Top 5 linux programs

January 27th, 2005

I’ve been using linux for a while now and think it’s really good. I’ve been using SuSE 9.2 on my laptop and Mike has kindly let me borrow his little iBook for a while to use Gentoo as well – thanks mate! Anyway, here are five programs that I think kick ass in linux.

  1. Screen – SSH is great, but using Screen via SSH is way better than great. Really useful for starting remote downloads, compilations or whatever.
  2. Portage – Gentoo package manager. Makes installing, updating and removing programs total piss. Wicked. Hammered home how good it is when I tried to install PHP-GTK on Gentoo and a SuSE back to back recently. I din’t bother finishing the SuSE install…
  3. MPlayer – easily the best movie player I’ve found for Linux.
  4. Kopete – nice little instant messenger program for KDE.
  5. Dia – cool program for drawing diagrams.

Thunderbird is a really nice mail, news and RSS client, despite being occasionally slow, but it doesn’t seem right in that list. I’m also sure there is a text editor out there that should be in my top five, but I haven’t found it yet.

Posted by mark Filed in Geek Stuff

3 Responses to “Top 5 linux programs”

  1. Mike Says:
    January 27th, 2005 at 01:33 PM

    Glad you’re enjoying installing Gentoo on the ‘gBook’. It’s way faster than with a standard install of Yellow Dog which just goes to show that it’s really worth compiling everything for your own machine. It’ll be interesting to see how it runs on something a bit faster.

    Thunderbird just isn’t quite there yet on any platform despite being a final release. Maybe they felt under pressure to get it out after the release of Firefox. Mind you, that isn’t really the most polished bit of software out there either. Possibly it’s a problem with trying to develop a truly cross-platform interface.

    Did you ever try to get Rhythmbox working? Looks like a half decent peice of software.

  2. Alex Fiennes Says:
    January 27th, 2005 at 02:09 PM

    For text editors I’d go for one of the emacs’s if you want to do any kind of coding work or lyx if you want to do large structured document markup. Personally couldn’t live without either of them…

  3. Mark Says:
    January 27th, 2005 at 10:52 PM

    Yeah, Emacs is something that I know I should like, but never manage to get into. I think I might invest some time in it soon. I have been using Scite under KDE recently and that is pretty nice, but I do like the idea of having a good editor that works on the console.

    You have got me into Lyx for longer technical documents though.

    Rhythmbox was bugger to install under KDE, at least for me. MP3 player that I like is something else I need to source.

Leave a Reply