Im curious if anyone else has found programs out there that they feel like they just cant live without? For example, Someone has just told me aobut urpmi and I thought they were full of it until I actually installed it and tried it myself. WOW.. easy intall without having to worry about dependicies, Uninstall, lookups, etc... IMO this should be the first thing everyone should install!

The other thing, is firestarter, if you are a total newibe and want a firewall/routing software get this. Nice GUI and very simple to use. Yes, Yes, I know someone is going to say, "d00d, just use IPTABLES" ... yeah I have moved on to IPTABLES myself but when I first started that was too much to learn right out of the box and I needed a firewall.

Anyway, Im just curious if there is anything else that you feel can make life easier the everyday n00b.

I thought urpmi was installed by default in mandrake as that is the command line version of the software area of the Mandrake Control Center.

Midnight commander, nano, links, and mutt are essentials for me.

# Mandrake links
Mandrake home page
Mandrake Users website
Easy urpmi config for Mandrake
urpmi mini-HOWTO
All You Ever Wanted to Know About Urpmi But Never Dared Asking Before
Maximum RPM
rpmfind
You didn't install the developmental packages? As root, command:
urpmi gcc
An Introduction to the Midnight Commander. You can install it by commanding:
urpmi mc
Midnight Commander home page

well, theres a fine line between utilities for newbs like urpmi vs. rpm
and then the line gets finer when you are an experienced grep user, then the line goes
grep vs. perl

see so I doubt it.
All Linux utilities are a must except the ones that suck.

I totally agree, the term newbie is very vague and therefore this will be somewhat difficult. I just thought it might be an interesting topic.

I don't know about Newbie apps, but I can give you my answer to "programs out there that they feel like they just cant live without". Most of this stuff I use everyday...some is used much less frequently but still very useful:

Midnight Commander
Vim
Gimp
ImageMagick
MPlayer
Sox
Cdrecord
Blender
XnView
Xmms
Jack/Ardour
Qps
VNC
Swat
Root-tail
FetchYahoo

The first thing I set up on a new system is my network card. The second is VIM. Couldn't do without that on my slackware system. Makes editting my config files much easier.

Otherwise:
Gimp 2.0
Opera
aMSN
rox-Filer

i just like to add :

firefox
downloader for x
kopete
apollon
mldonkey
xchat

Well I hate to post on this thread w/o adding any cool apps, so

XQF
Gimp (obviously)

sorry that's my long list, but i just recently broke free of the empire, so i'm loving everything.
-----
Now to the real point, (since this is the newbie forum, i must have a question)... I noticed some folks mentioned fetchyahoo, and thought to myself, 'now that's a great idea.' So I installed it and got all the necessary libs and stuff. I don't know much about using POP accounts in general or maildirs or anything like that, so I did my best to configure the script file (made sure to disable the deleting feature, as i did not want all my mail to disappear). This is my output from console:

[lloyd@localhost fetchyahoo-2.8.0]$ ./fetchyahoo
Logging in securely via SSL as myyahooname on Fri Apr 2 21:10:23 2004
You are using 67% of your 4.0MB limit.
Successfully logged in as myyahooname.
Country code : us Folder: Inbox Version: 2.8.0
Getting Message ID(s) for message(s) 1 - 25.
Getting Message ID(s) for message(s) 26 - 50.
Getting Message ID(s) for message(s) 51 - 62.
Got 62 Message IDs
Failed: Couldn't open output: /var/spool/mail/lloyd/tmp/1080940231.P3841Q0.localhost at ./fetchyahoo line 1107.

Sooo.... I thought perhaps several problems could be possible:
1) not sufficient permissions to write to that directory, so i went and made sure that i could, then ran the script again and same output.
2) i don't have my configuration set up correctly, so i went in and changed my spool (still have no idea about spools, etc) directory (/var/spool/mail/lloyd/ as above) to have a / on the end as directed in the script comments. tried script, same output.
3) looked at script with a text editor and went to line 1107 as the error output directed. This is line 1107 and the lines close to it:

1101 sub MyDie($) {
1102 if ($repeatInterval > 0) {
1103 sleep (60*$repeatInterval);
1104 goto startfetch ;
1105 }
1106
1107 die shift unless $noerrors ;
1108 die ;
1109 }

riiight... that's helpful to me

anyway so I searched for fetchyahoo in the forums and there were a few hits, but nothing that helped me, googled also but same thing, so I'm guessing I have a misguided understanding of how to configure the script, like where i should set the spool directory, or maildir or whatever, and also misguided as to configuring my mail client to find wherever the script would put my mail if it were successful. I have two e-mail clients on my computer, Kmail and Evolution. I tried configuring Evolution and i'm sure i did it wrong. Can anyone help set me straight here? Sorry for the long post, but wanted to include all the info i could. Thanks for any help!!

(EDITED, UPDATE):

Well, i'm getting closer to getting it working. I concluded that whatever directory I set had to contain a "new" and a "tmp" directory for the script to be able to write the data there, so now it will download my new mail. I was able to see some of it in Kmail, but it's acting a bit strange, haven't tried Evolution again yet. Also interested to know if I can compose mail and send it using my yahoo account with a mail client? Any info there would be appreciated. Thanks!

I'm not sure about its interaction with your mail client...I just use mutt (text-based) and it hasn't had trouble. You seem to be properly connecting and downloading, so I think the trouble isn't directly related to fetchyahoo, but rather something with your local mail configuration.
I don't have anything in .fetchyahoorc dealing with a tmp directory, though mutt uses /tmp to store messages while i'm reading mail. This is just a standard temp directory for the system, though...nothing specific to email.
The spool directory should be set to something like /var/spool/mail/kermlet. I'm going to assume this file was already created, but I don't know how Mandrake works.
What happens if you send local mail to yourself? Doing something like "mail kermlet" should send it to your own mail spool. Do you still get errors?

As for sending mail with Yahoo, I don't know if it's possible to directly use their smtp server, but you can set up an account using yahoo as your return address. This is the way I have it set up in Mutt, using Postfix to send the mail.

xmms,grip,lame - and on the 8th Day god created music.

Im suprised more people havent put anymore security apps like chkrootkit