Linux Power Tools - Great Tools To Make System Administration
By Amarjyoti Krishnan, Mon Dec 26th
It is very important for system administrators to have the righttools to to work smart. Linux is a great desktop OS fordevelopers as well as system administrators. Let us take a lookat some of the utilities which makes this a great environmentfor system administrators and developers. Most of the contentbelow is taken from the home pages of these apps and the I makeno claims on the originality. My aim is to introduce the readerto the wonderful tools that are available in a Linux/BSD desktopenvironment. Konsole Let's start from what most people think Linux is all about - atext based shell. Konsole is what is known as an X terminalemulator, often referred to as a terminal or a shell. It givesyou the equivalent of an old-fashioned text screen on yourdesktop, but one which can easily share the screen with yourgraphical applications. What makes Konsole special? Konsole'sadvanced features include simple configuration and the abilityto use multiple terminal shells in a single window, making for aless cluttered desktop. Konsole is also available as kpart andcan thus be easily embedded in other applications, likepracticed by Kate and Konqueror.
As most system administrators need log into servers on a regularbasis the konsole gives them a benefit over the Windoze commandprompt. In windows one needs to use a program like putty to login using SSH. Also as linux is the desktop OS the techs can usethe man pages on the local system. One can also try out the various commands locally. Consider asimple example. Is it $ ln sourcefile destinationfile or is it $ ln destinationfile sourcefile Such things can be easily found out locally without carrying outexperiments on the server. Many techs believe that servers areplaces where they can experiment. However, such experiments canlead to major losses to the customers due to one small error. Asystem administrator must understand that people have immensefaith in them when they give their entire data to them and theycannot 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 Novel and theKontact from KDE. Both these an email client, calendaring,meeting scheduling, a task list, contact management and syncingfunctionality. Kontact is essentially the regular KDE PIMcomponents which have been put in together i.e. kmail,korganizer, knotes etc.. It is very a very neat package and isstable and light. Both these are very functional and can connectto many groupware servers. Klipper Klipper is the KDE clipboard utility. It stores clipboardhistory, and allows you to link clipboard contents toapplication actions. Klipper can perform actions on the contentsof the clipboard, based on whether they match a particularregular expression. For example, any clipboard contents startingwith "http://" can be passed to the web-browser as URLs to open. Copying text is as simple as highlighting the text. And to pastethe text all one needs to do is click on the center mousebutton. This can be particularly useful for sys-admins as theyuse a sequence of commands from time to time. Having these inthe clipboard and using them often can make the work a loteasier. Gaim / Kopete Communicating via an instant messenger is an essential thesedays. Linux has a very clean solution for this. Both Kopete(http://kopete.kde.org) and Gaim (http://gaim.sourceforge.net/)are capable of handling multiple IM protocols such as supportingAIM, 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 compatiblewith AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC,Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, GroupWise Messenger, and Zephyrnetworks. Kjots KJots is a small program that helps you to write down some shortnotes and organizes them for you. It has two basic items used toorganize your notes - "Books" and "Pages". This is a good lighttool to write in all the templated responses and other importantnotes for quick references. Kwallet A lovely password manager which can store passwords for all thelogins including those of kopete and websites. Tea Cooker KTeaTime is a handy timer for steeping tea. No longer will youhave 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 youwhen the tea is ready to drink. Now how can a tea cooker beuseful for techs. Often techs get involved in solving a problemand forget to update the client about the progress. Withoutcommunicating with the client, on many occasions the entireeffort goes down the drain as the client get very agitatedthinking that nobody is looking at his problem. What the techcan do is use the tea cooker and get a reminder so that he canrespond the client with the progress. Koffice/ Open Office M$ Office is one of the most used software and a major reasonwhy customers do not shift to other operating systems. They needWord and Excel for just about everything. K-Office and OpenOffice are two great solutions. Open Office can open M$ Officefiles and can even safe the files in M$ Office format whichmakes it easy to communicate with those who still use M$products. Lyx Besides office suites which replicate the windows world productsin features, Linux also has some great alternatives. LyX(http://www.lyx.org) 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 thatencourages an approach to writing based on the structure of yourdocuments, not their appearance. LyX lets you concentrate onwriting, leaving details of visual layout to the software. LyXproduces high quality, professional output -- using LaTeX, anindustrial strength typesetting engine, in the background; LyXis far more than a front-end to LaTeX, however. No knowledge ofLaTeX is necessary to use LyX, although it will give a user morepower. LyX is stable and fully featured. It has been used fordocuments as large as a thesis, or as small as a businessletter. Despite its simple GUI interface (available in manylanguages), it supports tables, figures, and hyperlinkedcross-references, and has a best-of-breed math editor. Dia Dia is a great tool for creating diagrams. It has a hugein-built library of objects which are specially useful forsoftware engineers. So making a diagram of a computer network isas easy as dragging a few computers and switches from the listof objects available. It currently has special objects to helpdraw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts,network diagrams, and simple circuits. It is also possible toadd support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using asubset 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 havea great software. Gnucash is an ideal way to manage personalfinances. Designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible,GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income andexpenses. As quick and intuitive to use as a checkbook register,it is based on professional accounting principles to ensurebalanced books and accurate reports. KTuberling And finally a product for all those techs who maintain theirservers well and have no work or pending issues and yet have tosit through the nights waiting for some issue to popup. KTuberling (http://opensource.bureau-cornavin.com/ktuberling/)was originally game intended for small children. Of course, itmay be suitable for adults who have remained young at heart.Most techs in general love this software. It is a "potatoeditor". That means that you can drag and drop eyes, mouths,mustache, and other parts of face and goodies onto a potato-likeguy. Similarly, you have a penguin and an aquarium on which youcan drop other stuff. There is no winner for the game. The only purpose is to make thefunniest faces you can. There is a museum,like a "MadameTusseau" gallery, where you can find many funny examples ofdecorated potatoes, penguins and aquariums. About the author:Amarjyoti Krishnan heads Bobcares.com, Tech supportcompany for webhosts and ISPs. He is the co-founder of PoornamInfo Vision Ltd., a software and IT services company whichspecializes in Linux based solutions for Webhosts and ISPs.Poornam Info Vision is an ISO 9001:2000 certified company with ateam of over 100 engineers. Amarjyoti is a Computer Engineer based in India and has over 7years of
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