KATRs top utility software package picks
At KATR, we spend a fair amount of time researching and using utility software as part of our daily business. These are tools that we use on a daily or otherwise frequent basis and we decided to take a minute to share a few of our favorites with you:
| Name | Status | Platform | Brief description | |||
| Slackware Linux | free | it IS the platform | Although we think the website needs a little work and their installer isn't as nice as Suse or Redhat, we really like the Slackware distribution of Linux. Source code available. | |||
| Crimson Editor | free | windows | A lightweight source code / text editor | |||
| Cygwin | free | windows | A Linux like environment for Windows (they even offer an X-Server) | |||
| Firefox browser | free | linux/windows | An innovative browser that seems to draw fewer net virii than it's major rival IE | |||
| GIMP | free | linux/windows | If you can't afford Photoshop for editing images, GIMP is the logical replacement. Source code available. | |||
| Audacity | free | linux/windows | A great utility for capturing and manipulating sounds. Source code available. | |||
| ImageMagick | free | linux | An enormous selection of image manipulation and conversion tools. | |||
| Irfanview | free | windows | A fantastic image viewer plus... | |||
| KeePass | free | windows | A robust and secure password database. Check it out, these folks did a nice job. Source code available. | |||
| Putty | free | linux/windows | A fabulous package that provides everything that you need to telnet, ssh, tunnel, or copy files using SSL. Source code available. | |||
| Winmerge | free | windows | A very handy text file and directory comparison tool. Source code available. |
There are literally thousands of packages bundled with most Linux distributions including award winning packages such as Apache web server, Mysql database engine, PHP scripting language, gcc, Perl, Python, Bash... and the list goes on. Far, far too many to try to list here. A number of the items on our list are actually included in most distributions, however we wanted to list them independently as specialty packages.
