Hmm 🙂
Great weekend once again. With the sun coming out and enticing us with
the first smells and sounds of spring, One has to give into the
temptation of stepping outside and going for a little walk. So a stroll
with Nyana, Neelix and Enya ( Nyana’s sister’s dog) was something we could not pass up on. But of course, these outings are not without a computer by my side, and the laptop of choice to take along is of course my Acer Aspire One (with Ubunto 8.10 on it). As a switcher is always nice to jump from a Vista system (at work) to a mac, to my Ubuntu systems. But on every operating system one does have one’s favorite applications. Same goes for Ubuntu , so today i’ve listed up three of my favorite Linux applications.
Centerim
As mentioned in last weeks article, Centerim is a command line based version of an IM client like for example Pidgin. Where pidgin can be a little cpu intensive, Centerim is light and simple to work with. People who send me im-messages
with animated smileys, bouncing hearts and other flash based crap, have
found a sure fire way to get blocked from my contact list. An im-client to me is a communication tool, not a fracking flashmovie. Centerims easy way of working, text only interface and light processor-footprint make it one of my most used programs.
Sudo apt-get install centerim
Terminator
You know i’m a bit of a command line fan , so this application is, to me, the perfect portal for using my CLI
apps in my graphical user interface. Think of terminator as a multi
windowed super terminal. Once you open up terminator you can then split
anddivide that screen into more and more individual terminals. I love
working with terminator because when you have a screen resolution that
is large enough, you can have this one ‘superwindow" featuring ALL of your different open terminals. Sliding and dragging the window edges helps you resize every individual terminal according to your needs. Perhaps not ideal for the little screen of the Acer Aspire one, but awesome when I get to use it on my work Dell with a 1920 pixels wide screen.
Sudo apt-get install terminator
Compiz
The graphical Blingy Blingy of Ubuntu is certainly miles away from the simple command line interface where CENTERIM resides, but still I spend a LOT of time in the Compiz control panel.( Using the compiz control manager ) For me it customizes the way I work with the OS in such a way that it feels like ‘pushing ubuntu
beyond what it was designed to be’ Once you get done with tinkering
with spinning desktop cubes and wobbly windows, you will findyourself
working FASTER with the system because of some of these improvements
(virtual desktop, expose features etc) Something like this is (for me)
totally lacking on Xp or vista and only partialy available on OSX. To me the Compiz Desktop experience is an advanced way of interacting with my GUI.
sudo apt-get install compiz compiz-gnome
compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-fusion-plugins-extra
compiz-fusion-plugins-unofficial libcompizconfig-backend-gconf
( = entire compiz siute)
