easy
World War II – Germany decided to attack Poland. Poland had many
great warriors. They all prepared to fight the Germans. They
were all ready with the best armor, the best and well trained
horses, and ofcourse the best weapons , swords , spears …. And
the Pols were brave and were ready to give their lives for their
country. Sadly they did just that… give their lives. The
Germans had tanks… It is very important to have the right
weapons when one goes for a war.
In the same way it is very important for system administrators
to have the right tools to to work smart. Linux is a great
desktop OS for developers as well as system administrators. Let
us take a look at some of the utilities which makes this a great
environment for system administrators and developers. Most of
the content below is taken from the home pages of these apps and
the I make no claims on the originality. My aim is to introduce
the reader to the wonderful tools that are available in a
Linux/BSD desktop environment.
Konsole Let’s start from what most people think Linux is
all about – a text based shell. Konsole is what is known as
an X terminal emulator, often referred to as a terminal or a
shell. It gives you the equivalent of an old-fashioned text
screen on your desktop, but one which can easily share the
screen with your graphical applications. What makes Konsole
special? Konsole’s advanced features include simple
configuration and the ability to use multiple terminal shells in
a single window, making for a less cluttered desktop. Konsole is
also available as kpart and can thus be easily embedded in other
applications, like practiced by Kate and Konqueror.
As most system administrators need log into servers on a
regular basis the konsole gives them a benefit over the Windoze
command prompt. In windows one needs to use a program like putty
to log in using SSH. Also as linux is the desktop OS the techs
can use the man pages on the local system.
One can also try out the various commands locally. Consider a
simple example.
Is it
$ ln sourcefile destinationfile
or is it
$ ln destinationfile sourcefile
Such things can be easily found out locally without carrying out
experiments on the server. Many techs believe that servers are
places where they can experiment. However, such experiments can
lead to major losses to the customers due to one small error. A
system administrator must understand that people have immense
faith in them when they give their entire data to them and they
cannot risk carrying out simple experiments on servers.
Some screenshots of the konsole can be seen at the konsole site
Personal Information Manager / Groupware
There are two popular choices here. Evolution from
No
vel and the Kontact from KDE.
Both these an email client, calendaring, meeting scheduling, a
task list, contact management and syncing functionality. Kontact
is essentially the regular KDE PIM components which have been
put in together i.e. kmail, korganizer, knotes etc.. It is very
a very neat package and is stable and light. Both these are very
functional and can connect to many groupware servers.
Klipper Klipper is the KDE clipboard utility. It stores
clipboard history, and allows you to link clipboard contents to
application actions. Klipper can perform actions on the contents
of the clipboard, based on whether they match a particular
regular expression. For example, any clipboard contents starting
with “http://” can be passed to the web-browser as URLs to open.
Copying text is as simple as highlighting the text. And to paste
the text all one needs to do is click on the center mouse
button. This can be particularly useful for sys-admins as they
use a sequence of commands from time to time. Having these in
the clipboard and using them often can make the work a lot
easier.
Gaim / Kopete
Communicating via an instant messenger is an essential
these days. Linux has a very clean solution for this. Both Kopete and Gaim are capable of
handling multiple IM protocols such as supporting AIM, ICQ, MSN,
Yahoo, Jabber, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus SameTime.
Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for
Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM and
ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber,
Gadu-Gadu, SILC, GroupWise Messenger, and Zephyr networks.
Kjots KJots is a small program that helps you to write
down some short notes and organizes them for you. It has two
basic items used to organize your notes – “Books” and “Pages”.
This is a good light tool to write in all the templated
responses and other important notes for quick references.
Kwallet
A lovely password manager which can store passwords for all
the logins including those of kopete and websites.
Tea Cooker KTeaTime is a handy timer for steeping tea.
No longer will you have to guess at how long it takes for your
tea to be ready. Simply select the type of tea you have, and it
will alert you when the tea is ready to drink. Now how can a tea
cooker be useful for techs. Often techs get involved in solving
a problem and forget to update the client about the progress.
Without communicating with the client, on many occasions the
entire effort goes down the drain as the client get very
agitated thinking that nobody is looking at his problem. What
the tech can do is use the tea cooker and get a reminder so that
he can respond the client with the progress.
Koffice/ Open Office M$ Office is one of the most used
software and a major reason why customers do not shift to other
operating systems. They need Word and Excel for just about
everything. K-Office and Open Office are two great solutions.
Open Office can open M$ Office files and can even safe the files
in M$ Office format which makes it easy to communicate with
those who still use M$ products.
Lyx
Besides office suites which replicate the windows world
products in features, Linux also has some great alternatives. LyX is an example of a great
document processor.
What is LyX?
LyX is the first WYSIWYM (What you see is what you mean)
document processor.
LyX is what?!
LyX is an advanced open source document processor that
encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your
documents, not their appearance. LyX lets you concentrate on
writing, leaving details of visual layout to the software. LyX
produces high quality, professional output — using LaTeX, an
industrial strength typesetting engine, in the background; LyX
is far more than a front-end to LaTeX, however. No knowledge of
LaTeX is necessary to use LyX, although it will give a user more
power. LyX is stable and fully featured. It has been used for
documents as large as a thesis, or as small as a business
letter. Despite its simple GUI interface (available in many
languages), it supports tables, figures, and hyperlinked
cross-references, and has a best-of-breed math editor.
Dia Dia is a great tool for creating diagrams. It has a
huge in-built library of objects which are specially useful for
software engineers. So making a diagram of a computer network is
as easy as dragging a few computers and switches from the list
of objects available. It currently has special objects to help
draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts,
network diagrams, and simple circuits. It is also possible to
add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a
subset of SVG to draw the shape.
Gnucash An average tech earns a good salary and spends
it is well too. To keep track of all these personal expenses the
best is to have a great software. Gnucash is an ideal way to
manage personal finances. Designed to be easy to use, yet
powerful and flexible, GnuCash allows you to track bank
accounts, stocks, income and expenses. As quick and intuitive to
use as a checkbook register, it is based on professional
accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate
reports.
KTuberling And finally a product for all those techs
who maintain their servers well and have no work or pending
issues and yet have to sit through the nights waiting for some
issue to popup.
KTuberling
was originally game intended for small children. Of course,
it may be suitable for adults who have remained young at heart.
Most techs in general love this software. It is a “potato
editor”. That means that you can drag and drop eyes, mouths,
mustache, and other parts of face and goodies onto a potato-like
guy. Similarly, you have a penguin and an aquarium on which you
can drop other stuff.
There is no winner for the game. The only purpose is to make the
funniest faces you can. There is a museum
(like a “Madame Tusseau” gallery) where you can find many
funny examples of decorated potatoes, penguins and aquariums.
About the author:
Amarjyoti Krishnan heads bobcares.com, a tech support company
for webhosts and ISPs. He is the co-founder of Poornam Info
Vision Ltd., a software and IT services company which
specializes in Linux based solutions for Webhosts and ISPs.
Amarjyoti is a Computer Engineer based in India and has over 7
years of experience in the hosting industry.
http://poornam.com
http://bobcares.com
http://amarjyoti.com