I am a harsh software critic. I’m usually willing to try something new if there’s the possibility it will do a better job than my current favorite, but I hold grudges against programs — and sometimes even entire desktop environments — if they disappoint me.
In addition, I am a minimalist. I have a clear set of criteria that I use to judge a program.
- Do one thing, and only one thing. Everybody likes a flexible program. But I don’t like software that tries to do too much at once. For example, I resent music management software suites or photo management applications. I manage the photos. I manage the music. The application shows it, or plays it. Period. If you try to be all things at once to me, you will only disappoint.
- Do that one thing well. A program needs focus — that goes without saying. If it achieves that goal and doesn’t muddle the final product, it is a winner. In other words, if you can’t do it right, don’t bother trying at all.
- Don’t drag my system down. If you burden my installation with pointless libraries and dependencies that don’t add anything to your software, you fail. Some of the greatest software ever written has about two dependencies. Some of the worst drags in all of Gnome just to put an icon on the screen. That is inexcusable.
- Finally, points are awarded for style. I can forgive and even adopt an ugly or cumbersome program if it achieves in the first three categories. But if you manage to capture all three and have a clever interface or a smooth look, then I embrace thee through the power of the Internets.
All that being said there are some standouts for me. This list will change from time to time as I try new software and shift loyalties. I have been known to abandon a long-standing favorite at the drop of a hat, and only because I happened to find something new.
GUI-based software tends to bear the brunt of my criticism, since it is no longer 1988 and a graphical interface is not only mainstream, it’s expected. That doesn’t mean anything with shiny buttons is good, though. In fact, in some cases, it’s bad. …
I adopted Openbox a long time ago, when I realized there was little to be gained by relying on the gnarled monstrosity Gnome required just to interact with my computer. And I started to really learn about Linux — and not just suffer through its idiosyncrasies — when I started using Openbox. If you want to understand how Linux works and get to know it better, find a window manager that makes you learn. Openbox can do that.
The jump to the 3.4.x-series made Openbox a lot easier to configure and in some ways, more fun to use. Things like theming, behavior management and some of the nifty tools are handled without too much stress. Openbox is flexible and customizable without becoming a random association of shiny but shallow features. I started using it because it did the job and didn’t get in the way, and I still use it because it still does the job and still doesn’t get in the way.
Every window manager has a fan club, and I am a die-hard member of Openbox’s.
The unfortunate downside of Openbox is that it can occasionally be a little cumbersome on-the-fly. ObMenu gives you a way to edit the standard Openbox right-click menu without having to go through two or three steps and edit XML files. Openbox makes everything easier and quicker, and ObMenu makes the mundane tasks in Openbox easier and faster still.
For dependencies, it relies on Python and a few derivatives. The time you save over hand-editing menu files just to add an application is immense. If there was ever an application that should be grafted into the Openbox mainline, ObMenu is it. No self-respecting Openbox user runs without it.
In the same way, changing your GTK2 theme is important to ultralight desktops, or else you have to pretend it’s still 1998. 
There are some applications that will do it for you, but those are occasionally integrated into other desktop environments, or date back a generation or two in Linux’s history. What’s needed is something that is short, quick, concise and accurate.
gtk+ 2.0 Change Theme achieves this taks much more professionally and efficiently than its peers. Previews are immediate and font changes are handled as a standardized menu. All of the buttons and effects are available for testing without leaving the main selection list. And you can apply them at the same time.
And best of all, it has become standard in a lot of distributions. So where it was once necessary to compile, you can now usually download and install without skipping a beat.
Firefox gets all the publicity as the free software browser alternative, but once you peel away its monstrous bulk, you realize there are a lot of fantastic programs that never get mentioned because they live in Firefox’s shadow.
Kazehakase is a great deal faster than Firefox, and can do most anything it can — including Flash and Java and so forth.
It won’t appeal to everybody — if you’re one of those people who can’t live without extension X or plugin Y, don’t bother. But most everyone who tries Kazehakase and learns how to manage it … sticks with it. I’m sure there have been re-defectors, but they are hard to find. Trust me this time: Kazehakase is worth trying and learning.
For a long time I endorsed Audacious as my music player of choice — I learned the Winamp way of doing things a very long time ago, and I have been comfortable with that style ever since. I still like it, but I find I have drifted away from it in recent months.
AlsaPlayer entered the picture when I started tinkering with other distros, and I realized it was an exceptionally lightweight audio player that would do most everything Audacious can, runs smoothly against lightweight hardware and is customizable at a very low level. That’s when it took over for me, honestly.
It’s not the most popular audio player around, and that’s a shame. But it has a lot of simple features that I enjoy, with enough flashy additions to keep me from getting bored (try compiling it with the 3D spectrum analyzer, for example). It also has a nice array of interfaces available, including a full GTK2 version all the way down to a command-line version.
I know it won’t appeal to everyone, but if you just want fundamental audio playback, and you don’t want music management applications, this could do the trick for you. It does for me. 
Name a file manager, and I can tell you that I’ve tried it. I rarely hear of a file manager that I haven’t at least installed, if not used for a short period of time. They are my weak point. I have brief and anguished love affairs with file managers, only to dump them at the first sight of something new. Thunar, PCManFM, Xfe — you name it, I’ve tried it, proclaimed it the winner and then thrown it out at the slightest mention of something new.
So in that sense, my endorsement here is worth almost nothing. But I can tell you this: There is one that I continually return to, even after finding the newest, latest, greatest way of pushing files around my computer — emelFM2.
