Little goodies to improve your quality of life

Music

When I got broadband Internet access, my life changed forever. No more paying for dial-ups on a hourly basis. No more painful downloads of software. But what's more important than all of this is that I could now listen to radio! So what, you say. Well, I live more than 6,000 miles from the place where I grew up, so when I could finally listen to a radio station from the city where I was born as easily as my mother (who still lives there) can switch on the radio, I was delighted. RealAudio player for Linux is just one of those little apps I'd rather not live without.

RealPlayer

I can't help but make an editorial comment here about this application. This for me represents more than just a way of listening to your favorite on-line radio station or viewing the BBC World Service broadcast. RealPlayer represents the difference between stations having a choice to "webcast" freely or having to kow-tow to Microsoft. It looks like Gates and Co. plans on dominating the on-line music/information industry. Real Networks is at this point the only thing preventing them from doing it.

Now that I've finished my editorializing, you can go get RealPlayer for Linux and install it and start listening to web broadcasts.

XMMS

XMMS stands for the X multi-media system. If you're familiar with WinAmp, you'll have no trouble getting used to this program. You can listen to your favorite MP3s plus files in the newly emerging free Ogg Vorbis format.

Image viewing and editing

The GIMP

GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It should never be associated with the English word meaning lame. Gimp also has another meaning, according to the dictionary I consulted: Smart; spruce; trim; nice. That's a better description. This is a full fledged image creating and re-touching application. You can apply all sorts of filters and even write scripts for doing things to the images automatically. If you work a lot with images and think that by switching to Linux you'll be unable to work efficiently with graphics, then check out The GIMP. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

xv

In the words of the its author, John Bradley, xv doesn't stand for anything. I use this program all the time, literally. It is what I use to display the image in my desktop window.

type this:

xv -root -max -quit your_favorite_pic.jpg

and xv will display your favorite picture as the pic on your desktop. Sometimes I get bored and I use this script to rotate my favorite pictures.

#!/bin/sh

for i in `ls /home/mike/rotation_bkg/*.jpg`

do

xv -root -max -quit $i
sleep 300
done

If you're looking for heavy duty image software, xv is not it, however. This is the author's own words:

Basically, xv's primary thrust has always been displaying images (in many formats) quickly and nicely on a wide variety of display hardware.

That pretty much sums it up. xv is distributed as shareware.

ImageMagick

ImageMagick is a suite of tools for displaying and manipulating images. It's not as powerful (in my opinion) as The GIMP but more powerful than xv. I use it for three basic things. The 'display' tool I use to tell my email client open images that people send me in emails. Another one I use a lot is the thumbnail generator. If you've got a lot of images in a directory and you want to have an inventory of all of them as one image, then you would type:

display 'vid:*.jpg'

This creates one image of all of the jpg images as thumbnails in the directory you're in. This takes up a lot of CPU power on even a fairly powerful machine, so be patient. If you've got a lot of images in a directory and a slow machine, you might want to consider doing them in small batches.

This next use of ImageMagick is my two-year-old's favorite. I have some pictures of him in a directory and I type:

animate *.jpg

This starts up a slide show of him at blinding speed and he gets a big kick out of it. If you want to get the images rotating at a more manageable speed, just use the shift > keys or click with the right mouse button to call up the menu.

Text editors and viewers

Sometimes you don't want to fire up a whole office suite to read some text file and sometimes you have to create and/or edit documents as plain text. If you wanted, for example, to modify my image rotation script above, you would open up a text editor. There are two that I use on two different occasions.

Emacs

There is a version of Emacs if your not using X-window and then there's XEmacs, a version expressly written for X-window. I refer to the x-window version of Emacs, which is like the console version, but has clickable menus and windows and everything you need to work in a graphical environment. Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project, first started working on Emacs in 1974. It has since then become the flagship application of the GNU project. It is truly the perfect application to be the one associated with the GNU. It is a Swiss Army Knife of editors. To call it an 'editor' is to insult it somewhat. It does a little bit of everything. To me, it's almost like a mini-operating system in and of itself. If you're a programmer, Emacs is essential for working. If I could not use Emacs for some reason, I would probably go off and herd sheep. (and if you think I'm joking, ask my wife). Even for non-programming tasks I use it. The entire Linux Online beginners' course (yes, the words you are reading right now) were written in their entirety using Emacs. That day in 1974 when Richard Stallman sat down and started development of Emacs is a great day in history.

xedit

xedit is a basic text viewer/editor for X-window. It was one of the first applications. It is not slick or fancy, but there is one thing I like very much about it. The ability to fire it up from an xterm with a couple of preferences of mine. Reading fairly long things on a computer is not one of my favorite activities. My eyes don't seem to like it either. With xedit, you can specify a readable font and some good eye-friendly colors when you start it up.

xedit -bg seagreen -fg navajowhite -fn 9x15*bold some_text_file.txt &

As we're on the topic of basic X-Window applications, you can use xcolors to get a background and foreground combination that suits your eyes. Use the right mouse button to select a font color and the middle button to select the background.

If you want to select colors (for example, for web page work) and you've got the GNOME desktop installed, you can use GNOME Color Browser. It's easier to manage that xcolors and has a nice grab feature to select colors from other places and get their values/names.
Miscellaneous Programs

root-tail

tail is a console application that is normally used for monitoring files that change constantly, like log files. root-tail can be used to display these files on your desktop while you're running X-window. I normally use this to remember important stuff. It really comes in handy. First, you should create a text file with your favorite editor. Call it 'reminders'. Then on each line, write something that you want to remember. Then, you run root-tail. It's best to do this with a few options. For example, this is how I run it:

root-tail -color yellow -font 12x24 -shade -g +10+100 $HOME/reminders &

Let's explain some of these options. First, after '-color' you should use the name of the color you want the text to appear in. Use xcolors to find a color you like that's supported by your system. The next one is '-font'. As you see, I've chosen a good sized one. '-shade' will give the text a little shade under it and will look snazzier. '-g' stands for 'geometry' or the location in the window. I use +10+100 which set it right in front of me. You can experiment with settings. Now you have no excuse for forgetting to buy your loved ones presents on their birthdays!

gkrellm

This is nice little application to monitor what's going on with your computer. You can keep track of you memory usage, swap space, how much bandwidth you're using through your ethernet card and much, much more. You can see it in this screenshot. It's running on the upper right side of my desktop. It's useful as a way to alert you to how many clueless Windows users there are. Invariably, when some Sircam provoked mail comes through, the 'eth0' monitor, which checks bandwidth usage will start rising for no apparent reason. If you do conversions of audio to MP3 or Ogg format, you can watch your CPU usage go off the scale when you do them. Place your mouse over gkrellm and press F1 to configure other monitors. There are also plug-ins and themes/skins available.

Xchat

xchat is a comfortable IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client. It's very easy to configure to your liking. There is the possibility to use Python and Perl scripts to automate some things you do.