Linux: Best Programs That Suit Me.

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I haven’t updated this blog in a while, and I guess this is a good time to do so with a post of the current programs I use. Since the release of Ubuntu: Jaunty Jackalope my program selection hasn’t really changed. But, I mean, I do relatively use the same programs I did before. Here’s a list of them:

Internet Browser:

I like both Firefox, and epiphany-browser. I mainly only use Firefox because of the add-ons it has. In another post I’ll update you on what add-ons I use.

Music Player:

I’ve switched around a lot, but I’ve found common ground with Banshee. I liked exaile for the longest time, but I haven’t used it in a long time. The last time I tried it, the program was acting really strange. The UI wasn’t looking proper, no EQ support and it was complete utter non-sense. With Banshee, everything seems to work wonders, even videos! Sometimes, I’ll use MOC too. It’s an ncurses program that is used in a terminal. It plays streams as well as MP3’s, and I’m sure other song formats too.

Torrents:

I Strictly use Deluge now. I used Transmission for the longest time. I liked it, still do, but I find I like Deluge a lot better. It’s a little more heavy than Transmission, but it does similar things.

Mail:

I’ve always used Thunderbird. It may be overkill with options, but I only use it with basic IMAP usability with GMail. It’s an easy system to use, and once it’s set up proper, it’s set up. No fussing around needed. I’ve heard ClawsMail client is also really good, and a lot lighter than Thunderbird. But, I like the Mozilla suite.

Here’s something you could also try out: In Linux, try installing prism. “sudo apt-get install prism” Prism is simple XULRunner based browser. Once set up, go into the menu, click on the menu option, tell it to go to gmail.com. Now, you have GMail right on your desktop with no configuration required. It can be done with any other site, too. They even have selected WebApps for certain utilities now, too. “sudo apt-get install prism-google-mail” and you’ll have the same thing you just did.

Graphic Design:

Not sure if I’ve included this in my other, “best of”, blog posts, but, I’ll assure you, it’ll be quite expanded.

GIMP has always been with me since the first day I used Linux. Eventhough it’s multi-platform, GIMP is a nice substitute for Photoshop, and other expensive photo manipulation software. GIMP is free too.

For vector editors I’ve always used Inkscape, but Xaralx is also very nice. A bit heavier in resources but it’s never ceases to amaze me. It’s a really nice application. Pencil is also a vector, and bitmap editor, but it’s mainly used for animation since it has a nice timeline to render to. It’s an excellent application for vector animation.

I’ve recently stepped into the 3D world of making objects just for the hell of it, and I can say I quite enjoy it. It’s quite a challenge, even with Wings3D. The Wings3D UI is basically good if you like clicking your mouse a lot. There are some shortcuts, but it’s not exactly like Blender where there are many shortcuts and once you memorize the Blender shortcuts, you’re good to go, and you’ll be making things with ease. I’ve yet to get a handle of Blender, but Wings3D is a lot easy to use at least for me. A bit more time consuming, but I like it. The nice thing about the 3D applications is that I can make something in Wings save it to a non-proprietary format, import in Blender, and render with Blender’s engine(s) which are far more superior. A lot of people do it like that.

Another small program I like is Agave. Agave is an eyedropper program. If you want to find out what colours people are using on a website, or in a theme, or another wallpaper you can use the program like a swatch to save the colour variants. Just click the eye dropper on the colour and the swatch saves for later use in the program. It’s not really hard to use, and it’s really useful.

Instant Messaging:

For a long time I used Pidgin as a multi-platform instant messenger, but, I don’t really like it now. I mean it has nice cosmetics, but I like to use empathy now. It’s far more better. It’s a lot more stable, and I’ve had no problems with it so far. It can do Jabber, XMAPP, MSN, IRC, ICQ, and others. Pretty well any popular protocol. Mics and webcams work under it too!

Bitlbee is another multi-platform instant messenger. But people use it for commandline interface usage. It’s best used with screen. Last time I tried it, it pretty well had an intuitive interface, but I’m sure once you’ve learned how to use it, it’s not so hard and it comes naturally.

Internet Relay Chat:

Since my introduction to Linux, I’ve always whole-heartedly used irssi, and I still do! I love the program. It’s one of the best programs I’ve ever used, and hopefully it doesn’t change for a very long time.

Screen Multi-plexer:

This is a whole category on its own, and I think there’s only one of its kind. It’s quite awesome even though I don’t use it. I don’t really have a need to. The screen multi-plexer used is called, “Screen”. What it does is, when you open a terminal you have a CLI. With screen, if you’re only running CLI, or a terminal you can minimize, close, or hide screen instances while they’re still running. So, you want IRC hidden, you can hide it.

Firewall:

I’ve used Firestarter for a long time. I remember trying to use it when I first started learning how to use Ubuntu. To be truthful, it was really hard to use. It was for me anyway. I couldn’t really use it because there was quite a learning curve. But, I can lay that to rest because gufw is here. Gufw has a simple interface, and ufw is the backend of it which is already installed. I’m assuming Firestarter used the ufw backend. I could be totally wrong on that though.

Anyway, that’s the end of the list of programs I mainly use. If you find any others worth using, leave me a comment. I’m always looking for the best programs for the GNOME Desktop Environment.