This is one of those incredibly complex programs that can be customized to an astounding level, which makes it terrifically powerful and flexible. The premise is simple — like I said, it’s really just pushing files around on your computer. But emelFM2 takes a chore and turns it into an art form.
I also find the two-pane window arrangement, which hearkens all the way back to the late 1980s and the classic Norton Commander, to be preferable to a box full of icons. So the presentation is not new, but emelFM2 puts so much power in your hands that you’ll find you rely on it for everything from editing text files to synchronizing software repositories across networks. Yes, it can really do that much, and without hardly trying.
It also follows your GTK2 and icon themes closely, so it doesn’t look like an outsider. It’s light and needs almost nothing to get started. It’s fast and doesn’t hog your desktop or resources for no reason. This is a program you’ll spend an hour setting up, and then months later dread a reinstallation because you know how much work you put into configuring it. Configure it all the same.
I was, for a long time, a fan of PyBurn, a creation of Judd Vinet’s and an amazing example of terse, clean code that does an exceptional job burning audio, data and ISOs to CD.
PyBurn’s only real shortcoming, of course, was the fact that it didn’t handle DVDs. If I needed to write to a DVD, I ended up using something else, depending on the desktop and machine I was using. And then … a new challenger appears!
I don’t want to say Recorder is PyBurn, but it’s obvious that the two are interrelated, if not a complete offshoot. Both are easy to handle, take up no space, and do the job exactly right.
Recorder is a nice improvement over PyBurn simply because it does a few more things — DVD burning is possible, it can make ISOs from discs, and it’s actively updated, with the developer taking points and suggestions off an Arch forum thread. It’s always good to be able to make suggestions directly to the source, rather than through intermediaries.
Regardless, take a few seconds to install it; it should run nicely from within any distro that has a current copy of PyGTK installed, and the underlying CD/DVD-burner packages.
Text editors have a way of snowballing into code behemoths, replete with syntax highlighting, FTP accessibility, line folding, desktop management options and easter-egg video games. Let’s face it: All I want from a text editor is to adjust a configuration file, or maybe keep a list of names, or paste a stray link while I juggle pages.
That’s one of the things I like about Leafpad. It’s a text editor, and that’s all. It has all of about two “features” — it’ll show line numbers if you want, and it will auto-indent if you want. Beyond that, it’s you, the keyboard and a few words on the screen.
The interface is not innovative, it does not have splashy 3D effects, and it will not do your taxes for you. But it lets you move from point A to point B without taking up 71Mb on your drive or swallowing your bandwidth by requiring the entire Gnome underbelly. In other words … it’s perfect.
Be careful with Zim, because once you get started with it, you might become addicted to it. A desktop wiki was never anything I intended to use or even saw a need for, but once I put Zim in place, invention was the mother of necessity.
And for me, it is almost necessary now. My bizarre little experiments, my to-do lists, my journals of my troubleshooting adventures — they all have a place with Zim. Zim keeps them organized, keeps them neat, and helps me find them a lot faster than I could with just a straight text file.
As another almost-purely GTK2 application, Zim won’t require weird and wayward packages that cling to the hull of your system like barnacles. It looks good, it runs good, it’s terribly easy to figure out, and it has just enough embellishments to keep it from becoming a fancified Leafpad.
Just be careful, because if you are genetically inclined toward addiction, this one might become your drug of choice.
The running joke among Linux users — and probably not so much Linux programmers — is that if you must learn a new programming language, you can do us all a favor and not code another music player. For that matter, please don’t invent any other image viewers either.
In the roll call of *nix-ish image viewers though, I have to hold my hand up for Mirage.
It’s a standout for me because of all four of the point I made at the top of this page — it does one thing, it does it well, it doesn’t drag in a huge glut of dependencies … and it scores the hat trick by looking good too. It follows your current GTK2 theme, and adds the conveniences of an image preview sidebar and status bar. It can interface with the Gimp or other big-name programs, and is customizable to a small degree. There are just enough tweaks here to keep me happy, and for that reason, it’s a standout example of my ideal program.
The moment I best remember as the end of my love affair with Xubuntu, was when the mailing lists were resounding with arguments as to why ePDFView — a particularly lightweight PDF viewer — was omitted in favor of a heavier, fatter viewer (I think it was Evince, but I forget).
At the time, the argument was that ePDFView wasn’t being developed, and that wasn’t true. I am fairly certain the Xubuntu team went with the viewer that was already ennervated into the Gnome structure as a matter of convenience. Maybe true and maybe not, but speaking for myself, that sacrifice to convenience was part of a trend that eventually cost Xubuntu one user … me.
All that aside, ePDFView in its latest version is just a great GTK2 PDF viewer. Like Mirage, it has focus, it doesn’t stray from that path, it doesn’t encumber my system with rubbish and has a convenient and intuitive layout. And so, there again is the trifecta.
My e-mail requirements are basic at best, but I do have four or five separate e-mail addresses for different reasons. It’s much more convenient to check them all at once than to sign in through Web-based interfaces, then sign out again to move to the next one. And so Sylpheed is more than enough to get the job done.
There are enough e-mail clients out there that one of them is sure to satisfy the demands of the most esoteric mail system. I can’t guarantee that Sylpheed will talk with your server, but for my money it has a simple interface, easy setup and configuration, convenient options at the touch of a button, and it’s not a drag on my system.
So in summary: light, speedy, easy to use, convenient, flexible and good-looking. Two thumbs up.
