Any interesting linux projects?

[greg.freemyer@gmail.com (Greg Freemyer)]

manty kuma <mantykuma@gmail.com> wrote:
>Hi Greg Freemyer,
>Yes. Any interesting User space projects you know, please let me know.
>
>Regards,
>Sandeep

Well, there are a million userspace projects I'm sure.

My interest is in filesystems and my day job is computer forensics.
For me the most interesting opensource linux focused project in that
space is Plaso.  Plaso itself is written in python, but it relies
heavily on a collection of c libraries collectively known as libyal
(yet another library).  Plaso is highly modulized and the todo list
has lots of modules still to be written before it moves out of alpha
status.   Most of libyal is also in alpha or experimental status.

http://plaso.kiddaland.net/
http://code.google.com/p/libyal/wiki/Overview

I think Google is sponsoring the 2 main developers as they seem to be
working on plaso/libyal fulltime but there is tons of work still todo.
 No problem finding a task to claim for your own.

Also, even though plaso / libyal run on Linux most of the
functionality currently targets windows data files.  Adding support
for linux data formats would also be cool.  ie. I don't know if they
even have parsers for /var/log/*.

>From a low level code perspective libvshadow (part of libyal) may be
the most interesting subproject of plaso.  It is a linux solution that
provides access to microsoft NTFS volume shadow copies (sort of like
btrfs snapshots).

https://code.google.com/p/libvshadow/
https://googledrive.com/host/0B3fBvzttpiiSZDZXRFVMdnZCeHc/

The shadow copies are exposed to other apps as a virtual /dev/sdx type
device that allows loopback mounts to work:

Ie.  mount -o loop

Libvshadow is alpha I believe so you could help test/fix it.

Also there are no user friendly apps provided with libvshadow so you
could write some kind of front-end that would make it more accessible.
 I have a trivial shell script that will expose the virtual volumes
but it is very trivial.

A really cool thing to do would be to integrate libvshadow into a
filemanager like dolphin or mc (midnight commander).  I have no
experience in integrating something like libvshadow into a
filemanager, so you would need to pick one and ask there how to go
about the process.

fyi: I have packaged and submitted the parts of libyal that plaso
needs to openSUSE for inclusion in their next release (13.1 in
November).  I don't think any other distro has them readily available
for install so you have to build all the pieces from source.

Hope that's not all overwhelming.
Greg