7 Useful Apps For Linux (GUI)

There are so many fantastic desktop applications for linux users. Here’s a list of the top 7 that I favour the most.

Guake

This is so simple it hurts. A fold away command line anyone? Hit F12 and it’s gone. F12 again and it’s back! Keeps your terminal session persistent too.

recordMyDesktop/gtk-recordMyDesktop

While recordMyDesktop is a command line tool for capturing desktop sessions, gtk-recordMyDesktop (in the screenshot) is a front-end written in python.

BleachBit

From the website:

BleachBit deletes unnecessary files to free valuable disk space, maintain privacy, and remove junk. Rid your system of old clutter including cache, cookies, Internet history, localizations, logs, temporary files, and broken shortcuts.

HardInfo

From the website:

HardInfo can gather information about your system’s hardware and operating system, perform benchmarks, and generate printable reports either in HTML or in plain text formats.

Agave

Agave is a very simple application for the GNOME desktop that allows you to generate a variety of colour schemes from a single starting colour.

Freemind

Fantastic mind-mapping software that does so much more besides

DeVeDe

DeVeDe is a program to create video DVDs and CDs (VCD, sVCD or CVD), suitables for home players, from any number of video files, in any of the formats supported by Mplayer.

Linpus On The Aspire One?

The chances are that if you use a linux distro, you’re a natural fiddler. You just can’t leave things be, you have to constantly ‘improve’ things. I recently found myself tinkering once again after buying an Acer Aspire One. Hearing all of the bad reports about Linpus, the default OS for the Aspire One, I quickly decided that I too didn’t like it.

Had I really given it a chance? Or was this just a burning desire to ‘tinker’? Or was it the fact that my wife actually liked the look of Linpus and I had to prove her wrong?

Whatever the reason, I quickly forged ahead with my plans to remove Linpus (without my wife’s knowledge) and installed Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix. At first glance, this is indeed a great looking distro for the Aspire. Everything works as it should and it looks far nicer than the default Linpus ‘large icon’ desktop that appears as if it was designed for children under the age of 5.

I used UNR for a day and had no complaints whatsoever. The next morning however, things weren’t quite right. The night before, I’d let the battery run down which (obviously) shuts the computer down. In the morning, the machine wouldn’t boot up. I had to manually run fsck to repair the corupted files. I tested this again by letting the battery run down and once more had to use fsck to get the bloody thing booted.

No problem I thought; there’s bound to be a fix for this somewhere. After a day searching the net, I failed to find a solution. Then I noticed, while trying to install a vnc client, that I couldn’t install any new packages (or indeed remove any). Somehow, dpkg had been corrupted. I couldn’t get round this problem either (clearly I’m not a linux pro). I’d had enough by now and just wanted a working netbook. There are lots of netbook specific distros to choose from and it seems that each distro has varying bugs, some more than others.

So for the time being I’ve gone back to Linpus. Once you’ve done some basic customisation, it’s actually not that bad. Following the tips on this page helped me out a lot so thanks to the author, jorge.

Before I go and install another distro, I’d love to hear other people’s experiences. Let me know what distro you chose for your Aspire One and why.