Osmo will sneak up on you and surprise you. I didn’t realize my addiction to Osmo until I had to rebuild some of my lost configuration files, and realized how much information I had added to it.
Because Osmo fills in all the gaps left by other programs, it easily becomes a useful tool in a lightweight desktop arrangement. All the widgets and gizmos that are otherwise offered by taskbars or system tray clocks have a happy home in Osmo.
What is it? It’s an organizer. And a scheduler. And a task manager. And a contact manager. And an address book. And … and you get the picture. It’s very easy to customize to your liking. It meshes neatly with e-mail contacts and Web browsers. But perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t infringe upon the territory of other applications. So yes, it’s an e-mail address book, but a little different, a little more portable and a little more configurable than the ones built into other software.
One of the coolest and greatest things about terminal applications is that you sometimes can get the same range of functions and degree of power as a GUI-based application, and require only a sliver of the resources.
Think about it: To run a graphical application in Linux — even one as light as most GTK2-based programs — you still probably need the entire X suite, the GTK2 libraries, icon sets, font sets, rendering libraries, etc., etc. … and all that just for one look at your e-mail, or just a desktop calculator.
Perhaps that’s acceptable to you, and if it is, then I suggest you stick with it. After all, most people find the command line intimidating, but that’s probably because they don’t recall (or weren’t around for ) the days when computers were only command line. It might be uncomfortable and if that’s the case, don’t bother reading this section. But if you want some ideas for some amazing and powerful software that requires almost nothing to use, here’s what I suggest. …
Let’s get the most difficult one out of the way. Web browsing, given the hoopla of Web 2.0 and yadda yadda yadda, is strictly within the demesne of the graphical environment. Any attempt to browse without visual elements is fruitless and pointless and a waste of time. I mean, what about Flash? What about Java? What about lightbox effects? Rollover CSS effects? YouTube videos? Popup logins? These things are completely inaccessible to a text-based browser, and for that reason, it’s a non-issue.
Or is it? It’s a matter of perspective really, and here’s mine: Flash, Java, rollover CSS effects, popup logins, lightbox effects … all of those things are distractions really — attempts to delude you into thinking you’re getting a higher grade of content from a particular site. You should be skeptical, not embracing, of a site that employs so much glitter and sleight-of-hand that it’s hard to tell if it’s quality or questionable.
And that’s the beauty of ELinks. Here’s a text-based browser that employs a full range of features you expect — things like a tabbed interface, download manager and right-click menus — and strips away all the dreck and drool that drip from so many Web sites these days.
I can give you an example — Jamendo.com. Don’t get me wrong: I love Jamendo. But the fact is, there are so many rollover buttons, embedded Flash players, nested doodads and quasi-friends connections … sigh. Let’s just say navigating it is a chore. The content — which is to say, the music — is there, but you have to dig for it.
But not with ELinks. ELinks ignores all the crud and presents you with the stuff you’re really interested in, like the download link for a particular torrent.
Perhaps more importantly, ELinks isn’t counterintuitive or intertwined with strange keyboard commands. It’s menu-driven, it looks and behaves like a GUI application, it’s unbelievably fast, it has so many features and options that I don’t have time to go through all of them here. … If you’re like me and you’d just as soon strip away the garbage that encrusts so much of the Web today, ELinks is truly a gift from heaven. Install and enjoy.
File management is another area where most people don’t think beyond the obvious graphical application, with out realizing that at its core, file management is really just pushing files around. Sure, there are times when you edit or you view or you rename or whatever, but aside from those points, what’s so important that requires a graphical interface?
Midnight Commander, or just mc, does the job as well as any other file manager, and in some ways better. This one also takes the two-pane design that was popularized in the late 1980s, although it doesn’t have to be — mc can swap its arrangement for a file previewer, editor or another feature.
mc does an amazing amount of work for such an exceptionally light program. FTP access and virtual file systems? Check. Shell access and command-line options? Check. Menu-driven configuration and checkbox settings dialogs? Check. Mouse support, tab completion and onboard text editor? Check, check, check.
In some ways, mc does more and gives you more than most graphical file managers can or do. Sure, it won’t play a preview of an audio tune if you hover the mouse over it, but it will allow you to cue the audio player of your choice directly to the file in question, all at the press of a few keys. Don’t overlook this one.
Now before the mutt fans go all wild and crazy and foam at the mouth, let me just say up front that, as mentioned above, my e-mail demands are not that great. All I look for in an e-mail client is a way to check four or five e-mail addresses without too much stress or strain, a few times a day and not much more than that. It’s really only a way to circumvent logging in and out of a Web interface four times in a row, just to check my e-mail.
And so yes, I know, the cool kids all use mutt. And I tried that, I admit. I’ve tried many times as a matter of fact, but something always went south, and the results were usually a big goose egg.
On the other hand, alpine looks, feels and works like an e-mail client, even though it’s much more than that. Setting up alpine to read and send e-mails took all of about 30 seconds for one account, and less than 5 minutes total to cover everything I need it for. Compare that to the hours it took me to get mutt to not work.
Yes, I know. mutt is manna, straight from heaven. I am a lesser human being because I can’t get mutt to work. I fail and resign myself to an eternity in the Abyss because I rely on alpine to read e-mails.
But I can tell you what works for me, and what was easy to set up, and what did the job without too much complaint. I’m no alpine expert, but if I have to choose between a five-minute setup to read an e-mail from mom, or a four-hour torture session to read but not send, I’ll take the former. You can decide for yourself.
