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Hi. For better than a year and 1/2 I have resisted writing about the tools and programs that I run on my own desktop (The article: "My Etch Desktop in 150 words or Less" notwithstanding) . I was never really interested in this because I know that some people will say, "Cool, I haven't tried that one yet." and then proceed to install and be annoyed at said program. Computing is so idiosyncratic, I loathe comparing desktops. However, the masses will remain silent no longer. They say, "Hey, man, you got us here, now help us stay.". That's basically what they say.
Boring as it may be, self-promoting, arrogant and all the other things -- I have decided to write this article. But don't expect it to be any good and don't expect any voodoo insight. It's just a computer.
This Debian user prefers the Gnome user interface. Desktop, DE, whatever -- what I see on my desktop is contained within Gnome and that's the way that I like it. In fact, just yesterday I tried to like KDE again. I don't like knocking KDE because there is a lot of really fine functionality coming along with it. It simply gives me a headache. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I also like to log into a Xfce4 desktop every now and again. I dig this one when I don't want all the Gnome stuff, like when I want to do a nice and lean install and grow from there so I will be able to show customers and friends a bunch of different scenarios. KDE yesterday was simple; on my laptop I fired up apt and installed KDE and koffice because some years ago I really liked KDE. I even configured it and ran it for a while last night noticing differences between it and Gnome. Some little, some vast. I appreciated that Opera fired up quickly in KDE. I didn't like that most of the utility programs bundled with KDE didn't work for me. That was a personal let down because I often silently remark to myself how cool all those KDE apps look, and how cool it is that they are included. Bummer. Now, don't start emailing me about how to get said program to run or about how stupid I am. Save it. I need neither and thanks, but, I don't need you to tell me how to run a widget. If it doesn't run straight away, or within say, 2 minutes of tweaking, than forget it...Next! It's my responsibility to run as a "less-informed" desktop user that I may report findings to others just starting out. This is precisely why I run Debian on all of our computers at home. Debian GNU/Linux works. It works well, and it works without me fighting with it. On the NetworkI don't remotely administer or access any machines at home. Sure, I need the content on my server from time-to-time, but it's always handy on my pen-drive. That said, I do run Apache, php, MySQL, perl, and of course, Linux; LAMP. I take advantage of the web and I like having "websites" (actually, they are just scripts) running locally that we can all take advantage of. VideoDB catalogs our movie collection like Alexandria does the books. But Alexandria is no web-based app. I also use a couple wikis, Owl doc manager, phpmyadmin, Sugar, and some asset managers like, Assets-so-simple and Feta. Sometimes we stream mp3's over the LAN but it's just as simple to share our music directory to all local boxes. I am the only person with write access to said directory, but the kids can make their own Cd's and all that. I used to use mod_musicindex and I always install and use gnump3d. For FTP I use gftp I don't like that I cannot relocate remote files to another directory. Maybe it can and I just haven't figured out how to do it yet. I used wsftpLE on Windows and I could move stuff to different directories on the remote side of the screen. I also don't like that the cache doesn't get emptied when I chose this action. I'm not sure if gftp is the best ftp client that I can be using, but it works, is fast and doesn't get in my way or hurt my eyes.I use mtr for traceroute info. For reading RSS stuff I use Liferea. It's great and fast. Had some issues with it crashing some months ago but that was because it was in flux. Works dandy for me now. Let's see, oh - for IM I use Gaim. No, no video capabilities like Kopete, but then again, Gaim is stable. I want the video though, so I use Ekiga as well. When I was a kid the idea of video phones were all the rage. We couldn't wait. These days, I just wanna hide my worn-out face.I don't use a newsreader or IRC. My ISP is Verizon -- they censor the newsgroups and only give me a fraction of what's really there. But I read many mailing lists and for email I use Sylpheed-claws-gtk2. It simply rocks. I can open, download and start reading my email with Sylpheed before Evolution even opens. I have 14 email accounts with a zillion different filters, too, plus spam filtering. You can keep Evolution. I don't use Thunderbird because I find it flaky. You keep on keeping on. I liked Kmail and Balsa, but neither enough to pull me from Sylpheed. Mutt is fine but if I am running a fancy desktop then I want pretty. Oh, for spam don't forget to install bogofilter instead of that road-hog spamassassin. Or maybe you don't like quick and painless. Do what you feel.Yes, I have Firefox installed and I use it sometimes. It currently renders flash better than Opera, but you know that won't be the case for long. I cannot see flash on some