This is just a list of software I am using for different purposes. These are not recommendations, but merely a little helper for me to remember my favorite tools.
Free Tools I currently (2012-01-25) use
“I need a better editor than notepad under windows. And I want to have a edit entry for it in the windows explorer.”
Editor: Notepad++ Best editor I have seen yet. Tons of plugins are available.
“MS Paint is not good enough for painting”
Drawing Tool: Paint .Net Awesome program. The usability is more than impressive.
“Give me a nice and fast way to view and convert images”
Image Viewer: IrfanView
“I would like to have the latest songs of my favorite band not only on Audio-CD, but also as mp3”
CD Grabber: Audiograbber
“I want to know how much lines of code my projects have (to show off on tonight’s party)”
Line Counter for Java, C++ and many other languages: LinesOfCodeWichtel
“I would like to backup specific files and folders of my hard disk”
Backup: TrayBackup
Free Tools I do not use anymore
“I am trying to back up my entire hard disk to an external USB device. But I have MacOSx, WinXP and Linux installed on my computer.”
Backup or Cloning: Clonezilla
I prefer booting with clonezilla from the clonezilla live-cd and then backing everything up. If you want to clone to an external USB drive, you can go like this: Clonezilla stores its images as files. Before starting make sure, you have a partition that is large enough to hold the images. Clonezilla supports the NTFS file system, hence you can create and format the partition on the USB drive using Windows XP. When booting from clonezilla live-cd, you will have to mount your usb drive first, so go to the command line before starting clonezilla: 1. Become root with
sudo su -
2. Mount the usb drive to the partimag directory. You will need to know the name of the device. To find it out the device name, you can type dmesg and search for messages regarding usb devices. If the device is sdb1, you mount it with
mount -t auto /dev/sdb1 /home/partimag
Attention! If you used Windows XP to create and format your backup partition, it is probably formatted with NTFS. In that case replace above command by the following one (otherwise you will get a permission denied error when trying to write to the mounted partition):
ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /home/partimag
3. Start clonezilla with
ocs-sr -x
4. and follow the instructions.
This was last tested on 2008-01-31 using clonezilla 1.0.7.