Top 6 Linux Applications

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For the last few days I’ve been thinking of a good post to write since I don’t really frequent this blog too much. Well, I don’t really write any posts in any blogs, and again I’ve said before. I’d like to write more about things but my ambitions have been lacking. So here’s a list of a few Linux applications I use:

#1
Since I’ve been using Linux I’ve been using Mozilla Firefox as my primary internet browser and can say that it has been the proper choice. The customization, and ease of use is awesome. I can customize the user interface easily will a lot of add-ons and bring the browser to life.

I like my browser to be very minimal since I only use my laptop nowadays and it’s quite a small screen. It’s 15″, of course not the smallest, but I like minimal settings so I can see more of my content rather than just the UI.

Here’s a list of my add-ons I use with the browser:

• All-in-One Sidebar
• DOM Inspector
• GoogleEnhancer
• Scribefire(where my writing my blog atm)
• Smart Bookmarks Bar
• Stumbleupon
• Tiny Menu
• Toolbar Buttons
• Ubuntu Firefox Modifications

There’s one more add-on I’d like to download and use as well. Sometimes I like browsing the Ubuntu Forums, and there’s an add-on that will let me navigate to the forums from my menu. Of course there are a bunch of options to choose from and can become quite handy to use.

#2
Pidgin is a instant messaging program similar to what MSN is but the functionality of Pidgin is much greater. Not only can it handle the MSN protocol, but it can also handle many other protocols. Both open and proprietary protocols including:

• XMPP (Jabber)
• Google Talk
• Yahoo
• MySpace
• IRC
• ICQ
• QQAnd many more….

Being a multi-protocol messaging system it also has many plug-ins for the protocols it supports including Internet Relay Chat. Pidgin has pretty much all the settings MSN has and then some. It’s like MSN on steroids.

#3
Exaile is a GTK based music player for large libraries of music. It’s quite similar to Amarok but, Amarok is built on QT. There’s really no point in installing Amarok when there’s an equivalent music player like Exaile. Not only will you be installing extra KDE libraries and using a KDE application, but you’ll be slowing down your computer if you install Amarok.

Exaile has a huge amount of settings, like an EQ that can be set to each type of music genre you listen to, but it also collects data in database that can be used to store how many times you’ve listened to a song or if you want to listen to the top 100 songs you’ve listened to, you can! It has last.fm support, album art support which means when you listen to a song, it will get the cover from the internet and will display in the Exaile UI. It also has Ipod, and MTP support. Listen to Shoutcast radio if you want as well. It’s jam packed full of options and not only can you add plug-ins but you can also change the user interface a bit to satify your needs. One other thing worth mentioning is that if you’re a podcast listener, or video podcast viewer there’s an option to listen or view podcasts.

In my honest opinion, Exaile is better than Amarok by a tenfold.

#4
Mozilla Thunderbird, an email client at it’s best. Just like Firefox, it can be customized with addons. Whether you need inhanced security, or a minimal user interface, it can be done.

Thunderbird is set up to access my Gmail email using IMAP to receive email, and SMTP to send email. It’s very easy to set up this way and it makes sense to do so. The way IMAP works is that you’re interacting with Gmail’s IMAP server, saving all of your settings and emails there. Emails don’t download onto your computer it’s all done from their locale. If you want to save a draft, the draft is saved onto their server. It’s very secure and it works great.

The tutorial I followed to get thunderbird working with gmail is here.

#5
The Synaptic Package Manager is the default package manager that is installed in Ubuntu and I can say it’s one handy peice of software. I couldn’t live without it.

What a package manager does is manage your packages of software. To install packages of software you need to enable trusted repositories that work with Ubuntu if you’re using Ubuntu. Once the trusted sources(repositories) are enabled you can start installing software from the said program(Synaptic).

As a whole, Synaptic gathers a conglomerate amount of packages(software) and gives you an option to see what the package name is, gives a description, lets you install or remove and ignore packages. It handles everything in one justified place instead of searching all around the internet for a package you want. Although whatever repositories you’ve enabled – package may not be listed so in this case you would have to look for the package and install it another way. This means that it’s less secure as it could be from an untrusted source and could be hazardous to your computer, a cracker could take full advantage of the situation because it may be an untrusted source.

Ubuntu is a Debian based Linux Distribution which means it uses .deb packages to install software. A .deb is much like a .exe file in windows. It’s an executable file that will do all the hard work for you. By hard work, I mean it will install all dependencies if needed and will install everything in the proper place. There are many different types of installation processes, you can even compile things from source code but it’s not that easy and you would be working with the terminal or commandline.

Here’s a website that will show you how to install anything in many different ways with Ubuntu.

#6
Transmission, a Bit Torrent client which enables you to download torrents. This application is by far very minimal and it just works.

There are really no plug-ins that I know of, and it ships with Ubuntu preinstallated, meaning, it comes with Ubuntu. Transmission works very nicely, and is actively developed and used by a lot of people.

Of course there are many other clients that do the same thing, but I like what it does, it’s not hard to set up, and it’s very easy to use and enjoy. Once opened, it will minimize to the notification area. When trying to close it, you can right click the menu icon and close it.

So far I can only think of those selected applications that I use mostly on a daily basis, and can’t live without. If I find out anymore good applications and start using them daily, I will make sure to post what I’ve started to use.

Please, don’t be afraid to comment, tell me what your favorite Linux applications are and what futures they have that are worth highlighting in your response.

Thank you for reading.
Justin