I believe every system administrator is used to open source by now. From Apache to Firefox or Linux, everyone uses it at least a little bit.
However, most open source developers are not good in marketing, so I know that there are hundreds of very good tools out there that very few people know.
To fill this gap, share your favorite open source tool that you use in your day-to-day work.
*I will post mine in the comments.
I love PuTTY !
The PuTTY executables and source code are distributed under the MIT licence, which is similar in effect to the BSD licence. (This licence is Open Source certified and complies with the Debian Free Software Guidelines.)
Notepad++ lightweight, has excellent support for different formats, my main text editing tool in windows.
Synergy
Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own display.
It is also platform independent.
UnxUtils: This is a port of various gnu shell utilities based on msvcrt.dll so it understands native windows paths - i.e. you don't need to map to a
/cygdrivepath. This is a key advantage over Cygwin if you have to interact with native windows commands or homebrew CL utilities.Strings: is a very good way to scrounge through files for items of text. Many, many uses.
Flex: Really designed for writing lexical analysers, with a little bodge artistry and a C compiler it can be used as an uber-grep. I don't use it all that often but it can come in surprisingly handy in that role.
Fetchmail and Procmail: Core of my email system for well over a decade, since I had dial-up internet connectivity. If it ain't broke ...
rdesktop: an open source RDP (terminal services) client that works surprisingly well.
PythonWin:, particularly as packaged in Activestate Python. Python on Windows works a lot better than you might think. When used with COM Makepy it's really good for scripting COM APIs.
Wget: an exceedingly useful FTP/HTTP downloading tool.
Leafnode: if you still read any of the newsgroups that still have decent active traffic this is quite a good way to do it. Again, a bit of legacy from my dialup days but it still gets used on occasion.
Abiword and Gnumeric: full featured wordprocessing and spreadsheet software that's far leaner and meaner than OpenOffice.
Xfig: Visio type diagramming tool with an odd user interface. Once you get used to the paradigm it's much easier on my poor old mouse hand than a modern direct maniulation interface. Worth a mention for the ergonomics.
Tcl/Tk: Overshadowed by Perl and Python, Tcl is very easy to embed C code into - it was designed specifically for embedding. Surprisingly useful nonetheless, and the Tk toolkit is very easy to whip up a GUI with. Modern versions support theming so your applications no longer have to look like Motif.
Ghostscript: One of the great unsung heroes of the open-source world. A free postscript interpreter with a whole ecosystem of derived items - PS and PDF viewers, PDF creation tools, printer RIPs and all sorts of Postscript conversion tools. Perhaps most widely used outside open-source circles (if not actively credited) in its role in the back-end of PDFCreator
That's just a sampling of the obscure stuff without mentioning Vim, LaTeX, Firefox, python, gcc, gtk & qt and the Berkeley TCP stack - to name but a few.
Nobody mentioned screen yet?
My favourite open source tool is
rsync.I use it almost every day and it is still not as famous as it should be:-)
7-zip--a file archiver with the high compression ratio. The program supports 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, LZH, CHM, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, ISO, MSI, WIM, NSIS, RPM and DEB formats.
No one mentioned
git.It is not as well known as cvs or svn but I think it will be one day.
FileZilla - available as both a client and server.
Vim/gVim - an editor practically no one's heard of!