One Thing Well

My Linux Setup

This is the software I use on my Eee PC 701, which has a 900Hhz Intel Celeron M processor underclocked to 630Mhz, 500MB of RAM and a 4GB internal SSD, plus a 16GB SDHC card that lives permanently in its card reader.

Distribution

• Ubuntu

I install from the Minimal CD, and say 'no' to everything it offers to install beyond the basics, then install xorg and everything listed below with apt-get¹.

The last time I did this was with an Ubuntu 9.0.4 CD, and have do-release-upgrade'd from there to 10.10 Alpha 1 without a hitch; a cron job runs apt-get update && apt-get -y dist-upgrade every night to keep me up to date.

NB: the Eee PC is perfectly capable of running a full-blown Ubuntu installation, even with all the Compiz eye-candy turned up to 11; I just don't need a DE.

The Basics

• dwm, for managing windows.
• dmenu, for launching applications
• urxvt, which I run in client/server mode.
• zsh, mostly for its tab completion and typo correction.
• dvtm, for tiling 'windows' at the console
• tmux, for detachable sessions (I find it much easier to use than screen).
• dtach, for detaching single processes.
• wicd and wicd-curses for wifi networking.
• coreutils, for managing files, moving around, &c..
• autojump, for super-fast `cd`ing.
• locate, for finding things.
• sshfs, for mounting remote directories
• ncdu, for hunting down big files.
• htop, for viewing processes.
• pgrep and pkill, for managing processes by name
• rsync, for backups and uploading local versions of my websites to servers.
• tar, zip, unzip and unrar for making/extracting archives.
• PCManFM, for managing files when i'm not at the console.
• tabbed, to provide tabs for sandy, surf and urxvt.
• git, for keeping my stuff under version control.
• mercurial, mostly for getting up-to-date versions of, and applying my patches to, software.
• pm-utils, for suspending, power management.
• slock, for locking the screen.
• Dropbox, for synching files with my Mac, controlled with dropbox.py.
• Inconsolata and msttcorefonts, to make my terminal and the web look pretty, respectively.
• ubuntu-restricted-extras, for LAME, gstreamer, Flash, &c..
• Conky, for useful statistics pretty graphs and bars.

Text

• vim, for writing and—especially—editing text.
• nano, for quick edits.
• Sandy, for writing text when i'm not in a vim mood.
• apvlv, for reading pdfs.
• poppler-utils, for converting pdfs to text.
• antiword, for converting word docs to text.
• less, for reading text files.
• Markdown, for turning legible text into html.

Electronic Mail & IRC

• mutt, for reading/moving/saving/deleting email.
• vim (again), for writing email.
• msmtp, for sending email.
• offlineimap, for synchronising local email with gmail .
• mairix, for searching local email.
• goobook, for Gmail contacts integration.
• ii with the autojoin patch, for IRC (used rarely)
• srw and pcw, to make ii easier to use.

The Web

• surf, for browsing the web (lightly modified to include features like bookmarks and link hinting).
• w3m, for browsing the web and reading html local documents.
• newsbeuter, for reading feeds (it's slow to synchronise with Google Reader, but the 'save item as text' feature makes up for it).
• jekyll and jekyll_ext, to power my personal weblog.

Downloading

• cclive, for downloading videos.
• transmission-cli, for downloading torrents (I prefer rtorrent, but it doesn't do UPnP).
• axel, for downloading everything else.

Sound & Vision

• feh, for looking at photographs and setting a background image.
• scrot, for screenshots.
• imagemagick, for manipulating images.
• mplayer, to play videos (and music, sometimes).
• cplay, to play music and podcasts.

Copying & Pasting ²

• xcutsel, to keep the cut buffer and primary selection in sync.
• xclip, a cli interface to the x selection (useful for pasting into vim).
• Clipman, to store a clipboard history.
• xfce-clipman-popup, to select items from that clipboard history.

Software that doesn't seem to exist

• An equivalent to Textexpander. Readers John and Ronan suggested AutoKey, which looks good.
• A lightweight image editor, à la Acorn.

1. Except the software in italics, which I build myself. This can be tiresome, but in some cases I have to configure an application by editing its source code, and in others the version in the Ubuntu repos is packaged in a way I don't like (and sometimes I just like having the very latest version). ↩

2. I'm aware that this section is completely ridiculous; if there's a more sensible way to to copy and paste to and from every application, with history, do let me know. ↩

Updates

• 01/07/10: added IRC setup.
• 04/07/10: added goobook.
• 07/07/10: added autojump