Favorite little known software applications

darin3200 · 07-05-2004, 10:15 PM

Hi,
I was wondering what were some of everyone's favorite software applications for linux that aren't well known. Not things like firefox that are very common or applications that are entirely pointless, but software that save you time and increases productivity.

detpenguin · 07-05-2004, 11:06 PM

it's not lesser known, really, but i like gkrellm...it checks my mail, lets me know disc usages...it's a nice piece of software...

auditek747 · 07-05-2004, 11:43 PM

"Avicap"
It comes with avifile-0.7.
It's the only thing that will capture from my cheapo
wintv go (bt878) without losing av sync. It will do it
all day long too, using so few resources that you can
go about your business doing other things while it runs.

Cerbere · 07-06-2004, 12:35 AM

A little-known piece of software that I recently discovered is trickle. It limits bandwidth use by application.

For instance, I was having a problem when I used wget to download a long list of files, it would hog the bandwidth (I'm on dial-up, so the '--limit-rate=amount' switch wasn't effective), and I wouldn't be able to surf without pages timing out. So I found trickle, and use it to limit wget's download speed to 3k/s leaving me enough b/w to surf. The usage is simple. in the above example, the command line is as follows:

trickle -d 3 wget -i ListOfFilesToDownload

It will limit upload speed as well as download, and can be set to run (by root) as a daemon, or (by any user) to limit specific applications.

This may not actually be my number one favorite, but it's certainly the least-known of my favorite apps.

Enjoy!
--- Cerbere

mvillarino · 07-06-2004, 04:43 AM

I use a lot of times kalzium and kfocus

darin3200 · 07-06-2004, 09:04 AM

Avicap sounds very stable and trickle will help with downloading isos without hogging the bandwidth and I love the about kfocus page.

enigmasoldier · 07-06-2004, 11:26 PM

skippy-xd is a VERY cool program for ANY desktop user. Say you are a usual power user like me with 4 or 5 shell windows with ssh sessions open, firefox, rythmbox, vncclient, and a few other windows open. I hit f11 and all of my windows neatly tile like Apple's Expose. I use this program daily. Don't use skippy as it is deprecated, use skippy-xd. Unfortunately, it only works with freedesktop.orgs x server.

Links:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/expose/ Apple's Expose
http://thegraveyard.org/skippy.php Skippy

tbeehler · 07-07-2004, 12:12 AM

I have fallen in love with Firestarter . It's a firewall/internet sharing application written for X. Easy as pie to install, got a nice wizard to walk you though things. Give it a whirl!

Travis Beehler

auditek747 · 07-07-2004, 02:39 AM

Has anyone tried lyX (word processor) ? It looks interesting.

http://www.lyx.org/

rmanocha · 07-07-2004, 06:13 AM

lyx really is very good.
I dont know if this falls under the category of an app but i really like openbox(the display manager) and aterm(the virtual terminal).both of these apps are uberlight and hence keep my machine running which is a 3 years old dell with 128 MB RAM.

darin3200 · 07-07-2004, 03:57 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by auditek747
Has anyone tried lyX (word processor) ? It looks interesting.

http://www.lyx.org/

I just downloaded it today so I haven't had much time to play with it but I looks like an innovative program that does a lot to deal with the output style.

slakmagik · 07-07-2004, 04:31 PM

Hm. There's probably a lot of standard stuff that's still underused, but nothing leaps to mind. As far as stuff I've added, there's this set of scripts called 'tmv' which are good for sed transformations when renaming files (the -n option is your friend). 'diction' and 'style' are replacements of part of the old WWB - those are cool for analyzing text files. 'Screen' is base, but still underused. But then there's also 'twin' which is an actual console based window manager (T-extmode WIN-dow environment). Between multiple virtual consoles, multiplexers, console windowing environments and GUI window environments, it gets to be overkill, but you're not lacking choices.

I'll probably think of more later.

Tinkster · 07-07-2004, 05:08 PM

I'm a big fan of lavaPS ... (well,
without the lozenge shape, that is ... )

It gives an overview of process memory and CPU
usage at a glance, without having to dedicate time
to reading ps' and/or top's output.

As for wget and trickle ... no need for trickle if it's only
about wget ...

Code:

wget --limit-rate=XXK

Cheers,
Tink

Cerbere · 07-07-2004, 11:12 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Tinkster
As for wget and trickle ... no need for trickle if it's only
about wget ...

Code:

wget --limit-rate=XXK

As I said,

Quote:

(I'm on dial-up, so the '--limit-rate=amount' switch wasn't effective)

From the wget manpage:

Code:

           Note that Wget implementeds the limiting by sleeping
           the appropriate amount of time after a network read
           that took less time than specified by the rate.  Even-
           tually this strategy causes the TCP transfer to slow
           down to approximately the specified rate.  However, it
           takes some time for this balance to be achieved, so
           don't be surprised if limiting the rate doesn't work
           with very small files.  Also, the "sleeping" strategy
           will misfire when an extremely small bandwidth, say
           less than 1.5KB/s, is specified.

I've found that it tends to stutter even when setting the limit as high as 4k/s, hence the utility of trickle.

Enjoy!
--- Cerbere

darin3200 · 07-09-2004, 12:18 PM

I don't know if this is little know but I had never heard of it

Its this program called freemind and it lets you visually map out ideas or directories. Here's a screenshot