What are your favorite apps/games/tools for Linux?

aceO07

Diamond Member
Nov 6, 2000
4,491
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I've finally got around to dual booting Ubuntu on my computer. I've been using ubuntu though vmware at work and home. Finally I decided to give Linux another try on my home system. I used to use Slackware, but I don't have as much time as before to really dive into the system and learn it.

Anyways, my main question is.. What useful/cool apps/games/tools do you install?

Here's my list:
Amarok [KDE based, but Ubuntu Gnome can use it..] - Music player/collection management.
VLC - Video player. I got used to it from Windows.
Pidgin - Messenger program
Firefox
OpenOffice
Wine - Windows emulation. Mainly for Mame and Utorrent.

Any good text editors? Free feel to suggest alternatives to my current choices as well. What useful/cool apps/games/tools do you install?
 

silverpig

Lifer
Jul 29, 2001
27,709
11
81
Check out deluge-torrent. I like it better than utorrent, and you don't have to use wine.

xpilot is a fun little arcade game
Amarok is good, but the stupid xine-engine/doesn't-want-to-play-flac-files thing is annoying so I use exaile for now.
 

aceO07

Diamond Member
Nov 6, 2000
4,491
0
76
I'll give deluge a try. Though the download is huge compared to tiny utorrent. :)

I'm looking forward to installing MythTv so I can make use of my ATI HDTV tuner in ubuntu. That's about the only thing left in Windows that I want.
 

xSauronx

Lifer
Jul 14, 2000
19,586
4
81
after reading a thread in OS

locate

i love it, and if im playing around or doing something new, i use it often
 

jhu

Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
11,918
9
81
well, here're a few of my favorites

povray
vi
xfce
ls
less
bash
ssh
sshd
firefox
rxvt
gimp
gcc
g++
lynx
links
awk
grep
sed
ed

of that list, by far my favorite is ed
 

aceO07

Diamond Member
Nov 6, 2000
4,491
0
76
Originally posted by: sciencewhiz
mame runs in linux as well, no need for wine.

You mean xmame? I find that windows mame has much much better graphics quality than xmame in full screen. What settings do you use?
 

DarkThinker

Platinum Member
Mar 17, 2007
2,822
0
0
Let's see here:

- VIM (Advancd Text Editor)

- GCC / G++ (Compilers)

- Eclipse ( IDE )

- HexEditor (For editing binary files)

- Audacious (Music / Stream Player)

- Firefox

- Gimp

- Pidgin

- Tremulous (Game)

- FlightGear (Good Flight Simulator)

- Mplayer (ripping audio and video streams)

- Totem-Xine (Videos and DVDs)

- Mplayer's all-codecs package for xine / totem-xine

- OpenOffice.org

- elinks (minimal browser for NSFx sites)

- WINE (playing half-life, Day of Defeat and other games)


- CrossOver (Tricky windows software and office)

- ies4linux (installs IE under Linux nicely)

As fasr as utilities go:

- locate (got to update them db's :D)

- grep

- awk

- sed

^ Shell scripts

- SSH
 

calyco

Senior member
Oct 7, 2004
825
1
81
I like mplayer more than vlc, got used to the keyboard shortcuts. lbreakout is a nice game to kill some time while compiling, other than that only game Ive found worth playing is Enemy Territory. nedit is nice, like notepad on windows.
 

silverpig

Lifer
Jul 29, 2001
27,709
11
81
Originally posted by: aceO07
I'll give deluge a try. Though the download is huge compared to tiny utorrent. :)

I'm looking forward to installing MythTv so I can make use of my ATI HDTV tuner in ubuntu. That's about the only thing left in Windows that I want.

Do the ATI cards work in linux now? Last I checked they didn't...
 

yuchai

Senior member
Aug 24, 2004
980
2
76
Originally posted by: silverpig
Originally posted by: aceO07
I'll give deluge a try. Though the download is huge compared to tiny utorrent. :)

I'm looking forward to installing MythTv so I can make use of my ATI HDTV tuner in ubuntu. That's about the only thing left in Windows that I want.

Do the ATI cards work in linux now? Last I checked they didn't...

ATI HDTV Wonder works well.
 

BurnItDwn

Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
26,067
1,550
126
Originally posted by: aceO07
I'll give deluge a try. Though the download is huge compared to tiny utorrent. :)

I'm looking forward to installing MythTv so I can make use of my ATI HDTV tuner in ubuntu. That's about the only thing left in Windows that I want.

I've been using MythTV for a couple of years now ...
I've been doing it the lazy way (knoppmyth for a LONG time, switched to mythbuntu just a week or so ago)

a company named "zap2it" used to give out all the tv listings for free, however, people were abusing the service, so they stopped. Now, if you want to get listings for mythTV, your best bet is a company called "Schedules Direct." The downside is that this service is not free. :(
Fortunatly, it's only $20 per year, and there is a free 7 day trial first .... IMO it's worth every penny for me.

I'm having some minor issues with things (like getting it to cut the commercials and transcode to mpeg4 on it's own) .... but It still works very well and mythbuntu took less than 1 hour to get working :)
 

Praetor

Diamond Member
Oct 14, 1999
4,499
4
81
Originally posted by: aceO07
Originally posted by: sciencewhiz
mame runs in linux as well, no need for wine.

You mean xmame? I find that windows mame has much much better graphics quality than xmame in full screen. What settings do you use?

