From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: greg.freemyer@gmail.com (Greg Freemyer) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 12:47:37 -0400 Subject: Any interesting linux projects? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: To: kernelnewbies@lists.kernelnewbies.org List-Id: kernelnewbies.lists.kernelnewbies.org manty kuma 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