Imagemagick is an awesome command-line based image manipulation tool.
[Paraphrased from the imagemagick manual:]
ImageMagick®, is a software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats. Use ImageMagick to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bezier curves. ImageMagick includes a number of command-line utilities for manipulating images. Most of you are probably accustom to editing images one at a time with a graphical user interface (GUI) with such programs as gimp or Photoshop. However, a GUI is not always convenient. Suppose you want to process an image dynamically or you want to apply the same operations to many images or repeat a specific operation at different times to the same or different image. For these types of operations, the command-line image processing utility is appropriate.
To install imagemagick, use Synaptic, or issue the following command in a terminal
Guake, or (if it’s a K Desktop Environment) Yakuake are “drop-down terminal shells” that appear when you press a button (usually F12).
If you usually open a terminal with every log in to your Linux desktop, there’s a more convenient (not to mention laaazy) way. Simply tell the OS to run Guake after your user’s successful login. In Openbox, you’d add it to your autostart.sh file
The Guake terminal will notify you that it has started, and then auto-hides itself until you “un-hide it” by pressing the F12 key. When you’re done with your current command-line stuff, simply press F12 again and Guake gets out of your way.
Lynx is a text-only web browser that runs in the shell.
Lynx is useful tool for those times when you want to extract only the web links from a web page. Install lynx using the Synaptic (or other) package manager.
To view the hyperlinks of a given web page (google.com in this example), issue the command
lynx -dump http://www.google.com
It can also behave in a similar way to wget when you want to view the HTML source code of a web page. The command to view the HTML source code is
lynx -source http://www.example.com
Click the following link to view a post where we collected links to mp3 files to build an unattended download list for the wget command. Another feature of Lynx is that it allows you to view your pages as a web crawler/robot such as googlebot might see them.
So far, we’ve been talking about using the command line to download files or make some repetitive work simpler. We’ve also seen how to upgrade a Firefox Web browser in Ubuntu.
Today we’ll discuss general “tools” that a Linux user might need on a daily basis. Most of these tools are (believe it/not) GUI applications. You can lose time by slogging through a CLI solution only to learn you could have gotten the job done quicker with a GUI app. But when the GUI app is clumsy or lacks a reliable batch process—I consider command line solutions.
So, with that, here are some tools/apps that I install to my Linux desktops. Since I prefer Debian-based package management, GUI installs will reference “Synaptic” while command line install instructions will be “aptitude”.
This one’s up to you. There are so many to pick from, just check Synaptic.
Digital Audio Playback
For an iTunes-style program, try AMAROK, and for simple playback of audio files without hearing the audible “gap” between song cuts, try Aqualung.
Audio Editing
I have used Audacity for simple stereo-file (non-multitrack) audio editing. It got the job done, but arguably, there are better tools available for semi-pro recording on a Linux system.
Digital Video/Media Playback
VLC is a reliable application that can play many multimedia formats. VLC sometimes comes standard with a distro.
Video Editing
I haven’t done much video editing, but so far I’ve tried Kino and I found it really easy to use.
Linux Gui Applications for Website Design/Development
If you’ve got a site to develop or design, it’s easy to set up a working web server based environment in Linux. As stated in another post, you will need an IDE-style text editor (or at the very least you’ll need an editor that lets you keep several files open at the same time).
Run your pages using a web server such as Apache
While there are a few ways to do this, installing XAMPP for Linux by Apache Friends is simple. It is free, well-documented, and you can set up a website very quickly. By default, the web server is not started at boot time, (which to me is a plus) and starting/restarting can be controlled by issuing a command at the terminal. XAMPP comes with MySQL and PHP 5, so it gives you just about everything you need to develop/create dynamic, database-driven web pages with the ability to reuse code (via PHP “include” directives).
Check your work in a few browsers to ensure consistency
If you’re running Linux it may seem a daunting task to evaluate your site’s appearance in Mac OS-X or Microsoft Windows. Daunting yes, but you can come close. Safari in Mac OS-X uses the “webkit” layout engine and you can view your pages in the konqueror web browser as a poor-man’s substitute. It’s not perfect, but it’s close. Mozilla firefox uses the Gecko layout engine so it won’t show you know how a site looks in Internet Explorer for Windows. Firefox has a browser plugin called “IE Tabs” but I’m not sure if this reasonably captures the look and behaviour of the native IE. Be sure to browse the Firefox Web Development add-ons page.
Linux Gui Applications for Photos and Image-based tasks
If you like to store your digital photos in “album-style” format, then I recommend Digikam. It’s a KDE-based app so I suggest installing it using Synaptic on Debian-based systems. Let Synaptic fetch other files as needed. This saves you the headaches of “dependency hell”, which happens when an app you wish to install needs additional files and you have no idea which ones, where to find them, or how to properly install them.