Have you tried sdlmame? It's actually kept up to date, unlike xmame right now.
 

aceO07

Diamond Member
Nov 6, 2000
4,491
0
76
Originally posted by: yuchai
Originally posted by: silverpig
Originally posted by: aceO07
I'll give deluge a try. Though the download is huge compared to tiny utorrent. :)

I'm looking forward to installing MythTv so I can make use of my ATI HDTV tuner in ubuntu. That's about the only thing left in Windows that I want.

Do the ATI cards work in linux now? Last I checked they didn't...

ATI HDTV Wonder works well.

Last time I tried, a couple of weeks ago, Mythtv installed on ubuntu didn't seem to be able to detect any channels. It found the card, but no channels. I wonder if I set up something wrong in the settings for mythtv. It does get decent reception for a good number of channels when I'm in Windows XP using the standard ATI software package.
 

aceO07

Diamond Member
Nov 6, 2000
4,491
0
76
Originally posted by: Praetor
Originally posted by: aceO07
Originally posted by: sciencewhiz
mame runs in linux as well, no need for wine.

You mean xmame? I find that windows mame has much much better graphics quality than xmame in full screen. What settings do you use?

Have you tried sdlmame? It's actually kept up to date, unlike xmame right now.

I think I did try to install it once. For whatever reason I didn't consider it a success.

I think it may have been the fact that it didn't have a frontend that I could just install without compiling for ubuntu. I didn't have the time to find a frontend and compile/setup to get it to work. Any suggestions for a good easy frontend that is set for ubuntu?

(Ubuntu repository has kxmame which is a decent frontend for mame sdl 106, but if I uninstall the repos mamesdl, it will also uninstall kxmame. Also I can't install the new sdl mame over the old one since it conflicts.)

edit: I managed to install mamesdl 122, and get it to load the games. However I would still prefer a frontend. It took a while since the config showed 2 locations that the roms could be in, so I put it in my home directory. It didn't detect it from there and only like the local share directory. :p
 

Praetor

Diamond Member
Oct 14, 1999
4,499
4
81
Originally posted by: aceO07
Originally posted by: Praetor
Originally posted by: aceO07
Originally posted by: sciencewhiz
mame runs in linux as well, no need for wine.

You mean xmame? I find that windows mame has much much better graphics quality than xmame in full screen. What settings do you use?

Have you tried sdlmame? It's actually kept up to date, unlike xmame right now.

I think I did try to install it once. For whatever reason I didn't consider it a success.

I think it may have been the fact that it didn't have a frontend that I could just install without compiling for ubuntu. I didn't have the time to find a frontend and compile/setup to get it to work. Any suggestions for a good easy frontend that is set for ubuntu?

(Ubuntu repository has kxmame which is a decent frontend for mame sdl 106, but if I uninstall the repos mamesdl, it will also uninstall kxmame. Also I can't install the new sdl mame over the old one since it conflicts.)

edit: I managed to install mamesdl 122, and get it to load the games. However I would still prefer a frontend. It took a while since the config showed 2 locations that the roms could be in, so I put it in my home directory. It didn't detect it from there and only like the local share directory. :p

If you get MythTV setup, then you'd have a halfway-decent frontend with the Mythgame plugin.

As for the roms, that's defined in ~/.mame/mame.ini

#
# CORE SEARCH PATH OPTIONS
#
rompath /mnt/media/Games/mame/roms
samplepath /mnt/media/Games/mame/samples
artpath /mnt/media/Games/mame/artwork
ctrlrpath /mnt/media/Games/mame/ctrlr
inipath $HOME/.mame;.;ini
fontpath .
 

aceO07

Diamond Member
Nov 6, 2000
4,491
0
76
I managed to get mame sdl to work. I'm using the ini file that's in the /etc/sdlmame directory. Having a nice frontend like the windows mame32 version would be nice. I'll check out the myth plugin when I get mythtv to work. I'll have to use the mamesdl as is for now.
 

Praetor

Diamond Member
Oct 14, 1999
4,499
4
81
Originally posted by: aceO07
I managed to get mame sdl to work. I'm using the ini file that's in the /etc/sdlmame directory. Having a nice frontend like the windows mame32 version would be nice. I'll check out the myth plugin when I get mythtv to work. I'll have to use the mamesdl as is for now.

It's sdlmame ;)

It does include a basic frontend which can be used just by executing sdlmame example

Alternatively, there are other frontends available
GNOME Video Arcade
Wah!Cade

Give it a try. :)
 

imported_Uber

Member
Oct 5, 2006
111
0
0
The program that probably gets run more often than any other program on my Ubuntu computer is Battle for Wesnoth.

But I'm pretty much a Linux noob, so there's still alot for me to try.
 

Praetor

Diamond Member
Oct 14, 1999
4,499
4
81
Originally posted by: hans030390
Any alternative programs to the Zune software, or will it run in wine?

Not that I'm aware of. Most methods use vmware or virtualbox to parse the initial handshake.
 

MovingTarget

Diamond Member
Jun 22, 2003
8,999
109
106
Amarok, Kopete, Xchat, Openoffice, gedit, Kile, Firefox, Thunderbird, Konsole, Boinc (TeAm stuff...), Konsole, etc.

As you can probably tell, I'm a KDE user, although I do use the shell a lot. Pretty excited now that KDE 4.0 is out. I hope to try it soon.