Equivalent Linux tool to ppm

Is their a tool similar to ppm for Linux (Unix)?
 
"You use a Windows machine and the golden rule is: Save, and save often.
It's scary how people have grown used to the idea that computers are
unreliable when it is not the computer at all - it's the operating system
that just doesn't cut it." - Linus Torvalds
 
Sean Hoskin, 
Technical Lead
E-Application Development
Williams-Sonoma, Inc. 
151 Union Street - IH1 
San Francisco, CA 94111 
 <mailto:shoskin@wsgc.com> shoskin@wsgc.com 
(415)402-4775 

/* The instinct which creates the arts is not the same as that which
produces art. The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its
simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born
inexplicably in an individual, a vitality great beyond all the needs of his
own living - an energy which no single life can consume. This energy
consumes itself then in creating more life, in the form of music, painting,
writing, or whatever is its most natural medium of expression. Nor can the
individual keep himself from this process, because only by its full function
is he relieved of the burden of this extra and peculiar energy - an energy
at once physical and mental, so that all his senses are more alert and more
profound than another man's, and all his brain more sensitive and quickened
to that which his senses reveal to him in such abundance that actuality
overflows into imagination. It is a process proceeding from within. It is
the heightened activity of every cell of his being, which sweeps not only
himself, but all human life about him, or in him, in his dreams, into the
circle of its activity. 

From the product of this activity, art is deducted - but not by him. The
process which creates is not the process which deduces the shapes of art.
The defining of art, therefore, is a secondary and not a primary process.
And when one born for the primary process of creation, as the novelist is,
concerns himself with the secondary process, his activity becomes
meaningless. When he begins to make shapes and styles and techniques and new
schools, then he is like a ship stranded upon a reef whose propeller, whirl
wildly as it will, cannot drive the ship onward. Not until the ship is in
its element again can it regain its course. 

And for the novelist the only element is human life as he finds it in
himself or outside himself. The sole test of his work is whether or not his
energy is producing more of that life. Are his creatures alive? That is the
only question. And who can tell him? Who but those living human beings, the
people? Those people are not absorbed in what art is or how it is made-are
not, indeed, absorbed in anything very lofty, however good it is. No, they
are absorbed only in themselves, in their own hungers and despairs and joys
and above all, perhaps, in their own dreams. These are the ones who can
really judge the work of the novelist, for they judge by that single test of
reality. And the standard of the test is not to be made by the device of
art, but by the simple comparison of the reality of what they read, to their
own reality. 

I have been taught, therefore, that though the novelist may see art as cool
and perfect shapes, he may only admire them as he admires marble statues
standing aloof in a quiet and remote gallery; for his place is not with
them. His place is in the street. He is happiest there. The street is noisy
and the men and women are not perfect in the technique of their expression
as the statues are. They are ugly and imperfect, incomplete even as human
beings, and where they come from and where they go cannot be known. But they
are people and therefore infinitely to be preferred to those who stand upon
the pedestals of art. */ -Pearl Buck, Nobel Lecture
 

• Equivalent Linux tool to ppm by Sean Hoskin
• Re: Equivalent Linux tool to ppm by Agustin Rivera
• Re: Equivalent Linux tool to ppm by Jonathan E. Paton
• RE: Equivalent Linux tool to ppm by Brian Warn