Discovering New Applications
One of the great strenghts of GNU Linux is its wide variaty of applications. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of music players and chat programs for this platform. A common joke going around in the linux community is “Why don’t you program another music player?” in reply to developpers who don’t know what to do in their spare free time. It confuses a lot of new users; they simply can’t decide what particular program they have to choose. Even I, who have been using linux for a couple years now, don’t know them all. Every now and then I discover a new program that I find better than the one I’m currently using. What follows are some that I discovered the last couple of months.
Emesene
Yet another chat program. I used pidgin before, a multi protocol chat program, but now I switched to Emesene following one of the basic principles of linux “Make one program for a specific task and make sure it does the job well”. It is solely for the MSN protocol and I can tell you, it does the job very well. It includes everything you’d want from a chat client except for voice chat and webcam support. But then again, only aMSN has those features and I despise aMSN (no offence to the creator though).
Gnome-MPlayer
A video player based upon the superiour MPlayer. Though there are a lot of front-ends for MPlayer in circulation (gmplayer, SMPlayer, …), its approach is different from everything else: Keep it simple and stupid (KISS). You won’t find any fancy features here and the configuration menu is trimmed to the strict necessary options. If you do want to change more options, you can still directly put it into the .mplayer configuration file. Note that, in spite of the name, it doesn’t have gnome dependencies so you can safely use it in your openbox or fluxbox setup. It doesn’t consume much ram either. It also comes with a browser media plugin (gecko-mplayer) so you can see media in your browser directly.
Mirage
A lightweight image viewer. I don’t have much to say about this one. It’s just a lot better than …let’s say the bloated F-Spot.
Midori
I don’t use this web browser as I probably will never abandon my beloved Firefox, but it is certainly worth mentioning this lightweight juwel in the world of web browsing dominated by Opera and Firefox. It uses the fast webkit render engine, acquiring 100/100 on the acid3 test. Despite being in a “pre-alpha” stage (it has version 0.0.21 as of writing), its performance is very promessing. I’m sure we will hear a lot more about Midori in the future.
Rtorrent
With no doubt the best torrent client around. It is a terminal application and very lightweight as well. It includes all the features you’d want from a torrent client: encryption, DHT, bandwith and peer throttling, torrent resuming, …It can also monitor a directory for torrents. When there are torrent files in it, it will start them automatically. Nifty huh.
Mpd and ncmpc
To confirm the cliché, I couldn’t but mention this one too. A console music player. It is a lot more than just a music player. Mpd allows you to control the music on a computer remotely, or in other words, you can start/stop music, manage playlists and a lot more on a computer remotely. Ideal for integration with a stereo system.
Gedit
Obviously I knew this one already. It is the default text editor in GNOME. What I didn’t know is that there exists a latex plugin for it as well. Not only syntax highlighting, but also command completion and compile/preview buttons are included. Bye bye Kile, hello Gedit! No more KDE dependencies on my computer.