build platform updated to a "modern" distro -- SuSE 10. The older Mandrake version is frozen at version 0.8f which is still included in the VK-Tools packets
- Updated win32 port
view_knot_dump
- UI no longer depends on icons subdirectory to properly display
- If local .view_knot_view config does not specify the location of vk_tafe we assume its somewhere in the PATH and try to launc it
- Updated HTML documentation
- Target build platform updated to a "modern" distro -- SuSE 10. The older Mandrake version is frozen at version 0.8f which is still included in the VK-Tools packets
- Updated win32 port
- Removed Plugins. Theyve only been broken for 5 years now :)
view_knot_viewer
- No changes

Site Tools is a collection of Modules for perl that allow easy template integration, SQL forms creation, tables, sessions, and various other things that make web development a little easier to manage. Requires the SQLObject and PObject classes available on my project page. I have stopped developing these classes in favor of the Template Toolkit, it is a lot more robust and mod_perl aware, please use that instead.

To install everyhthing, follow the next instructions:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

Basic documentation can be found through perldoc Site. It has pointers to other modules to look at.