The best new open source software on the planet Mike Saunders Having visited every single nook and cranny of the internet, Mike Griffon Puddletag Mobik PyHIDS Potamus Ioping knows where the best open source Dateutils Berusky UBee512 Vinterm S2png gems are hidden. Text editor and IDE Griffon Version 1.6 Web http://griffon.lasotel.fr/en e Brits don’t have a great horribly cluttered on low-resolution reputation for learning displays, but if you have plenty of W foreign languages, so it screen real estate, you’ll appreciate always impresses us to see so much having lots of useful panels and widgets multilingualism in the open source surrounding the main editing area. world. We mention this because Griffon is written in C with GTK, and Griffon’s lead coder, Philippe Muller, is a along with the source tarball a Deb Frenchman and although there are a package is available for Debian and few problems with the English Ubuntu-based distros. translation of his program, they’re The core component of Griffon is the Don’t like the colour scheme? Go to Themes in the menu minor and we applaud his effort. syntax highlighting, auto-completing for an alternative selection of eye-pleasing photons. Griffon is a hugely ambitious text editor with elements of an IDE editor; the latter’s implementation is a (Integrated Development Environment). “A very customisable bit strange at first, making heavy use of It attempts to cram everything you editor with a few the right-hand Shift key, but it becomes could need into a single window, second nature after a while. Syntax producing an interface that looks interface rough spots.” highlighting is available for 13 languages, and Griffon has a special focus on HTML, with a dedicated menu for creating HTML templates, inserting Exploring the Griffon interface Doctypes, and adding tags to your code. However, the editor can be used for virtually everything, thanks to a Projects Second toolbar feature which lets you associate build Use the blank space to enter a commands and working directories to line number and click the blue arrow to jump to it. source code files. Get things done File browser Griffon lets you mount SFTP servers in the right-hand panel, while the bottom A standard filesystem navigator – double-click on a section is home to a bunch of useful source code file and it will tools, such as a WebKit-based viewer open in the tabbed editor in (for previewing web page edits), a the middle. terminal and a to-do list. Ad-hoc user commands can be created by going to File > Manager configuration file > Extra tools Configuring the user menu: this opens This area contains an a new editor tab where you can add embedded terminal, web page custom commands accessible via viewer, note-taker and to-do Editing panel Yet more tools! Function > User Menu. list, switchable via tabs. The heart of Griffon. Hit the right- Another switchable area, this time containing In all, Griffon is a very customisable hand Shift key to bring up auto- auto-complete keywords, language help and editor with a few interface rough spots, complete options when typing. a place to mount SFTP shares. but plenty of neat features to pad it out. 60 LXF176 November 2013 www.linuxformat.com LXFHotPicks Audio tag editor Puddletag Version 1.0.2 Web http://puddletag.sourceforge.net ost music players include a If your music collection is lacking way to edit tags, the decent tags, you can create new tags Mmetadata associated with based on filenames via the Convert music files, but the implementation is menu. You can also do this the other often lacking. In many cases you have way round, creating more descriptive to open a new editing dialog box for file names based on the content of your each song, which is horribly tedious. tags. Puddletag’s Actions system is Puddletag takes a different approach by immensely versatile: you can define Scratching an itch: the author wrote Puddletag to escape presenting songs and their tags in a custom actions to modify tags based Mp3tag on Windows and free up a partition. spreadsheet-like layout – so you can on regular expressions, merge tags work on multiple files at the same time. together, remove whitespace and much Undo button if you mess up. You can It’s written in Python, and you’ll need more. These actions can be applied to even play songs from inside the various modules, such as Mutagen and batches of songs, providing an program, by default in Amarok (go to PyParsing (the full list is in the Readme automated editing system. Edit > Preferences to change to a file). Once you have these, you can run With the python-musicbrainz2 different player). the program from its own directory with module, Puddletag can retrieve song Puddletag is one of the most ./puddletag. You’ll be presented with a data from the net and tag files versatile tag editors we’ve come across, mostly blank display, so use the accordingly, and there’s a life-saving and its spreadsheet-based approach is Filesystem panel in the bottom-left to way better than the tiresome dialog-box navigate to a directory containing your system normally employed by. If you’ve songs. This will populate the main panel “One of the most used Mp3tag on Windows then you’ll with tag data, and you can scroll around versatile tag editors feel right at home here; the interfaces inside it like a typical spreadsheet – are very similar, although there are double-click on a cell to change its data. we’ve come across.” some feature differences. Wiki engine Mobiki Version 2013-07-23 Web http://bit.ly/1488jIw or quick document collaboration initial edits, you’ll need to input a jobs, nothing beats a wiki. password. This can be modified in the FThey’re easy to use, anyone with configuration section of index.php. a web browser can contribute, and Mobiki’s markup isn’t quite the same as admins can monitor changes to the MediaWiki’s, but it shares many content. The only problem is the setup: similarities and a pre-built Wiki-Markup many wiki engines require the admin to page is provided for experimentation. create databases, fiddle around with The template.html and template. permissions and other laborious tasks. css files are used for customising the Mobiki is designed to be ultra simple wiki’s appearance; in the former you Mobiki’s default theme is targeted at mobile devices. to install – it’s a single PHP file, and it can modify the structure of pages, while writes wiki pages to individual text files, the latter lets you fine-tune fonts and comparison to the larger engines: it’s so no database is required. It’s colours. Mobiki provides a simple News not possible to do comparisons with “optimised for usage with mobile page which shows recent edits sorted earlier page versions or revert changes. devices”, hence the minimal interface by date, along with an RSS feed With a quick five-line hack (saving when compared with the likes of containing the same information. extra copies of pages with a timestamp MediaWiki, and the code is easy to hack Here’s where Mobiki feels weak in affixed) it’s possible to add a basic thanks to an abundance of comments. versioning system, and manually copy To get the wiki running, place its files older versions of pages over current in the document root of a web server “Mobiki is designed to ones if necessary. But Mobiki isn’t with PHP 5.4 (or later) support (we be ultra simple to install designed to be a high-end engine, and used Nginx in our testing) and open for a simple, low-maintenance wiki for a index.php in your browser. To perform – it’s a single PHP file.” small group of users, it does a solid job. www.tuxradar.com November 2013 LXF176 61 LXFHotPicks Intrusion detection system PyHIDS 0.4 Version 0.4 Web http://bit.ly/14o4vr1 f you suspect that someone has compact and easy to use example of an broken into your home, what do IDS, as its name suggests it’s written in Iyou do? Before calling the old bill, Python. To run it you’ll need Python 3.3 you’ll want to find some evidence that a and the RSA module, which are no-gooder has been inside your available in Debian/Ubuntu-based property (and they are not still there systems like so: Here we’re looking at the config file, and then running too). For instance, a window that has sudo apt-get install python3-pip PyHIDS – in this case the Iptables have changed. been forcibly opened, or a broken door sudo pip-3.3 install rsa lock. You have a similar situation when Copy conf.cfg-sample to conf.cfg of the files and commands that are your computer is compromised, and open it in a text editor. You’ll see described in conf.cfg. Then run pyHIDS. whereby system and configuration files various configuration sections marked py to see if any of them has changed – that have been changed without your in square brackets; first look at the try manually editing one of the files involvement can indicate the work of [files] section. Here’s where you specify listed in conf.cfg and run pyHIDS.py an intruder. the files that PyHIDS will keep track of, again to see what the warning output The problem is, a typical Linux so if something changes in them, looks like.