To manipulate photos and images (such as cropping, or layering text captions onto them) I suggest you install the GIMP if it’s not there by default. To find out if you have it, you can check your Applications menu or issue the following command in a terminal
which gimp
If the shell returns something like “/usr/bin/gimp“, then its installed. If it returns nothing, you’ll need to install it. The GIMP also does scaling (resizing images while keeping the aspect ratio) and is the closest freeware knockoff of Adobe Photoshop to my knowledge.
When I say “closest” I implore you to decide for yourself if your tasks can be done with free software. The GIMP has a lot of great features such as transparency, layers, gradients, and more; but IT IS NOT CAPABLE of replacing Photoshop if that’s what your work requires.
If you’re doing commercial graphical work, your software choice (and budget) should be “an investment” and not “an expense”. For many personal uses, the GIMP may be able to give you professional-looking results.
For simple stuff I recommend Gedit that comes with GNOME-based Linux distros. If you’re running a K-Desktop Environment (KDE) then Kate is really good. Gedit works well for writing quick text snippets or copying text from websites to use later on.
For text writing in general, I like Pyroom which came pre-installed with Crunchbang Linux 9.04 and I happen to be writing this very blog post using Pyroom. Pyroom reminds me of a typewriter interface—everything else on the screen (except for your text and a light border) is invisible. Nothing to distract your eyes. You only see the words that you type (non-formatted) on your (virtual) page. Each time you hit “return”, your work just scrolls upward. And it can “auto-save” your work at intervals that you set in preferences.
If you’re going to write scripts in various programming languages, then you’ll need a decent IDE-style code editor. This comes in handy if you’re building a website, because you can create a “project” file that will group together the text-based files related to your website.
For this type of work, I use Geany, but have recently installed Aptana Studio to try it out.
The benefit of an IDE-style editor is that it can color the syntax so your commands don’t look like a big vat of text. This makes reading, writing, documenting (or “in-code comments”) and troubleshooting your work much much easier.
Depending on your Linux distribution, you already have an application capable of burning Data CDs for file/folder backups and Music CDs. Most of them offer the ability to burn an .iso file.
I usually install K3B (KDE-based) for disk burning. Install k3b with Synaptic package manager: type “k3b” [no quotes] after clicking the “Search” button. If you’re using a non-KDE System, let Synaptic install any extra items.
I prefer k3b because I find it more reliable than other burning software that may come bundled with a distro. I won’t name applications, but for one reason or another they disappointed me, even though community opinion of them is high.
There are times when you just have to trust your instincts and experiences.
When something works for you, use it. If it gives you headaches, then seek alternatives.
[UPDATE TO POST] Hello, my apologies, but I have made a silly error in calling Openbox a Desktop Environment. Openbox is not a desktop environment, Openbox is a Window Manager.
I feel I made that mistake for a few reasons:
My current distro, CrunchbangLinux, runs Openbox with other apps such as a system tray & taskbar. This “combination of apps” compose the desktop environment.
For fast performance, you simply run Openbox without an overall Desktop Environment.
Without a desktop environment, I thought Openbox was the desktop environment.
Openbox provides a “Minimalist Environment”. For example, Openbox does not put icons on a user’s Desktop.
Here are some screen shots from my Openbox Environment on my Dual-boot laptop (MacBook).
Screen Capture: Openbox in Crunchbang Linux
In the above picture we see the main “Desktop” interface with a circa 1970’s picture of the dudes from RUSH. To the right, some keyboard shortcuts. At the bottom of the screen capture, we see three (3) virtual desktops represented by the thin gray rectangles, and the System Tray with a few icons: (wifi-connect, volume) and the system clock. Multiple (virtual) desktops can help you manage your computing tasks. Most (if not all) applications allow you to “pin them” to all desktops. There are 2 advantages to “pinning” (if that’s the correct term).
It allows you to run only one instance of an Application instead of “1 per desktop”.
No need to scroll between desktops to access an app that you need to use instantly.
In the above picture we see some applications running. When an application is running, you will usually see its icon within the rectangle that represents a specific virtual desktop.
One thing I like about Openbox is that when you launch an app, it’s default window position is the center of your screen. This can be changed, but I like it, so I’ll keep it that way.
The above screenshot features a few applications one might use when designing a website. “Agave” lets you preview color schemes. Selecting colors that complement each other on a web site is really important. You don’t want to create a visually-jarring website.
Also shown is the “Specimen” font previewer—good for general usage for viewing a font at various sizes. Specimen even lets you type in your own arbitrary text. Last but not least we see the “Terminator” terminal emulator that comes with the Crunchbang distro.
Because Linux is all about choice, you can choose any Desktop Environment you like, or even make up your own if you feel like doing so.
