Note: Content on this page is old and probably no longer applicable, kept online for historical purposes

My Favorite Linux Apps

Everyone has their favorite linux applications. This page is not so much to say "hey look what I use" as to give people a look into what sort of options are out there. Maybe you thought bitchx was the only chat text client, or that pico was the only decent text editor! Well welcome to my world of linux applications. Feel free to disagree with my choices, linux is all about using what you like!



XFCE4 - XFCE4 gives me a lot of control over how my desktop works and looks, and customization is easy, especially in newer versions that have a lot of customization options available in easy to use menus - no more editing text files to get keybindings working. It doesnt have the bloat of KDE or Gnome, and even ran great on my 333 mhz laptop.


screen - I can't believe I ever lived without this program, moreso than most others. It allows you to launch a program and "detatch" from it so you can let it run in the background. Example:

screen irssi -c irc.xelium.net -n nickname

This will start a screen session running irssi, now i do ctrl a d and I get back to my terminal... the implications are nearly endless ;) I once had a 186 day screen+irssi session (had to reboot the box!) This program is a MUST HAVE!


aterm - This is the terminal that I use. I used to use gnome-terminal, but some versions conflicted with my irssi key-bindings, used wterm for a while, but had an issue after some upgrade. I found Eterm to be too bulky and slow, xterm was too limited as far as options and making it "pretty" goes. So I finally found aterm, which is light, doesn't conflict with my keybindings, and looks great.

aterm -bg black -fg white +sb -tr -sh 20 -tint magenta


mplayer - My favorite media play for linux, it took a big of work to install it (My How-to), it supports all sorts of file formats, and you can compile it to work with streaming media, including some windows streaming media. There is even a way to get it to run on svga... no x required!


mpg123 - A console-based mp3 player, fairly basic, with the -C flag you have a bit of control. I have found it's more stable than mp3blaster, great for running in screen on our media server.


ogg123 - The standard Ogg Vorbis command line decoder/player. This plays my oggs in console. It doesnt have the control of mpg123, but it works for what I need it to do, play oggs, and I haven't found anything better.


xmms - I admit it, I use xmms. It's the best GUI app I've found for music playing.

aumix - A very basic audio mixer that'll run in console.

abcde - This is what I use to encode my cds in ogg. It runs happily in console and I've never had trouble with it. Really nice because it allows you to edit (in vim, but this is probably customizable - maybe it just uses your default text editor?) the way you want the songs to be titled when the oggs are made. Very easy to use.


vim - Based on vi, this is my favorite text editor. Syntax highlighting is VERY nice, and it's very powerful if you know how to use it. It takes a lot of getting used to... but once I learned how to properly use it, there was no going back to something like pico/nano! I do all the work for my website, all text editing, and even type up journal entries in vim first.


gimp - Some have compared it to Photoshop. Honestly I don't have enough experience with photoshop to know, but I do know that the gimp handles all image editing I need it to do. Best of all it's free, and you can write filters for it in perl, woo!


firefox - I've switched browsers many times over the years, opera, mozilla, even konqueror for a time. But today I use firefox, it's relatively light compared to mozilla, has much fewer compatibility issues than opera and konqueror, and I can use it on whatever platform I'm working on.


links - Text browser of choice. Navigation is not too bad to get used to, and it does what I need it to do for the rare times that I require a text browser.


irssi - I like text irc clients. With screen I can stay connected to several irc servers in a number of channels without bothering anyone with my constant joins/quits because I need to restart x. Unlike other clients like BitchX, irssi hasn't had have nearly the number of exploits, and instead of using a special scripting language developed for it, you write perl scripts.. an obvious advantage for me. I also like the way it's set up by default, with private messages popping up in separate windows.


bitlbee - I am an IRC junkie, so when I learned that there was an instant messaging project out there that allowed you to connect to a server and link up with all your instant messaging services within your IRC clientI was excited. I started using it. I even joined the project channel and got involved with documentation writing. For me it was the best solution to how annoying I felt normal instant messaging software was. I also use gaim from time to time, and it's the most popular instant messaging software for linux, not everyone is such an IRC junkie, afterall.


mutt - My email client. Again, it's text-based... and with procmail it's great! I switched from pine a few years ago. The navigation in mutt takes a bit of getting used to (and the reason I was reluctant to switch from pine at first) but it handles gpg better than pine, is open source, and really really nice once you get the hang of it. Best of all, you can compose messages using your favorite text editor, in my case, vim.


gnumeric - The spreadsheet program I use. I use it to track all our finances, and although it's sometimes clunky compared to Excel (which I use at work), it does it's job very well, and it's stable.


logjam - Just a small, basic GTK client for updating my livejournal, much better than actually going to the livejournal site and updating things there!


wget - A program I could never live without, I even downloaded the windows version. You just open up a terminal, type wget http://url.of.file.to.download and it gets it for you! You don't need to worry about browsers crashing in the middle of a download %) And if it's a big download you can use it with screen to just have it do it's thing in the background.


apt - The main reason people use Debian! This is a package management program... you can install, uninstall, view, change, search, and get more information about a vast debian library of sortware maintained across the internet, but more than that, when it tries to install a program it will collect all packages it needs solve all dependencies and ask for permission before proceeding (BSD has portage, but it takes a bit more work to get it to show you dependencies *before* installing... heh, yes i had a bad experience! *g*).