I recently participated in #FreeSoftwareAdvent suggested by @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk , coming up with 25 FOSS packages that I rely on.

Today, I collected those (and 2 extra that I thought about afterwards) into a new article on my Production Log:

"27 Essential FOSS Packages Our Animation Studio Relies On"
https://lunaticsproject.org/2025/12/29/essential-foss-packages/

I changed the order to be slightly more topically organized, although the text for each packages is nearly the same as what I used in my thread.

I recently participated in #FreeSoftwareAdvent suggested by @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk , coming up with 25 FOSS packages that I rely on.

Today, I collected those (and 2 extra that I thought about afterwards) into a new article on my Production Log:

"27 Essential FOSS Packages Our Animation Studio Relies On"
https://lunaticsproject.org/2025/12/29/essential-foss-packages/

I changed the order to be slightly more topically organized, although the text for each packages is nearly the same as what I used in my thread.

#FreeSoftwareAdvent Day 23: ffmpeg

This is the Swiss Army Knife of video tools, and actually underpins other tools I've mentioned by OBS and vlc. It does video manipulation on the command line, everything from format conversion, up- and down-sizing, re-sampling, filtering, and so forth: all ready to be used programmatically or wrapped-up in a friendly interface as required.

https://ffmpeg.org/

#FreeSoftwareAdvent Day 23: ffmpeg

This is the Swiss Army Knife of video tools, and actually underpins other tools I've mentioned by OBS and vlc. It does video manipulation on the command line, everything from format conversion, up- and down-sizing, re-sampling, filtering, and so forth: all ready to be used programmatically or wrapped-up in a friendly interface as required.

https://ffmpeg.org/

Following on the heels of ssh(1) yesterday, today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is rsync(1).

It's one of the key elements in my podcast listening (more on that to come later this month), where my podcatcher pulls down podcasts into a backlog tree structure, and I rsync the whole thing to my phone for listening. It also undergirds my blog deployment, building in Nikola (still gotta find some time to switch that to my custom Makefile driven build process) and then rsync'ing the output/ tree up to my web-server.

And last night our teen wanted our family photo website content's pictures for a school project, so I was able to rsync the latest copy of them to a backup USB drive that he could browse offline.

It's reliable and does a particular job (keeping two directory trees in sync) very well. Yes, ZFS send/receive is more efficient if both sides support it and they're whole datasets, but that's not always the case.

Also, since I use bash as my shell, the "^" substitution makes it easy to issue something like

$ rsync -n -avr $SRC $DEST

and if it looks good, use

$ ^-n

to remove the dry-run flag and run it for real.

December 19 #FreeSoftwareAdvent

#DokuWiki: Simple, effective wiki software

It's hard to beat the wiki format for good old fashioned knowledge management. Dokuwiki is a file-based wiki which doesn't need a database and runs on pretty much any PHP-based hosting. It's very easy to set up and use. While it's simple to jump in, DokuWiki also has loads of advanced features like access control and revision history. It supports 50+ languages, alternative visual themes, and has a rich plugin ecosystem.

Thanks @dokuwiki !

https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is LibreOffice, the amazing free office suit (document editor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, etc).

I know that I've included this in previous #FreeSoftwareAdvent toots, but I use LibreOffice, particularly Writer, every day.

Better still, this one isn't just for Linux users, so if you are thinking about moving away from your Microsoft or Apple office suite, you can give LibreOffice a try, for free, alongside whatever you use currently, and give it a good go before you made a decision.

#LibreOffice

Free Software that I rely on. One per day.

Day 13:

VideoLAN Client, a.k.a. VLC

Some distro maintainers apparently hate it. It is very customizable, which results in multiple and frequent UI changes.

But damn is it useful! I MUST have it.

I have found very few video formats that VLC won't play, at least if you install all the codecs (some of which are non-free, which is why you have to install them later -- but that's not VLC's fault).

It is my usual music player, and video player. I use it to check my newly-edited videos.

Somewhere in there is a way to edit metadata in files -- I know I've used it, though not in a long time.

And if I go to "Media -> Convert/Save", it can convert video formats, which can be a life-saver.

If my computer should shut down suddenly, my screenlogging script will produce a corrupted video. VLC can read it and convert into a corrected format that other programs can read. Handy!

https://www.videolan.org/

#FreeSoftwareAdvent #VLC #VideoLan #MusicPlayer #VideoPlayer #Multimedia

Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's ZFS. It gives me

• all in one volume management (no volume-groups and logical volumes and manually resizing partitions on those logical volumes with a dozen different commands, no playing the "oof, need more space on partition A and have too much free space on partition B, back up all the files, nuke both, shuffle partition-sizes/locations, restore the files" dance)

• transparent file compression

• transparent volume encryption

• fast and effectively free snapshots and clones (you start paying the cost if they diverge or deleting files that remain in a snapshot, but that's to be expected)

• same-disk redundancy with copies=2 to help prevent against bitrot, and multi-disk redundancy with effectively zero effort

• the CoW means no need for fsck(8) horribly slowing my boots or finding orphaned fragments of files and shunting them into a lost+found/ directory (my biggest frustration with OpenBSD's FFS2) in the event of an abrupt power loss

• efficient send/receive (beats rsync hands down in terms of speed)

• fine-grained quota/reservation control

• utilities make scripting easy with output-formatting options

• cross-OS support in a way that very few other filesystems provide (other than FAT 😆)

I'm sure there are additional reasons that didn't percolate to the top of my brain, but it's just so much more pleasant than any other disk management I've done on any OS.