Calcurse is a cheater and a bad idea. Calcurse is a trend toward usability and convenience that cannot be tolerated in console applications. Calcurse makes things easy. Calcurse is pretty. Calcurse even has … colors!
In all seriousness, Calcurse is a fantastic little text-based calendar and appointment scheduler. It’s easy to use, easy to configure the way you like, and looks good too. If all console applications followed this trend, there wouldn’t be any GUI applications because there’d be no need. …
There’s little I can tell you about irssi that you probably haven’t already heard. To the best of my knowledge, irssi is the de-facto standard for command-line chat clients. I have heard of some others, but irssi is the one that seems to be featured in all the desktop screenshots by my Linux heroes.
And since chatting is little more than streams of text … why bother with the requirements of a GUI-based application, just to find out what some ignorant wag on the opposite side of the planet thinks is important? Save yourself the time, effort and bandwidth and stick with irssi.
nano, Vim, Emacs and Midnight Commander (again)
For text editing, I will tell you that I have used all four you see in the screenshot above. I think they each have strong points, but they all have weaknesses too. So regardless of what your favorite is, I think it’s fair to say that there are good sides and bad sides to each one. In other words, don’t include me in your editor crusade. …
I have to say that nano was my favorite for a long time and I still use it when it’s available. However, there are some features — most notably, screen wrapping without inserting line breaks — which I need for other applications, and that’s the reason I occasionally don’t use it. For sheer usability and newbie-friendliness, I think it’s the winner. The important commands are pasted right on the screen in front of your face, and I think that’s how it should be.
And of course, there are some onboard editors that come with other applications, like mc’s standard text editor. It’s not the greatest and strongest contender in the editor war, but it will do the job and requires no more space than mc itself.
It’s probably important to note that you can actually cue mc from the command line to open and edit a file, which means there’s no need to start the file manager, navigate to the file and then edit. Just issue the command, the -e flag and the target file and mc will jump straight into edit mode.
I mention Wordgrinder out of sequence with the other text editors for a good reason — it’s not a text editor. Like the home page says, Wordgrinder is a word processor for processing words. It’s not a tool, it’s not a toy, and it’s not an intermediary for handling outside tasks. Yes, you can edit your xorg.conf file with this, but it’s rather like using a screwdriver to drive a nail.
It’s also not fancy. It’s not point-and-click or intended for the graphically dependent. It’s for writing, and by that I mean writing, like your secondary school language teacher wanted you to do, but you thought it was too much work.
So in that sense it’s a real, honest-to-goodness application, and not just some esoteric utility. It’s sparse, it’s clean, it’s fast, it’s efficient. This will spur your creative genius … or at least refrain from distracting your inner ADHD child.
There are a lot of tools for the console, but not as many applications. Here’s one that is definitely the latter.
I am so, so happy I found Charm. WordPress.com’s Web-based interface continues to pack on the pounds, becoming more and more an obstruction with every “improvement.” All I need is something decent for writing — something that can post the text without bogging down a perfectly good 1Ghz machine in the process.
Charm is so much the complete opposite of the WordPress.com interface that I can run it on a 100Mhz Pentium with only 16Mb of memory. Charm technically doesn’t edit anything — you do that in an external editor of your choice. But the dirty work is all done with Charm, and done amazingly well. Manage posts, spellcheck, view, delete, upload, you name it. I use for 95 percent of the stuff you see on this site; the only exception being link-heavy posts or pages, like the one you’re reading now.
Charm plays nice with WordPress.com and a half-dozen other hosting services. I strongly recommend it, even if you don’t rely completely on a console-based environment.
I don’t rely much on RSS readers, but knowing full well that a lot of people find them to be exceptionally useful, I give my personal thumbs-up to Snownews. I had previously followed Raggle, but that fell out of development and additionally relied on too much Ruby to perform well at very low specifications.
Snownews doesn’t have the visual appeal Raggle might, but Snownews does the job with much less overhead and seems to get more attention in the here and now. And with a keypress-help screen and fairly intuitive commands, you’ll be up and reading in a matter of minutes. Give it a try.
What is there to say about NetHack? If you’ve never tried it, don’t, because it’s another one of those perennially addictive games that will keep you enthralled for days on end. It’s ugly, it’s complex, it’s a weak representation of role playing games, and it’s something that you’ll start and keep coming back to, again and again.
And that’s why it has been around for about 22 years. …
CMatrix doesn’t really do anything, aside from what you see in the screenshot above — spew random characters in glowing green patterns down the console screen. But with a quick addition of a few flags, like -sab -u 2, you have something akin to a screensaver for your console.
And it will drive other geeks into a technophiliac frenzy.
For a very long time I was a proponent of cplay, mostly because it was a clear, clean and intuitive tool for playing back music without relying on an entire X environment for a couple of pretty buttons. Unfortunately, cplay drifted away into that hazy gray area where free software goes to die (I have heard rumors of a revival, but seen nothing yet). It had a lot of potential and it still does, but the fact of the matter is that all the things I wished for cplay are already in moc.
moc handles just about any file type you can throw at it. It has an obvious two-pane arrangement that you can customize to your liking. It has a progress bar, three or four different timers, easy-to-learn key assignments and it can stream from the Internet too. It even has theme support for different color schemes, which is completely impossible to comprehend from a console program.
It’s not for everyone — nothing ever is — but if you just want to play some tunes and you don’t want to go through the harangue of setting up some of the more complex arrangements, moc does the job very, very, very well.
