Collection managers

If you’ve ever had the desire to catalogue all of your gear, whether they be DVD’s, games, books or CD’s I can heartily recommend GCstar.

The app Ceemedia was suggested in last month’s Linux Format magazine so I tried it, only to find that many users on its Sourceforge page were complaining of error messages when searching for content – same thing happened to me and the project seems to have gone stale, but never fear, there is always something else.

GCstar fits the bill perfectly. You can create a number of pre-set collections, whether it be books, movies, games, wines or board games or you can create a new collection type.

The “movie collection”, will allow you to type the name of the movie into the search bar – it’ll then scan a pre-defined website like IMDB and populate the other fields with the artwork, cast, release date etc.

You can then sort the movies on year, cast or any other detail supplied.

The games collection is an absolute treat. It’ll search gamespot or Amazon for your games and fetch a couple of screenshots and even game tips & cheats.

When you’re done you can export your collection as a CSV or HTML file (among others…).

To round it off, if like me you have trouble deciding what game to play or movie to watch, it’ll randomly select movies for you.

Best thing is, its available from the apt repository. Simply type:

sudo apt-get install gcstar

Enjoy!