sights with Opera. Yes, I have flash 9 update installed. As far as the extensions I use in Firefox -- you're on your own, it's your browser. I like Epiphany browser and Galeon. Both are very cool and functional, stable. Well, Galeon crashes from time to time but it's got those cool bookmarklets. Which will work in any other browser. I copied over the bookmarklets to my Opera bookmarks and they all work fine. In Firefox, too.For downloading tasks on occasion I really dig wget. It allows painless remote file gathering all without any user-interaction. I have a cron job set up that prompts wget to download the web logs for my sites. This is some cool functionality, just set it and be on your way.Have I forgotten any network apps that I use? To config my hardware I just use the terminal but there are many widgets in Gnome and Debian that can assist you. If I come up with any other network apps that I use regularly I'll update this article. Otherwise I think this section is finished.MultimediaThis, along with utilities, is the killer section. Everyone wants to watch videos and stuff on their computers. OK, OK -- me, too. Sometimes I goto Apple trailers so the kids and I can catch some movie previews. I need that plugin action to work. So, on our Etch boxes we use mplayer. Listen, I dig Totem, really. I would much rather use it, but the gstreamer stuff appears not quite up to date. I cannot use Totem with w32codecs and view all of the codecs that I can with mplayer. It's that simple. Further, for viewing the movies that our digital camera takes (.mov files from a Panasonic DMC-FZ3) VLC works best. However, Mplayer is getting better, as is Totem. Of course I have mozplugger installed. For web multimedia on Linux you cannot go wrong with the:ffmpeg, mplayer, mozplugger triple-play. I also have java and flash installed. Tunes are played with xmms or Rhythmbox. The latter is cool because I can manage my ipod through it. That's cool. I use ExFalso to edit mp3/ogg files. There's not really much to say about multimedia. It's really much simpler and neater than most people claim.UtilitiesThis is my favorite section. Linux has no shortage of utilities that you can use to keep your desktop running smoothly, protect it, tweak it, etc., etc., etc. However, I don't use that many. (I'm lying, of course, I use a bunch. That's an article for a different date.) My server employs different utilities than I use on my desktop. The first thing that I set up is powernowd and cpufrequtils I like to control the CPU speed for power and heat management. On the kid's desktop I have installed athcool, which is terrific. On all of our computers I install rkhunter and chkrootkit. Firewall is handled by iptables and my d-link router. This is pretty tight. No Complaints. Beats the hell out of Kerio Personal Firewall 2.X popping up all the time on the Windows boxes that I am still pained to set up for my less-informed friends. Which, in my opinion, is still the firewall to use on XP and 2K. Some may disagree, and they may be right -- I've been out of Windows for years.As you all know from the site, I use dvdbackup with Wine emulated dvdshrink and then Gnome to rip and burn DVDs. As well, I may use vobcopy or simply dd. Of course, libdvdcss2 needs to be installed as well. This is so we can view movies on Linux. However, don't expect me to upload and or share movies on some p2p server. Buy your own. Although utilities is always my favorite collection of software apps, I find that I don't need many on Linux, Debian. When I ran Windows I used zillions of them, on my Debian desktop I don't use many. I much prefer to open a text editor to manage my apps. I have the typical laptop utilities installed (gnome-Power-Manager and laptop-detect) as well as pcmciautils. I don't use any utilities for wireless, I just enable my eth1 nic card and disable eth0 and there ya go. However, there are many apps to manage your wireless needs including locating a network. I install lm-sensors and use sensors-applet in my task bar to keep tabs on my processor and motherboard temperature. Along with Synaptic for package management, I like to use apt-file and apt-spy. These 2 apt utilities terrific. If I think of any other utilities that I use, or actually notice myself using them, I'll update this article.OfficeAbiword works fine for me, but I use Gedit far more often. I don't find myself needing a full document editor. On the kid's box my wife (my one-true-love) has installed openoffice but she doesn't use it. She does use Gnumeric, though, and she likes it. At work all she uses is Excel. For keeping notes, when I'm not just lazy, I use notecase. It's a great app. There are others, many, but another stand-out for me was ejourn.If I need to make any labels I have glabels installed for that. Love it. Other office type fluff that I might have installed is: Gourmet for recipes, maybe Alexandria to manage our book collection, but like I wrote earlier, that's my daughter's job. Alexandria is installed on her computer. I have an HP DeskJet 7110. I have installed hplip and the rest of that group enabling all the functions of this printer. With Etch I have noticed more functionality for the thing, namely, it's claimed that I can send faxes by using "print-to". I haven't tried, but I did set it up. I'm not too optimistic, but we'll see how it