Last but not even close to least, htop is a vast improvement over the standard top package that exists in many distros by default. It’s a system monitor and a process viewer, and also gives you a decent look at what’s taking up space — or stalled and spinning its gears.
htop wins points for me because it uses color. Just kidding. htop is a lot easier to control and adjust than top, which means its quicker on the draw for finding and killing zombies, or yanking annoying processes. There are a lot of system monitors and resource profilers for graphical environments, but for the console, you only need this one.
What about gpicviewer? it doesn’t have too much deps and it just shows your pictures.
Hey, thanks for the epdfview tip. I use latex a lot and have disliked xpdf and evince for a long time, but never done anything about it.
Quick question: no screen? I don’t go anywhere without it these days, but I guess its appeal depends on how much you use console apps.
I always thought the main purpose of pdf files was to be printed?
ePDFView is quick but doesn’t seem to have a “print” action anywhere.
(Another vote for the fast gpicview btw, if you just want to see the image and not do anything to it.)
@johnraff: Just go to the FILE menu or CTRL+P
K.Mandla:
I’ve just came across Pymp, it’s a Mplayer gui written in python. Follows the GTK theme and is simple as can be. Check it out! (it’s in ARCH’s AUR)
@el mariachi: Not in my version (0.1.5) which came off the Feisty repos. “File” only has open/reload/save a copy/close and Ctrl+P does nothing…
oh you’re right then. Mine is the latest version from the arch repos
Another great image viewer is gimmage – it’s much like mirage, but I’m more partial to it’s interface.
As far as terminal’s go – XFCE4’s ‘Terminal’ is great. Only a few Xfce deps and it’s just as useful as Gnome-terminal.
G’day,
Thanks for getting me into Openbox. I kept referring back to this page the whole way through the installation.
I ended up with just docker installed on the desktop. I missed the little clock in the corner — so I installed a program called lal (http://d.minuslab.net/?p=62). You’ll like it — next to no dependencies, just Xlib pretty much, and low memory use. Sits in the system tray.
I recently hacked lal to produce a navigable calendar when you click on it (just like Gnome’s calendar). I called it lalcal. Still no dependencies, low memory usage. You can get it at my site on Google Pages: http://xerxesdaphat.googlepages.com/lalcal%2Caclockforyoursystemtray . Might be useful for some of us nekkid-computing types.
Cheers,
-Tom
Recorder looks like a nice and simple cd/dvd burner.
http://code.google.com/p/recorder/
The author says it’s based on PyBurn.
Hello,
First, thank you for one of the best weblog I have see
I juste would like to know if you are aware of LXDE (http://lxde.sourceforge.net/) ?
As a lot of people I think gpicview is a really good pictures viewer.
But what i want to talk about is lxappearance, gtk+ 2.0 Change Theme always overwrite my icons selection. Lxappearance let you choose your icon theme, and don’t have many deps
AUR link -> http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=16047
Thanks for writing this post, it gave me a few ideas and I switched to Openbox. In fact, I blogged about it, too:
http://blog.yarrt.com/2008/05/given-my-computer-a-bit-of-a-facelift/
checkout Arora web (http://code.google.com/p/arora/) – a lightweight, webkit-based web browser
And if you still prefer a GTK browser, there is Midori, based on webkit like Arora pointed out above, still beta but already usable (with a VERY small memory and disk footprint)
And if you still prefer a GTK browser, there is Midori, based on webkit like Arora pointed out above, still beta but already usable (with a VERY small memory and disk footprint)
http://www.twotoasts.de/
As for a music player, if you have a static music library, Music Player Daemon (MPD) is the best thing, ever. You do not need to keep a player open to *listen* to music.
sonata is an awesome front-end for mpd… Meets all your requirements for elegance.
Just wanted to say that your site is a very big resource for me, now that I’m going to have to get an EXTREMELY low end computer to function as my main computer now. I’ve always wanted to play around with lighter apps that didn’t depend on all of gnome. Thanks to the resources here, I think I’ve got it..
I do have a simple question though.
IM and IRC. What are two apps that you’d recommend that don’t have a lot of dependencies. (One IM app, preferably GTK+ 1.2, and one IRC app, please…)
Thanks very much for the great resource that you’ve put together here!
That’s tough, Trevor. I don’t usually use IM or IRC, so I’m stretched to find one that works for your criteria. Some people mentioned Ayttm as a possibility.
http://ayttm.sourceforge.net/
Aside from that I haven’t heard about much IM/IRC that still stands in GTK1.2. If you find any, let me know.
What’s the “quick launch” there:
http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/3630/screenshot2009010908011wc4.jpg
?
That is wbar.
Thanks for the tips on programs for an openbox machine.
Sylpheed is awesome! Thanks for that recommendation. If nothing else, that was worth the read.
I use ePDFViewer exclusively, but then again, I always did. Never did care for adobe’s viewer.
I found Recorder in Arch’s Forum, but it is definitely worth the mention. The newest one is pretty slick, allowing for options to be passed, provided you know the command-line options for the backend programs your using.
I’m trying out Kazehakase, Xpad, Zim, and Osmo based on your recommendations as well, but I haven’t had enough time to really play with them yet. Kaze, in particular, is going to take a little getting used to, like installing java64 for instance. (I had to jump through a few little hoops to do it in Firefox, too, so it isn’t a real surprise.)
You’re welcome.
