Free written communication software for linux

Ice, the Internet Communications Engine, is middleware for the practical programmer. A high-performance Internet communications platform, Ice includes a wealth of layered services and plug-ins. Ice means simplicity, speed, and power.
Ice is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Commercial licenses are available for customers who wish to use Ice with proprietary products. Please contact sales@zeroc.com for more information.
Ice is currently available for C++, Java, C#, Visual Basic, Python, and PHP, and is supported on various operating systems. Additional operating systems and languages will be supported in future releases.
Ice consists of the following packages:
Slice The Specification Language for Ice. Slice establishes a contract between clients and servers, and is also used to describe persistent data.
The Slice Compilers Tools to compile from Slice into target languages, such as C++ and Java, or to automatically generate documentation from Slice files.
Ice The Ice core library. Among many other features, the Ice core library manages all the communication tasks using a highly efficient protocol (including protocol compression and support for both TCP and UDP), provides a flexible thread pool for multi-threaded servers, and additional functionality that supports extreme scalability with potentially millions of Ice objects.
IceUtil A collection of utility functions, such as Unicode handling and thread programming. (C++ only.)
IceBox An application server specifically for Ice applications. IceBox can easily run and administer Ice services that are dynamically loaded as a DLL, shared library, or Java class.
IcePack A sophisticated server activation and deployment tool. With IcePack, the complex task of deploying applications in a heterogeneous computer network is dramatically simplified. Simply write a deployment descriptor in industry-standard XML, and IcePack handles the rest.
Freeze Freeze provides automatic persistence for Ice servants. With just a few lines of code, an application can incorporate a highly-scalable evictor that efficiently manages persistent objects.
FreezeScript It is common for persistent data types to change, especially in large software projects. In order to minimize the impact of these changes, FreezeScript provides inspection and migration tools for Freeze databases. The tools support an XML-based scripting capability that is both powerful and easy to use.
IceSSL A dynamic SSL transport plug-in for the Ice core. It provides authentication, encryption, and message integrity, using the industry-standard SSL protocol.
Glacier One of the most difficult challenges for object middleware systems is security and firewalls. Glacier, the firewall solution for Ice, greatly simplifies the deployment of secure applications. Glacier authenticates and filters client requests and allows callbacks to the client in a secure fashion. In combination with IceSSL, Glacier provides a powerful security solution that is both non-intrusive and easy to configure.
IceStorm A messaging service with support for federation. In contrast to most other messaging or event services, IceStorm supports typed events, meaning that broadcasting a message over a federation is as easy as invoking a method on an interface.
IcePatch A patching service for software distributions. Keeping software up-to-date is often a tedious task. IcePatch automates updating of individual files as well as complete directory hierarchies. Only files that have changed are downloaded to the client machine, using efficient compression algorithms.
Enhancements:
- Various additions, including redundant IceGrid registries.

Libtubo Interprocess Communication is a small and simple library that can run processes in the background and communicate via the stdout, stderr, and stdin file descriptors.
The functionality of libtubo is similar to the glib function g_spawn_async_with_pipes(), except that all pipe setup and monitoring is taken care of.
The calling function only has to provide the functions with which to process the input/output of the remote process.
The library first appeared in the year 2000 in the xfce3 desktop as part of the xfsamba application, and is now available for use for other developers.
Enhancements:
- Some control bugfixes.
- The version has been updated to the xffm scheme, as this package is now distributed with xffm.

multican is a Canon EOS class camera remote control utility.
multican is able to remote control 300D, 350D, 30D, 20D, and 5D cameras and can be scripted to control up to six attached cameras.
Which functions are supported?
Several remote control functions are available in scripts, they are:
- setting shutter release speed (Tv)
- setting aperture size (Av)
- setting ISO sensitivity
- releasing shutter (currently only allows to store the image on CF)
Known Bugs:
The timing in the script strongly depends on the camera type and CF card which is used to do shooting. This is to be tested by multican user himself. If too short times are described in the script, the communication may hang, may skip some commands. Thanks to camera image caching, the shooting rate could be set under 1s if only several images are takes since the most of the EOS camera models contains an image cache, so that the images are stored into a queue and written to the CF lately.
The known bug in this multican release is that cameras need to be switched off and on again when a scripted sequence is finished and a new one is to be done. This is likely caused by the fact that the communication is not correcly terminated in the actual multicam release.
Enhancements:
- fix typos, update docs
- fix warnings

Minicom is a serial communication program. minicom is a Unix clone of the well-known MS-DOS Telix program.
It has ANSI color, a dialing directory, dial-a-list, and a scripting language.
Enhancements:
- This release fixes bugs, cleans up code, and adds a couple of translations.

DIET Agents is a multi-agent platform written in Java. It was developed as part of the DIET project and released as Open Source at the end of the project. A bottom-up design was used to ensure that the platform is lightweight, scalable, robust, adaptive and extensible. It is especially suitable for rapidly developing peer-to-peer prototype applications and/or adaptive, distributed applications that use bottom-up, nature-inspired techniques.
Main features:
- A clean layered architecture, with a kernel that is lightweight, simple and general.
- The fail-fast kernel constrains and minimises the use of threads, sockets and memory.
- Agents are autonomous yet lightweight, making it possible to run 100,000s of agents in a single VM.
- A model-event infrastructure provides sophisticated visualisation support.
- A thread-safe agent execution model makes programming new agent behaviours straightforward.
- Provision of extensible and modular agent behaviours, using jobs and event managers.
- Various implementations of remote communication are provided, built on top of the kernel
Enhancements:
- Only relatively small improvements have been made, but ones that developers should find useful. In particular, the new MirrorFactory interface makes it much more convenient for agents to initiate communication with a remote agent.

CrunchyFrog is a database schema browser and query tool written in Python/PyGTK. CrunchyFrogs current status is under development, but its useable for the most common tasks.