Tag: excellent top ubuntu apps

Tools in my Linux kit

ubuntu_apps_compThere are always some software programs that become a part of your daily activities. Being a round the clock Linux power user I have my share of Linux applications which I am particularly fond of and accustomed to. Some of them even replace the default installed applications in their categories as they are lightweight and do the job better. I thought of coming up with a list of such tools so that our readers can also try those out. All of these tools are GUI based. For the sake of the record, I use Ubuntu with the LXDE environment. The list is in alphabetical order.

Some of my favourite Ubuntu utilities

ubuntu_apps_compThere are some excellent applications on Ubuntu which come handy frequently. I have listed some:

  1. Baobab: Graphical disk usage analyzer.
  2. BleachBit: Free up your system by removing temp files, history and other cruft.
  3. eboard: If you play on FICS eboard is indispensable.
  4. FSlint: Remove duplicate files. It can find things like duplicate files, problematic filenames, temporary files, bad symlinks, empty directories and nonstripped binaries.
  5. galculator: A better alternative to the gnome-calculator which still seems buggy/user-unfriendly to me when converting between Hex to Dec etc.
  6. GCstar: A collection manager for almost everything you collect.
  7. gFTP: Tiny multithreaded FTP, FTPS (control connection only), HTTP, HTTPS, SSH and FSP transfer client.
  8. Glipper: A very handy clipboard manager that can remember entries across reboot. It can be accessed using a keyboard shortcut beside your pointer (like right click) and you can choose the copied text.
  9. Gpick: Pick any color from the screen.
  10. GtkOrphan / RpmOrphan: The omnipotent clean-up utility of to get rid of unused libraries, packages etc.
  11. HandBrake: The best video encoder ever written!
  12. Leafpad: A great relief the bloated gedit editor is removable on Ubuntu 12.04. I use the lightweight Leafpad. When I need power, I use vi.
  13. localepurge: remove unnecessary locale files.
  14. Marlin: Lightweight and superfast file manager. To make it faster: 
    $ sudo mv /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/tumbler-1/tumblerd /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/tumbler-1/tumblerd.bak
  15. nautilus-image-converter: Resize and rotate images from nautilus.
    To customize it, edit:
    /usr/share/nautilus-image-converter/nautilus-image-resize.ui
  16. PCManFM: Ultra-lightweight and fast file manager.
  17. qBittorrent: µTorrent for Linux. Supports torrents, magnets and DHT.
  18. Subtitle Editor: Do anything with movie subtitles.
  19. rar & unrar: Frequently needed to extract downloaded rar files.
  20. wget: A very very powerful cmdline downloader (a good multi-threaded alternative is axel).
    As an example of the power of wget, a whole website can be downloaded using the following command (instead of installing HTTrack):

    $ wget -r -mirror -p -convert-links -P ./mydir URL

    -r: recursive
    -mirror : turn on options suitable for mirroring.
    -p : download all files that are necessary to properly display a given HTML page.
    -convert-links : after the download, convert the links in document for local viewing.
    -P ./mydir : save all the files and directories in ./mydir. To resume a partial downloads (if server supports), run the following command in the same directory:

    $ wget -c file_URL
  21. xpad: A tiny sticky notes application. (#9a99ff is my preferred bg colour)

I used to use wine 3 years back to run some Windows applications but Google helped me find much better alternatives for all my needs on Ubuntu.