I still keep an eye on Kazehakase but I haven’t had much luck building the recent releases, so I have to rely on Firefox again. 
A year ago it was the only thing I’d use, but I ran into a string of mysteriously unbuildable versions after about 0.5.0, and so I’ve been away from it for a while.
Ok… I have discovered the one and only issue I have with Zim… spell checking. I am using a current Arch, I have gtkspell installed, and I looked over the manual.
I am not sure where to specify the language spell checker needs in order to operate. The Documentation is not overly clear on this point. I “think” it is supposed to be in the main config file, which I found. However, I have not been able to figure out the format zim wants it in.
(Kazehakase compiled from the AUR without a hitch, but I am using a 64 bit system… you may be running into issues because of older hardware? I know… it makes no sense to me either.)
@trevor: I was thinking of an old version of Pidgin. (aka Gimp)
Argh, I meant Gaim instead of Gimp.
I like the idea of using one programm for only one puropse. As a political science student i have to write papers and have to read a lot of papers. To get these tasks done i use gvim to write papers (latex), to read other papers i use acroread.
To get the rest done i started using online apps from goole:
-gmail (offline support)
-greader (offline support)
.gcal (offline support)
with these apps its possible to store all data in “the cloud” and i dont have to manage my data by myself. the other advantage is that i can access my data everywhere.
in my oppionen this is the easiest way to get everything done.. all i need is vim, acroread and firefox.
just my 2 cent.
In terms of console RSS readers, you may be interested in canto: http://codezen.org/canto/
The caveat being being it requires Python.
Personally, I think lxappearance has now completely replaced gtk-chtheme as the all in one stand alone appearance manager.
It’s small, doesn’t bring many deps (In Ubuntu, gtk2-engines is the only one, after a min install) and it allows you to change icons, text placement on top of what gtk-chtheme did.
One of dvtm and/or screen should make an appearance as well…
Otherwise every good list; I basically use it a starting reference guide when building my own installs.
I’ll try lxappearance again. The last time I tried it (which might have been as long ago as six months), it couldn’t differentiate between icon and GTK themes, and had the whole business scrambled. And since changing the icon theme for me is just a quick one-word edit of the .gtkrc.mine file, I kind of stayed with gtk-chtheme.
dvtm and screen are both worth mention, you’re right. (Me adds them to the to-do list.)
A nice light image editor is mtPaint, which is actually small enough to fit in 32 MB of RAM!
I know that you’re in a terminal only phase but when you get back to X I suggust you try out the browser Midori. It’s small, fast, and has a much better memory profile than Firefox (that’s not too hard though). It uses the WebKit rendering engine so it gets 100/100 on the Acid 3 tests. It’s still pretty early in development though, although it’s improved a lot since I last used it though. Also the guys at XFCE look like they will be adopting it as a official browser for XFCE.
Oh and I second that suggustion for lxappearance. I used to use gtk-chtheme and manually edit my icon prefs but with lxappearance around it just makes that kind of silly.
Turns out you might want to ditch newer GTK+ libs if Project Ridley (http://live.gnome.org/ProjectRidley) succeeds. Then GNOME stuff will be actually IN GTK itself.
Since the mc userforums somehow have beenswallowed by a black hole or so. I come here to ask:
Is there a way to set “run actions” for files? Like when I doulble- click on a mp3 it should open it with alsaplayer?
Or when I double click a movie it’ll invoke mplayer …….
Any hints?
I’ve tried the Japanese browser, Midori and Arora. According to htop, Arora is the lightest on resources by quite a margin, though all three are lighter than Opera which in turn is way lighter than IE or FF.
By the way, for your Openbox mention of Obmenu, there are two other GUI bits that work on the rc.xml… Obconf and Obkey. Obkey with with keybindings (not mousebindings) and obconf does pretty much everything else, except mousebindings and per application specifications. (Obkey is only available in the Arch’s AUR, while the other two are in Arch’s repo.)
I wonder how long it will take Obconf, Obmenu, and Obkey to merge into a single, tabbed GUI, maybe with a mousebinding’s controller, too. It would clean up my menu rather nicely.
Hear hear. I would love to see ObConf absorb ObMenu, particularly because the latter hasn’t seen an update in the entire time I’ve been using Linux. Openbox has changed enough to warrant updates (for example, you can label separators manually, but ObMenu doesn’t support that) but ObMenu must have stalled years ago, because it’s seen no improvements that I’m aware of.
Hey K-man, thought you’d be interested in volwheel, this app I found in Arch’s community repos today–it’s a nice light tray app for controlling volume, and works well with fbpanel and the like. It runs well as a daemon at startup and uses whatever gtk theme is loaded as well. Try it out and let me know what you think.
I’m a fan.
http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2007/12/07/fontmatrix-is-pretty-cool-volwheel-rocks/
Great for Win2K desktop knockoffs too.
http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/oh-so-close/
Didn’t see those older posts, but while we’re at it, thanks for showing me fontmatrix! It seems it’s one of the few Arch Linux fontviewers.
Keep up the great work!
Awesome site!
Awesome page!
I have changed a lot of my configuration now.
I am a gentoo fan, and no I don’t wanna start an argument here over what’s best Ubuntu or Gentoo
What I really want to say is Thanks for this awesome compilation of softwares!
