The Linux Portal Site
This is the first in a series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series will examine both graphical and text based open source utilities. The first tool under the spotlight is ps_mem, a small utility that reliably reports how much memory is consumed by an application.
Read more
Linux is well endowed with graphical file managers with tons of original creations together with fork upon fork of GNOME Files. Polo File Manager is not a fork of GNOME Files nor any other established file manager. This original creation is written in the Vala programming language.
Read more
Qmmp is a cross-platform, open source, Qt-based multimedia player. The default user interface is similar to Winamp or xmms. But there’s also an alternative user interface.
Read more
calcurse is an open source, text-based calendar and scheduling application. The software keeps track of events, appointments and everyday tasks. The software is lightweight, fast and reliable. It’s designed for the console or terminal, locally or on a remote machine.
Read more
In the field of system administration, Linux has bags of graphical file managers. However, some users prefer managing files from the shell, finding it the quickest way to navigate the file system and perform file operations. This is, in part, because console based file managers are more keyboard friendly, enabling users to perform file operations without using a mouse, and make it quicker to navigate the filesystem and issue commands in the console at the same time.
Read more
Peek is designed to make short screencasts. It’s not a general purpose screencast application like OBS Studio.
Read more
Irrespective of the operating system used, the text editor is one of those quintessential applications for many users. A text editor is software used for editing plain text files. Text editors are used to write programming code, change configuration files, take notes, and more. For this feature, we wanted to select alternative text editors which are definitely worth trying but may have been missed given that they receive less coverage in Linux publications, and are not included or installed by default in many Linux distributions.
Read more
Podcasts are shows, similar to radio or TV shows, that are produced by professionals or amateurs and made available on the internet to stream and/or download. They are a popular source of entertainment. There’s lots of great podcasts that are Linux-centric, which I surveyed in this review.
Read more
Game engines play a crucial role in the fast creation and development of computer games. As they offer a collection of visual development tools, and are often presented in an integrated development environment, they vastly accelerate the development of games.
Read more
musikcube is a marvellous console application. It’s lean, looks beautiful, offers a good range of features, and is very stable. I’m not liking its slow syncing metadata which is annoying if you’ve a large music collection. The mouse support is particularly welcome.
Read more
A framework for the quick development of websites is a structure of files and folders of standardized code (HTML, CSS, JS documents, and more) which can be used as a reference to help approach and resolve new problems of a similar nature. By providing a common structure, frameworks offer developers the opportunity to reuse code and avoid starting projects from scratch.
Read more
BASIC (an acronym for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use.
Read more
StingRay is a new entry in the field of Linux-based chess software. It’s billed as a simple chess graphical user interface with basic functionality to run against UCI and XBoard engines.
The software is designed to be lightweight and not burden the chess player with features they’ll never use.
Read more
gPodder is an open source tool that downloads and manages free audio and video content (“podcasts”) for you. The software is written in Python and sports a simple GTK interface. The software package also includes a command-line interface which is called gpo. It lets you listen to podcasts on your computer or on mobile devices.
Read more
bat is a drop-in replacement for the cat command adding advanced syntax highlighting and Git integration to show file modifications. It’s a really useful utility that is a massive leap up from cat. bat’s written in the Rust programming language.
Read more