Building a community media center and a media library in Abu Al Nomros is turning out to be a very interesting job.

I need to find decent FOSS apps for all sorts of use cases, to be ready for the future I decided to spend a few days going through all the packages available to Mandrake.

I'm testing using cooker since it has more packages, and maybe I'll get to post a bug report or two.

Anyways, I'll keep track of the packages I find promising here, and maybe later I'll review some of them

• kaspaliste - kde bibliography tool, powerful, loads of features, bibtext integration, interface is as good as a webbased thing though, see no point in KDE if it won't add a more friendly UI.
• Alexandria - ruby/gnome book collection manager, minimal but nice, way to many dependencies, does ISBN and keyword searches in amazon, but you cannot manualy enter books (useless for arabic books ya3ni)
• mysqlcc - gui mysql management interface, kinda similar to M$ $QL $ERVER, could this be the end of PhpMyAdmin
• hk_classes - C++ db access libs, with nice command line tools, write db engine independant scripts with it, import and export csv etc
• Knoda - hk_classes based access clone, no query builder though, I suppose rekall or the koffice thingie will make this obsolute.
• Rekall - frankly rekall was not impressive at all, this ugly thing was a commercial product, it has a louse query editor and it ain't very stable, only thing going for it is the many DB backends it supports, I suspect the koffice alternative or the Mergeant (the gnome-DBA one, if they ever manage to make it stop crashing) would replace rekall.
• Gaby - very nice app for personal single table databases like address books and CD collections (it has support for simple subtables), only problem is its GTK+1 based, and is not actively maintained.

thats all the database apps, tune in for more stuff later.