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Linux Power Tools

World War II – Germany decided to attack Poland. Poland had many great warriors. They all prepared to fight the Germans. They were all ready with the best armor, the best and well-trained horses, and of course, the best weapons , swords , spears …. And the Pols were brave and were ready to give their lives for their country. Sadly they did just that… give their lives. The Germans had tanks… It is very important to have the right weapons when one goes to war.

linux

In the same way it is very important for system administrators to have
the right tools to to work smart. Linux is a great desktop OS for
developers as well as system
administrators. Let us take a look at some of the utilities which makes
this a great environment for system administrators and developers. Most
of the content below is taken from the home pages of these apps, and then
I make no claims to the originality. My aim is to introduce the reader
to the
wonderful tools that are available in a Linux/BSD desktop environment.

Konsole

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Let’s start from what most people think Linux is all about – a text-based
part shell. Konsole is what
is known as an X terminal emulator, often referred to as a terminal or
a shell. It gives you the equivalent of an old-fashioned text screen on
your desktop, but one which can easily share the screen with your
graphical applications. What makes Konsole special?
Konsole’s advanced features include simple configuration and the
ability to use multiple terminal shells in a single window, making for
a less cluttered desktop. Konsole is also availablpartand
can thus be easily embedded in other applications, like practiced by
Kate and Konqueror.
As most system administrators need log into servers on a regular basis
the konsole gives them a benefit over the Windoze command prompt. In
windows one needs to use a program like putty to log in using SSH. Also
as Linux is the desktop OS the techs can use the man pages on the local
system.

One can also try out the various commands locally. Consider a simple
example.

Is it

$ ln sourcefile destinationfile

or is it

$ ln destinationfile sourcefile

Such things can be easily found out locally without carrying out
experiments on the server. Many techs believe that servers are places
where they can experiment. However, such experiments can lead to major
losses to the customers due to one small error. A system administrator
must understand that people have immense faith in them when they give
their entire data to them, and they cannot risk carrying out simple
experiments on servers.

Some screenshots of the konsole can be seen at the konsole site

Personal Information Manager / Groupware

There are two popular choices here. Evolution
from Novel
and the Kontact
from KDE. Both these an email client, calendaring, meeting
scheduling, a task list, contact management and syncing functionality.
Kontact is essentially the regular KDE PIM componentsthat have been
putn togethe,r, i.e., kmail, korganizer, knotes etc.. It is very a very
neat package and is stable and light. Both these are very
functional and can connect to many groupware servers.

Klipper

Klipper is the KDE clipboard utility. It stores clipboard history, and
allows you to link clipboard contents to application actions. Klipper
can perform actions on the contents of the clipboard, based on whether
they match a particular regular expression. For example, any clipboard
contents starting with “HTTP://” can be passed to the web-browser as
URLs to open.

Copying text is as simple as highlighting the text. And to paste the
text all one needs to do is click on the center mouse button. This can
be particularly useful for sys-admins as they use a sequence
of commands from time to time. Having these in the clipboard and using
them often can make the work a lot easier.

Gaim / Kopete

Communicating via an instant messenger is an essential these days.
Linux has an immaculate solution for this. Both Kopete and Gaim are
capable of
handling multiple IM protocols such as supporting AIM, ICQ, MSN,
Yahoo, Jabber, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus SameTime. Gaim is
a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X,
and Windows. It is compatible with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN
Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, GroupWise Messenger,
and Zephyr networks.tools

Kjots

KJots is a small program that helps you to write down some
short notes
and organizes them for you. It has two basic items used to organize
your notes – “Books” and “Pages”. This is a good light tool to
write in all the templated responses and other important notes for
quick references.

Kwallet

A lovely password manager which can store passwords for all the logins
including those of kopete and websites.

Tea Cooker

KTeaTime is a handy timer for steeping tea. No longer will you have to
guess at how long it takes for your tea to be ready. Simply select the
type of tea you have, and it will alert you when the tea is ready to
drink. Now how can a tea cooker be useful for techs. Often techs get
involved in solving a problem and forget to update the client about the
progress. Without communicating with the client, ohe
entire effort goes down the drain aon many occasions as the client getsvery agitated
thinking that nobody is looking at his problem. The tech cans
use the tea cooker and get a reminder so that he can respond to the client
with the progress.

Koffice/ Open Office

M$ Office is one of the most used software and a major reason why
customers do not shift to other operating systems. They need Word and
Excel for just about everything. K-Office and Open Office are two great
solutions. Open Office can open M$ Office files andeven savee the
files in M$ Office forma, makings it easy to communicate with those
who still use M$ products.

Lyx

Besides office suites which replicate the windows world products in
features, Linux also has some great alternatives. LyX  is an example of a great document processor.

What is LyX?

LyX is the first WYSIWYM (What you
see is what you mean) document processor.

LyX is what?!

