not well known applications

During last week I made a basic set up of new desktop. I had a lot of data to review, gathered since many years. Dozens of unneeded, forgotten GBs and a lot of directories with interesting things to touch in the future. I can’t say that I got rid of them all but I was under a delusion that I’m able to do many things at the same time. The old school of clean up always works – if you didn’t use/take care of something more than one year you can remove it. As always are some exceptions from the rule – photographs (memories) and interesting things (ambition).

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With a clean up I also made an inspection of all programs installed on the old computer. Very useful is history command which directly shows you list of the most common typed commands. Obviously it’s helpful when you call applications from command line. Also, useful is list of all installed programs:

dpkg -l

Many programs work in daemon mode, they are started by scripts and you may just forget about them but you still use them indirectly. One of the best solutions to find out which programs might are important for you is check the list of modified files. Thankfully in debian repository you can find command debsums. The most powerful set of arguments looks like this:

debsums -ca

I’m not going to describe how it works, please follow man pages for more details.

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After all, I generated a long list of used programs. I’m not going to share with you whole list, there is a lot of common programs, but I think that it’s quite good idea to mention here some not well known applications:

• slim – displayer manager. It’s the smallest and the fastest one which I found long time ago. Moreover, you can run it without any problems even on VESA. Right now modern displayer managers like GDM don’t support it.
• i3 – if you love Vim you will be delighted. The most configurable window manager ever. Nothing more to say – just start using it.
• w3m – there is only one reasonable text-based web browser. It has saved my bacon many times when X11 blown up. BTW, it supports cookies (read – sessions).
• feh and eog – the first one, feh, is a image viewer used by me mostly from command line. It works well with i3 and has a lot of options. Eog is minimalistic image viewer with a good looking interface – mostly used to show something other people and don’t scare them feh command line arguments.
• scrot – very easy and useful command line screen capturing application. You can take picture of whole screen or select a part. Works perfectly with i3.
• Evince – light PDF viewer. Small memory usage, fast, nice look, it has everything what I need.
• calibre – an e-book manager. To be honest, I don’t like it look, but it has build-it conversion from epub into mobi. Moreover, ebook-viewer, part of calibre is very useful.
• Liferea – RSS reader. Old school, easy to use.
• Anki – I use Anki since a few months day by day. It’s much more than flashcards on computer. I’m mostly use it to learn English but I also have some odd decks.
• Redshift – Yet another application which has to be installed on my desktop. It protects my sight against screen bright light. Just try it. If you think that it doesn’t work simply switch off it at night. Then you see the difference.

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I also learn that it’s good idea to create an user account even for one application. On old desktop I called steam from my user account. Steam creates a lot of directories in different places on your home directory. After a few years you have mess. Moreover, when I made a backup from pld I had to exclude all this directories. Right now, on discworld I made an user account steam and it resolved my problems. Furthermore, when I enter into that account steam starts automatically. Finally, I don’t have to be worried that this application contains backdoor. Even if it has something special, it can’t reach my other data.