Add and Remove, uh, Sometimes
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Welcome back, You can download the podcast here, Episode 26. Before I get started, i just want to say due to the Holiday Weekend (aka, the SuperBowl) I will not be putting out a podcast for the week of February 4th 2007. I hope you understand and may the best team win!
This week I talk a little about "The GIMP". I consider it a viable alternative to Photoshop for my needs. I must stress that it is for "my needs". In other words, for the casual (and I mean rare) user. Yes, I understand that GIMP does not support CMYK colors (or Pantone, I think) but, it can probably handle most anything just short a retouching photos for Architectural Digest and it might be able to do that as well only the final post printing colors will probably not look right so I've read. Here is an interesting article I came upon talking just about this very topic and if you are curious about the GIMP you can reach it here.
Whoops! Sorry I forgot this link to Gnome Hacks, click here.
The Command line of the command of the week was: netstat -tup
This specific command lists all the internet connections both incoming and outgoing. So if you are wondering about what programs are using internet access this would be a good command to use to find exactly that!
In the main segment, I talk about another package manager that I generically call the add/remove packet manager. I really like the user interface of the packet manager. First of all there are only packages in there! Unlike Synaptic which lists packages, dependencies, libraries and whatever else that packages need. As an end user, I am only interested in a couple of things. What applications are available to me and what applications are the hottest/latest/best. The add/remove package manager addresses both very easily as it does rate (at least) the most popular application from 1 star (the least) to 4 stars (you guessed it, the most). All of the packages are categorized in the left frame and the packages are contained in the upper right frame with the lower right frame reserved for a description. One esoteric addition albeit (IMO) an important one is the addition of the packages' Logo icon to the left of the package name. I know, I am a bit shallow, but really folks, in all honesty, it adds the sizzle to the steak! The only downfall is that it is heavily dependent on Synpatic Package Manager to handle removal of closely related packages and utilities of the user interface, but, it handles adding packages with the same ease and grace that Synpatic does. Overall, I give it a 7 out 10, but what would be nice is if Synaptic Package manager used elements of the add/remove manager and we would have an even better package management system.
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Harlem, just thought I'd write a quick word to say "keep up the good work". Fresh Ubuntu is one of the podcasts I listen to regularly as I commute to/from work here in London, (that's the one in the UK).
I've been a Ubuntu users since Warty way back in 2005 and it's still one of the 2 distros that's is on at least one of my PC's (the other is openSuse, although I've tried many, many others).
While some of the other podcasts I listen to have a bit more gloss they are obviously the product of people with either big backing or a long history in journalism and/or media, it's great to see an individual enthusiast giving them a run for their money and showing others that maybe you don't need normal people can use Linux and contribute.
I have a couple of commands I'd like to suggest for you to cover on Fresh Ubuntu, they aren't Ubuntu specific, I use them on other distros too.
1) Is a "drop-down" konsole utility called yakuake, it's very handy if you need to fairly regularly use a command like for things. It uses F12 to drop down a Konsole screen over the desktop, and then F12 rolls it back up again until you need it again.
2) Is an archiving/backup utility and it's GUI front end, dar and kdar. I've just found this (maybe I'm slow, but I always naturally turned to tar which I've used for years on Unix systems). It's great as it splits the archive into "slices" that are the right sice to burn onto CD's or DVD's. It allows you to save profiles for archiving different things. The kdar front end also can save a shell script to invoke the dar utility which is great as a starting point for use cron to automate backups.
3) Maybe we should add cron to the list of command you could cover.
Sorry for blathering on,
Terry