I am compiling openbox (as I type) and I am gonna get rid of all the stupid KDE apps that I run on my Fluxbox! (yes, I was stupid enough to use fluxbox+konqueror+amork+konsole combo)
you have given excellent alternatives
few queries and suggestion from my side
1. Mirage vs gqview
Try gqview, its just like mirage, but is more user friendly (you don’t have to change dir manually, standard flipping/rotating images can be done right from their)
2. epdfview
saved my life from that crappy acroread! thanks a ton
i was thoroughly disappointed by gv (i don’t know why I use it but removing both acroread and gv)
3. terminal ??
I use aterm (with transperancy and nowindow, so it sticks to my desktop) So I can’t use multiple aterm’s.
the xterm comes by default with the X server which i don’t like (no tabs)
So I use Konsole (I know, too many KDE dependancies)
but i think i like the keyboard shortcuts and multiple tabs in konsole
can you suggest me good terminal which has tabs feature?
4.volwheel
thank god, I don’t know why I started using KMix (prolly due to konqueror and konsole pulling most of KDE stuff)
I definitely like this one
5.Amarok alternative NOT alsaplayer
Apart from playing the mp3 file I want my music player to be able to build collection too. Why? its easy to pick song according to artist/album or even name if you have such collection.
I don’t think alsaplayer can do that. What would you like to recommend? Rhythembox ? or Audacious ??
Thanks again for this awesome page!
hope to see your reply (here or my inbox, anything will do)
~S
@Prince:
If you’re still looking for a lightweight, tabbed x-terminal-emulator, I’d suggest mrxvt. Might not be the most beautiful terminal on earth, but it works.
thanks for the MrXVT tip
I am using it rite now
i changed mrxvtrc
now it has no borders,no menubar, no tab bar buttons, no scroll bar, complete transperancy and it looks awesome
i don’t have a screenshot utility, otherwise i would’ve shown my desktop screenshot here
BTW, any suggestion on screenshot utility?
i have gimp+gqview already installed
thanks a lot again
~S
@Prince:
I know you were looking for K. Mandla to reply but I’ll give you some suggestions too.
I’m assuming you’re looking at GTK apps now so those are what I’ll suggest. For a terminal I would suggest Sakura. It has pretty light dependencies and K. Mandla used it for a while too. Yes there are tabs.
For a music player I would either suggest Consonance (look here for K. Mandla’s post about it) or MPD and Sonata. Consonance is a very light music manager which you should feel comfortable in coming from Amarok. MPD (with Sonata or another client) is a bit different and more advanced. Use it if you want more control over your player and music library.
Thanks a lot Sean
I tried MPD
but somehow didn’t like the idea of running a server/daemon
that was long before, I will give it another go.
Sakura is pulling 3 dependencies
vte (its required, i undertand), xmlrpc ??? and cmake ???
anyways, i don’t mind pulling in cmake (will remove it after compiling sakura)
The problem is with VolWheel and consonance
both are not in portage
I use gentoo and portage is the legendary package manager of gentoo
looks like i have to compile them manually
any links to “howto” or “wiki” on these two ??
meanwhile I am giving mpd and sonata a try
~S
@Prince
No problem. If the issue is that you’re not sure how to manually compile them the process isn’t too hard. VolWheel should be a snap. Download the source, unzip it and then read the README file for installation instructions and dependencies.
Consonance is pretty similar. Download the source, unzip and read the README. Make sure you have the dependencies, you can use the Arch AUR page for that as it lists all of the dependencies.
thanks again Sean
will come back here if I face any problems
My experience with the two softwares -
MPD+Sonata :
I tried mpd, but didn’t like it. The whole idea of some server running through my music directory and another client listening to it, is too much for me. I don’t know why, perhaps I am missing something. Anyways, I installed, and then removed mpd+sonata.
Consonance :
Did as you said, download source, unzip, install according to the Readme. AUR page was helpful.
It installed without a hitch, started using it
Very simple good intereface
BUT!BUT!!BUT!!!
cpu intensive! i have c2d 2.4GHz and its uses 20 to 40 % cpu
WTF??
when i read the FAQ, I’ll copy paste it here-
“”"
Q. Why the fsck does a freaking music player consume so much CPU ?
A. Use the HW device directly in ALSA (hw:0,0). The ‘default’ device is dmix which is setup with a samplerate of 48Khz while most tracks are in 44.1Khz samplerate. Resampling is cpu intensive. Using the HW device, bypassing the dmix plugin is the current workaround. Of course, you lose the advantages of dmix in the process.
“”"
anyways, this is no place for troubleshooting consonance. Also I really need the functionality to search song as i type (by artist/album/name etc.)
I am gonna try alsaplayer and audacious.
Sakura:
I am using sakura, and its a bliss to remove konsole and its KDE dependancies. (y0y0!!)
FileManager-
) now I have to try good file manager (konqueror is too heavy)
I removed Konqueror (y0y0!! again
any suggestions?
I have installed emelFM2 and first impression is “great”!!
but I won’t mind trying another file manager
*phew*
had too much fun today
do suggest me if there is more
I will come back here tommorrow
~S
PS: @ K. Mandla : hope you don’t mind
PCManFM is lightweight and is similar to Konquerer. No KDE!
Yeah, at first I didn’t like the idea of running a daemon just for music but now I don’t really have that problem as I’ve seen how useful it is. It’s nice being able to restart X and have my music continue. Or just have the ability to listen to music without a client running. But to each his own.
As for the CPU intensive Consonance stuff this is a problem in ALSA not Consonance. You can configure dmix to stop re-sampling or just not use dmix. There are pages in the Gentoo wiki about this I believe. If not then the Arch wiki should help.
