Linux software

I was inspired by one of my old blog entry Enhancing productivity in Linux with 5 tools to make this list of programs the is essential to me.

unetbootin guake nmap rsnapshot keepassx autofs gimp-ufraw gkrellm vim
handbrake meld network-manager-openvpn preload
  • yakuake
    It is easy to clutter a desktop with lots of terminal windows when working with Linux on different machines. To solve this problem I use yakuake which is a dropdown console like the one found in the game Quake. When ever I need a shell I press F12 and yakuake drops down from the top of the screen. Just as the normal konsole yakuakle supports tabs (Shift-Ctrl-n creates a new tab) so only one instance of yakuake is needed.

    • yakuake

  • gkrellm
    I like to monitor a couple of linux servers and I really enjoy the gkrellm as it gives me a visual presentation of the cpu, disk and net load on the different servers. It is a bit James Bond sixties like but it really makes sense – with a glance I can see if there is any problems on any of the machines. Life feels empty without this program. Invisble theme is my favorite theme for gkrellm. gkrellmtop shows the 3 most cpu intensive processes. Download top.so and put it in the folder /home/tjansson/.gkrellm2/plugins/.

    Alternativt kan man bruge det mere flashy screenlets.

  • Kile
    The best LaTeX editor for Linux i my opinion. I use this to create my Danish Linux notes.
  • vim
    A small and omnipotent editor. One editor to rule the all. See also Vim 7.1 on Solaris with color syntax and functional backspace key
  • Unison
    There are many ways to do synchronization including home brewed rsync scripts, CVS, SVN and more, but I wanted something that was easy to setup, so I chose Unison. One of the great things about Unison is that it is very easy to use and supports SSH – the latter makes the synchronization secure even over the dangerous internet (unlike FTP). Furthermore Unison supports both Windows, OS X and Linux and even supports syncing a Linux folder with a Windows folder. The setup much more easy than using CVS and SVN which makes unison the right choice for most users.
    See also: Unison – Secure synchronization of 2 computers
  • sshfs
    This gives the option to mount a file system over SSH as a folder in my home folder. Even smarter than sshfs is autofs+sshfs, see Autofs and sshfs – the perfect couple
  • nmap
    A swiss knife of networking. Great for security scanning and mapping.
  • rsnapshot
    A rsync based backup script which I use to backup my server, laptop and desktop. It supports SSH.
  • Animal Wallpapers
    Great wallpapers which doesn’t bother the eyes and is almost only one-color which makes icons stand out.
  • kcolorchooser
    A small and simple program to find the color of a given pixel on the screen. In Ubuntu it is found inside the package kcoloredit.
  • VirtualBox
    If one have the hobby of trying out new Linux distributions or perhaps have the need to use Internet explorer for Web development VirtualBox is the solution.
  • ubuntu-restricted-extras
    I always install this package on a vanilla Ubuntu install to get all the great stuff that can’t be bundled due to licensing problems.
  • pidgin-blinklight pidgin-encryption pidgin-extprefs pidgin-guifications pidgin-plugin-pack pidgin-otr pidgin-themes pidgin-libnotify
    Extra plugins for the multichat client pidgin
  • filelight (KDE) or baobab (Gnome)
    Both of these small programs show the disk usage graphically which is extremely useful and easier that looking through du output.
  • gqview
    ADCsee for windows started out as a great tool that did one thing good – viewing images. Now ADCsee is bloated and slow crapware but the for Linux users Gqview has the same values as the first version of ADCsee – it is really fast and does one thing really good – viewing images.
  • Mypasswordsafe
    I have to have access to a lot of passwords both when sitting in front of Linux and Windows computers, so I needed a program to store my passwords which existed on several OS. Mypasswordsafe is a Qt implementation of Password safe which is a open source password manager that is availble for Linux, OS X, BSD*, Solaris and Windows.
  • pdftk og pdfedit
    Both of these programs are found in the Ubuntu repositories and are essential when working with PDF documents. Extracting figures blending and editing.
  • BUM Boot-Up Manager is a Perl-Gtk2 application to handle runlevels configuration of any debian derivative system.
  • SNOWEAqua-RAD.E8
    I really love these icons. 🙂
  • sysutils – This package is need to get the tools dos2unix and unix2dos to convert EOL’s from and to a Windows system.
  • xvnc4viewer – Currently xtightvncviewer does not allow full screen in Ubuntu 8.04
  • Using the Medibuntu to get acces to stuff like, acrobat reader and google earth.
  • recordmydesktop – produce nice screencasts.

Installation checklist

Shell scripting notes

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