LyX is an advanced open source document processor that encourages an
approach to writing based on the
structure of your documents, not their appearance. LyX lets you
concentrate on writing, leaving details of visual layout to the
software. LyX produces high quality, professional output — using
LaTeX, an industrial strength typesetting engine, in the background;
LyX is far more than a
front-end to LaTeX, however. No knowledge of LaTeX is necessary to use
LyX,
although it will give a user more power. LyX is stable and fully
featured. It has been used for documents as large as a thesis, or as
small as a business letter. Despite its simple GUI interface (available
in many languages), it supports tables, figures, and hyperlinked
cross-references, and has a best-of-breed math editor.

Dia

Dia is a great tool for creating diagrams. It has a huge in-built
library of objects which are especially useful for software engineers.
S, making a computer network diagramk is as easy as dragging a few
computers and switches from the list of objects available. It currently
has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML
diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and simple circuits. It is also
possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files,
using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.

Gnucash

An average tech earns a good salary and spends it is well too. To keep
track of all these personal expenses the best is to have a great
software. Gnucash is an ideal way to manage personal finances. Designed
to be easy to use, yet powerful
and flexible, GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income
and expenses. As quick and intuitive to use as a checkbook register, it
is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books
and accurate reports.

KTuberling

And finally a product for all those techs who maintain their servers
well and have no work or pending issues and yet have to sit through the
nights waiting for some issue to popup.

KTuberling was
originally a game intended for small children. Of course, it may be
suitable for adults who have remained
young at heart. Most techs in general love this software. It is a
“potato editor.” That means that you can drag and drop eyes, mouths,
mustache, and other parts of face and goodies onto a potato-like guy.
Similarly, you have a penguin and an aquarium on which you can drop
other stuff.

There is no winner for the game. The only purpose is to make the
funniest faces you can. There is a museum,like a “Madame Tusseau”
gallery, where you can find many funny examples of decorated potatoes,
penguins and aquariums.

World War II – Germany decided to attack Poland.
Poland had many great warriors. They all prepared to fight the Germans.
They were all ready with the best armor, the best andwell-trainedd
horses, and ofcourse the best weapons , swords, spear, andd
the Pols were brave and ready to give their lives for their
country. Sadly they did just that… give their lives. The Germans
had tanks… It is imperative to have the right weapons when one
goes to war.

In the same way it is very important for system administrators to have
the right tools to to work smart. Linux is a great desktop OS for
developers as well as system
administrators. Let us take a look at some of the utilities which makes
this a great environment for system administrators and developers. Most
of the content below is taken from the home pages of these apps, and
I make no claims on the originality. My aim is to introduce the reader
to the
wonderful tools that are available in a Linux/BSD desktop environment.

Konsole

Let’s start from what most people think Linux is all about – a text-based shell. Konsole is what
is known as an X terminal emulator, often referred to as a terminal or
a shell. It gives you the equivalent of an old-fashioned text screen on
your desktop, but one can easily share the screen with your
graphical applications. What makes Konsole special?
Konsole’s advanced features include simple configuration and the
ability to use multiple terminal shells in a single window, making for
a less cluttered desktop. Konsole is also available as kpart and
can thus be easily embedded in other applications, like practiced by
Kate and Konqueror.
As most system administrators need log into servers on a regular basis
the konsole gives them a benefit over the Windoze command prompt. In
windows one needs to use a program like putty to log in using SSH. Also
as Linux is the desktop OS the techs can use the man pages on the local
system.

One can also try out the various commands locally. Consider a simple
example.

Is it

$ ln sourcefile destinationfile

or is it

$ ln destinationfile sourcefile

Such things can be easily found out locally without carrying out
experiments on the server. Many techs believe that servers are places
where they can experiment. However, such experiments can lead to major
losses to the customers due to one small error. A system administrator
must understand that people have immense faith in them when they give
their entire data to them and they cannot risk carrying out simple
experiments on servers.

Some screenshots of the konsole can be seen at the konsole site

Personal Information Manager / Groupware

There are two popular choices here. Evolution
from Novel
and the Kontact
from KDE. Both these an email client, calendaring, meeting
scheduling, a task list, contact management, and syncing functionality.
Kontact is essentially the regular KDE PIM components that have been
put together, i.e., kmail, korganizer, knotes, etc. It is very a very
neat package and is stable and light. Both these are very
functional and can connect to many groupware servers.

Klipper

Klipper is the KDE clipboard utility. It stores clipboard history, and
allows you to link clipboard contents to application actions. Klipper
can perform actions on the clipboard’s contents based on whether
they match a particular regular expression. For example, any clipboard
contents starting with “HTTP://” can be passed to the web browser as
URLs to open.

Copying text is as simple as highlighting the text. And to paste the
text all one needs to do is click on the center mouse button. This can
be particularly useful for sys-admins as they use a sequence
of commands from time to time. Having these in the clipboard and using
them often can make the work a lot easier.