Unix software
Use hugin
There isn't much competition here, Hugin is currently the most sophisticated and easy to use tool for assembling photos and stitching panoramas on Unix/Linux systems.
Hugin is a standalone GUI program which depends on Helmut Dersch's pano12 library to perform much of the hard work.
There are two optional tools that can be used in conjunction with hugin:
- autopano-sift - Save time by automatically generating control-point pairs.
- enblend - Perform sophisticated blending of seams when overlapping photos have varying brightness.
Linux tools overview
For a full list of Unix/Linux tools, see the Linux category page.
Basic Library
Panorama tools is a high quality and free panorama stitching software package. Notably it contains pano12 and PTOptimizer, both required by Hugin.
Stitching Software
Hugin provides an easy to use graphical user interface for Panorama tools. Available for most Linux and Unix varieties (plus OS X and Windows)
Helper
autopano-sift: Automatically identifies control points. Works with Hugin but requires the mono .NET runtime.
Autopano: similar to autopano-sift (Freeware).
PTStitcher: The original Freeware Panorama Tools rendering engine, now superceded by nona and PTmender.
nona: An open source replacement for PTStitcher. Part of the Hugin package
PTmender: another open source replacement for PTtitcher. Part of the pano12 package.
Enblend: Overlays images so to make the seam invisible. Works with Hugin
ImageMagick: Optionally batch process images before using Enblend, e.g. when you have large black areas because of a pitch angle.
PanoCube: Converts equirectangular (360x180) panos to QTVR cubic movies.
Viewer
Quicktime can be installed via wine
Plugins for the Gimp
The Gimp is a sophisticated image editor similar to Photoshop.
There are several panoramic photography related gimp plugins that can be used to manipulate panoramas.
Non-Panoramic use
clens command-line version of PTLens
Other Software
PanoPoints: Perl-Based control point picker for use with Panorama Tools