I highly recommended Audacious. I’m not too sure about ALSAPlayer but it should be good if K. Mandla likes it. I used Audacious for a pretty long time and I was quite happy with it. The reason I didn’t suggest it is because there is no music library. But if you have your music nicely organized in a directory then it’s easy just to drag and drop into it.
If you like emelFM2 then my all means stick with it. If you want to experiment, some other popular choices are PCmanFM and Thunar. Thunar can be made to be very minimal or (how I use it) a glue to keep the parts of your system together. You can use it with the thunar-volman package to make it automount your hal devices. It’s up to you. I’ve never tired PCmanFM but I’ve heard good things about it, same with emelFM2.
@K. Mandla: Sorry for taking over the comments like this. >_>
Not a problem. Please enjoy.
Sorry for the delay.
Looks like my D-Link ethernet card has given up on me
no internet
will definitely come back here and write more, but thats later
thanks a lot K.Mandla
~S
and i am back… after a long time
had to change my ethernet card
now the eth link goes up/down every min for a second, but at least my internet is working
@sean
i did not try thunar as it showed xfce4 dependencies on my gentoo machine (should there by any? i don’t know)
i am happy with emelfm2
so i’ll stick with it
as for audio player, i came across soundbird (i know, its heavy, needs gstreamer and xulrunner and what not)
but i was trying exaile at the time when i downloaded its ready to use tarball and exaile had already installed gstreamer for me, xulrunner was not a problem as the tarball itself comes with its own libraries
it’s an iTunes (and also amarok) killer app
hence i am NOT going to recommend it to you guys
it has all the features one would ever need (yes, scrobbling library and all) PLUS an inbuilt web browser!!!
hey! i didn’t ask for it, but where did it come from??
the answer is that the huge (~30mb) tarball comes with its own libraries and uses its own stuff (hence the xulrunner and all stuff)
though its a big buggy if it can’t find some system library it actually requires and you have no clue where to get it
i have installed audacious alongwith it
and i loved it!
alsaplayer somehow isn’t playing any mp3s for me (dunno why) and i think i like audacious2
now apart from this
)
i am still on fluxbox, as i love my current desktop way too much (and am way too lazy to configure openbox from scratch
all kde apps are gone, so is qt,qt4 (wow!!)
not much gnome stuff either(yay !!)
the volwheel is highly unresponsive mixer (scrolling and actual change in volume differs almost by couple of seconds!) so trying new mixers
i am searching for a good FTP client (i am using fireftp extension of firefox for now) but will soon need a gui (gFTP??) client
also, in most probable case, i’ll be setting up an FTP server
any suggestions on that?
tried proftp, it has gui (thank god), but would like to try other, easy to use servers
vsftpd is too geeky for me (can’t sit and configure files running into 100s of option=value lines)
i removed mplayer (some library problem, wont compile/run on my machine… and wanted to try new stuff)
installed vlc first
only to realise no GUI (it’s qt based)
now using xine (xine-ui is not that bad, if you ask me)
*phew*!!
excuse me if I wrote too much
and also pardon my English/typos
~S
@Prince, yeah Thunar has some XFCE dependencies because it’s the defualt file manager of XFCE. Anyways I just use the thunar-light package in the Arch AUR which builds it without the silly dependencies and other annoyances like the xfce4-panel requirement just for a trash plugin.
Anyways if you like emelfm2 then by all means use it. ^_^
I quite like Gftp. Very speedy and stable.
Is kazehakse still being developed? I checked the site, there was a steady stream of releases…then it seems to have adrupted stopped
That’s a good question. It’s been a year since the last update, and I wonder if perhaps the authors are preoccupied. If you can read or speak Japanese you might be able to trace some of the development, but other than skimming the mailing list or watching the update page, I have no more information than you. It would be sad if it stalled.
I have to disagree, f-spot is a very nice program. It takes generically named photo dumps like from your camera and sorts them based on date in a timeline archive. And when you browse through to check that you got all the pictures off the camera and took all your snapshots you can do the tedious task of flipping the pictures if you like. It does a few other useful things but I never had an issue it being wasteful.
I do to, the only thing is Gnome. I have no problem with Mono, in fact, it’s my programming enviroment, but it brings in a ludicrous amount of Gnome to work.
Hey, I found a cool window manager called Karmen. It looks nice and is VERY fast, at least on my PC.
Call me old fashioned, but I still mainly listen from *CD*s. Alsaplayer is a simple no-fuss player that allows me to do that. In this era of mp3 and other digital formats and the like, you don’t know what hard it actually was to find something like that.
For the record, I just use (gnome-)mplayer for playing most other things. It plays whatever you throw at it, and I don’t need the music management options. (Or even advanced tuning options – my aural needs are very basic). It also has that useful browser plugin.
Hello !
Long time not many comments on this page
Anyways, I am currently using audacious (media-sound/audacious-2.0.1) in gentoo portage. Its good but the problem is sudden spike in CPU usage. The behaviour seem totaly random, usually when i am monitoring by htop, i see 2-3% CPU usage by audacious, and suddenly it hogs on to 40-60% usage !!
I am playing normal mp3 files, with 256kbps CBR
running $ audacious2 -N gave no errors (apart from GTK warnings) and show no more debugging info for the sudden spike in CPU usage.
I don’t know if this can be fixed, but I would like to try another audio player.
Any suggestions?
library support is highly appreciated, but i can do well without it.
Last.fm scrobbling will be simply great
~S