#FreeSoftwareAdvent day 11: Dokuwiki

I use Dokuwiki a lot. I have a private wiki for personal notes, my business has a private wiki for documentation, I maintain an RPG website that is a wiki, and there are others. I even write my books in a modified Dokuwiki.

I particularly like that pages are stored as plain text files. On some of my wikis, I've taken advantage of that by writing bash scripts to check or edit files.

https://dokuwiki.org/

@neil

#FreeSoftwareAdvent

What a great idea - must take a look when I've got more time - love it!

#FreeSoftwareAdvent
A piece of free software I rely on at work is #Dokuwiki: https://www.dokuwiki.org
We run it on a simple Apache & PHP VM. No need for a database, connects to LDAP for user accounts (optional).

It's old-school but it also has a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) plugin for editing pages - which doesn't support all formatting features (pending more funding from interested users). But it's there so the non-techy people can clicky-click their headlines and tables.

#FreeSoftwareAdvent day 5: StreetComplete

StreetComplete is an Android app that displays local data from OpenStreetMap, and asks questions to improve/update the data.

I joined OpenStreetMap in 2006, back when many roads simply weren't mapped. I remember reading an article (probably around that time) which predicted that OpenStreetMap would get progressively out of date.

The author said that adding new things to the map was fun and exciting, but there were challenges with keeping the map up to date.

First, people wouldn't want to fire up something as big as JOSM just to make a small change. Second, updating the map was much less interesting, so people wouldn't bother.

The inevitable result, the author said, would be that OpenStreetMap's data would degrade and it would gradually become unusable.

StreetComplete addresses that issue by making it easy and fun to keep the map up to date. You can't use it to add a missing road to the map, but you can use it to add details like whether or not the road has lighting.

It will also periodically check that things are correct, so when StreetComplete asks "Is this rubbish bin still here?" and the user selects "No", the bin is removed from the map.

I've made over 19,000 edits using StreetComplete. If I'd had to use JOSM, I wouldn't have done most of them. It's an excellent app, and I thoroughly recommend it.

https://streetcomplete.app/

@streetcomplete

#OpenStreetMap #OSM @streetcomplete

Free Software that I rely on. One per day.

Day 7:

ImageMagick

This is actually a small suite of tools that can be used from the command line, although it also has a GUI interface. Pretty old school software; been around for ages; still very handy.

Not as powerful as Gimp or Krita for manipulating a single image, but with ImageMagick and a bash script you can make changes en masse ("convert" and "mogrify" -- which does the job in place). You can quickly check the format and size of images from the command line ("identify") or simply pop up the image with "display".

Finally, with "compose" you can make an image combining multiple images in many different ways, including making a grid with or without labels.

I don't use it as much as I used to, but it is still the simplest way to check image content from the command line. And it's really the only option when you need to change a whole lot of images at once.

Also often used on server back ends to manipulate images for display in web applications.

#FreeSoftwareAdvent #ImageMagick #Graphics #FreeSoftware #OpenSource

Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's lynx(1). Which is amusing because it's been scheduled for today on my calendar since the beginning of the month, but @neil chose to share links(1) today as well, for many of the same reasons. 😆

It's been around for decades—I used it to browse gopherspace (and maybe WAIS?) in the 90s via a 1200 baud dial-up connection to a shell account and later the nascent WWW when it arrived.

Sadly, ClownFlare, Google, and anti-AI-bot/scraper tech has made many formerly-accessible-with-lynx sites now inaccessible, some blocking by User-Agent, some blocking due to the lack of JavaScript support.

But it has the right amount of usability and friction, so I can use it from my command-line-only writer-deck netbook to do a little research or read some HTML documentation, without getting sucked into the modern web.

My custom configuration puts it in Advanced mode (no help-bar at the bottom), specifies vi-key-bindings, a custom color-scheme, uses links-and-form-fields-are-numbered making it easy to jump to them, and text-fields-require-activation so I don't get stuck in text input boxes when using j/k to scroll up/down in the document.

I also have a couple shell wrapper-functions to invoke lynx on particular URLs (Wikipedia, dictionary/thesaurus/rhyming resources, web search, etc) with the CLI arguments filled in.

I also have mutt configured to show text/html messages in lynx (either using `lynx -dump` and the internal pager, or using `m` from the attachments menu to view it interactively)

Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's lynx(1). Which is amusing because it's been scheduled for today on my calendar since the beginning of the month, but @neil chose to share links(1) today as well, for many of the same reasons. 😆

It's been around for decades—I used it to browse gopherspace (and maybe WAIS?) in the 90s via a 1200 baud dial-up connection to a shell account and later the nascent WWW when it arrived.

Sadly, ClownFlare, Google, and anti-AI-bot/scraper tech has made many formerly-accessible-with-lynx sites now inaccessible, some blocking by User-Agent, some blocking due to the lack of JavaScript support.

But it has the right amount of usability and friction, so I can use it from my command-line-only writer-deck netbook to do a little research or read some HTML documentation, without getting sucked into the modern web.

My custom configuration puts it in Advanced mode (no help-bar at the bottom), specifies vi-key-bindings, a custom color-scheme, uses links-and-form-fields-are-numbered making it easy to jump to them, and text-fields-require-activation so I don't get stuck in text input boxes when using j/k to scroll up/down in the document.

I also have a couple shell wrapper-functions to invoke lynx on particular URLs (Wikipedia, dictionary/thesaurus/rhyming resources, web search, etc) with the CLI arguments filled in.

I also have mutt configured to show text/html messages in lynx (either using `lynx -dump` and the internal pager, or using `m` from the attachments menu to view it interactively)