goes.GraphicsWhat? I'm no graphics guy. I have XaraLX installed as well as Agave for colors, Gimp for everything Photoshopesque, and gThumb for browsing and managing my images, all 7500 of them. I do have Picassa installed as well. It's not used much, but it is really a good program. Native or no, it's pretty (oooh, aaaah) and it works. I Tried F-Spot and you can keep it. Tried Digikam, too. Keep it. Not to say that these 2 programs didn't work, I just didn't like them for whatever reason. YMMV!I use meld to compare and keep updated my 2 picture directories. I know, it's a utility, but there ya go.SecurityOops! Forgot this section this morning when I was trying to write this article; getting assaulted by my chillen...Security is probably the most important aspect of running any machine connected to any network or accessed physically by any person. Namely: your computer. In choosing to run a flavor of Linux you are already on-track. Good choice, now - stick with Debian. A zillion loyal fans (users) and companies cannot be wrong! Initially, I protect the boot process by allowing boot to only hdd-0 and password protecting the BIOS. If someone removes the battery for any length of time this becomes moot, though. Your BIOS will reset, no password protection and will boot to anything. Those are the breaks. Don't let anybody open your box.You can password protect hard drives in the boot process, password protect grub, run encrypted file systems and set some really clever encryption up to guard your box -- but I don't really do much on the desktops around here. We have some network utilities installed like ethereal, which I guess is now wireshark. I don't have a lot of daemons running - services. If it's not something that's used it's gone. I run nessus occasionally. Nessus is one of those apps that I like because it makes me dig deeper. You should try it out. User directories are chmod'd 700 and nfs and cups on the server are set up pretty tightly. I locked Apache down pretty well using a few terrific tutorials I found web-wide some ... sheesh, forever ago. And it never hurts actually visiting, and re-visiting, these sites. You know, go to Apache's website and MySQL. Go read up on any security worries, tips and tweaks and how to set this stuff up right on your machine. I check the websites out of many of the programs that I run. Not so much, but a couple times a year can yield a wealth of information. And reading man pages every once in a while doesn't hurt, either. A little off topic but whenever I ./configure I always append it with --help to see what's up with the install options. Security is more of a kung-fu than a cool-app. It's not really in the programs that you might use, but the reasons for their use and how you might successfully tie these apps together to form your own blanket of security. It's tough to say, oh, I use "these apps" to keep my box secure. No. It's more like, I have "this" attitude towards security and "this" is how I implement it. I guess you do need at least a little knowledge with respect to how aspects of computing works. Like networking, hardware, memory, etc. One very important aspect of system security is to continually check for updates. They're usually security related. Check for them and install them regularly. So, do I have key loggers and retina scanners? Nah. There's nothing interesting that I'm protecting on my machines. No $$ data, or really any personal stuff, besides pictures. Besides, Debian takes care of quite a bit for me coming out of the gate. It's very simple to continue from there. Sure, it would be a terrible thing to have a breach that resulted in lost data or even more nefarious problems. We all do things to prevent that (like backups!, Yo!), but I'm not sitting here with a tin-foil hat on, either. My system's file permissions are squared away, and it's very important that yours are, too. What anti-virus?Maybe I forgot about some security utilities because I haven't run them in some days or weeks and they're out of my mind. Wait 'till you're ... older. They'll be mentioned later, I guess. There is a giant web out there with terrific information for you, go find it! You won't find much here, I keep this site really low-key and basic . But, it's out there for you. In case I forget to get preachy, you can't trust some company to safeguard you and your stuff. You have to do it yourself and there are good tools out there to help you.- Here is a good list to start
- This article has been around for a while
- packetstorm white papers is always fun
- Everybody uses nmap
- Check out Bastille, for a fun trip
[EDIT: Since I used to run Adinf on my Windows boxes, which is a file integrity checker (whiff), I thought I'd install Tripwire on my laptop. It's also a file integrity checker. So, there you have it, another utility, categorize it as you will. Here is a helpful Tripwire help page.] So there you have it. Most of the applications on my desktop. Take this article with a grain of salt. It would be terrific if visitors would add their favorite desktop programs in comments. How about it? Do you use the same stuff that I do? What's different? Write a comment and tell us all.As always -- computers suck, but they suck a lot less when they run Debian.machiner -- 15 Dec 2006 07:00 Talk it Up
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