Application(s) of the Day

johnraff · 2018-06-22 03:01:55

ncdu
Head_on_a_Stick mentioned this a little while ago (thanks!) and reminded me of the name I heard a long time ago. I was using Baobab sometimes for an overview of what was taking up disk space, but ncdu does more or less the same in a terminal and is much faster and lighter. That might be important when your system is grinding to a halt.

johnraff · 2018-06-22 03:06:13

debian-goodies
Interesting little collection of cli utilities, including checkrestart, which is improved on by:

needrestart
This is a utility for keeping track of processes that need restarting after a library has been upgraded, and is suggested by:

unattended-upgrades
which I just installed on my Helium system, having been quite pleased by the job it did on Hydrogen.

ohnonot · 2018-06-22 03:44:47

johnraff wrote:

ncdu

cli is always nice and leet, but qdirstat is a very useful tool in a way only a gui application can be (and still surprisingly quick).

hhh · 2018-07-01 19:52:32

On buster and sid, slick-greeter, an alternative to lightdm-gtk-greeter...

https://github.com/linuxmint/slick-greeter
https://packages.debian.org/search?keyw … ck-greeter

-edit-

This is on a helium install that's had all bunsen-* packages and bl-* configs stripped out (including bl-alternatives), then upgraded to buster and bunsen packages were selectively added back. I'm running bunsen-exit and bunsen-themes, that's it.

Installation...

sudo apt install slick-greeter

Remove lightdm-gtk-greeter (and the settings GUI, if it's been installed)...

sudo apt purge --autoremove lightdm-gtk-greeter*

Some gnome themes are removed, I reinstalled them. Optional but recommended...

sudo apt install gnome-themes-extra

Reboot. You should see the default slick-greeter login page, black with a white-dot grid overlay, a panel and a login window, enter your user name and password to login.

Configuration...

Create and/or edit /etc/lightdm/slick-greeter.conf with the following...

# LightDM GTK+ Configuration
# Available configuration options listed below.
#
# activate-numlock=Whether to activate numlock. This features requires the installation of numlockx. (true or false)
# background=Background file to use, either an image path or a color (e.g. #772953)
# background-color=Background color (e.g. #772953), set before wallpaper is seen
# draw-user-backgrounds=Whether to draw user backgrounds (true or false)
# draw-grid=Whether to draw an overlay grid (true or false)
# show-hostname=Whether to show the hostname in the menubar (true or false)
# show-power=Whether to show the power indicator in the menubar (true or false)
# show-a11y=Whether to show the accessibility options in the menubar (true or false)
# show-keyboard=Whether to show the keyboard indicator in the menubar (true or false)
# show-clock=Whether to show the clock in the menubar (true or false)
# show-quit=Whether to show the quit menu in the menubar (true or false)
# logo=Logo file to use
# other-monitors-logo=Logo file to use for other monitors
# theme-name=GTK+ theme to use
# icon-theme-name=Icon theme to use
# font-name=Font to use
# xft-antialias=Whether to antialias Xft fonts (true or false)
# xft-dpi=Resolution for Xft in dots per inch
# xft-hintstyle=What degree of hinting to use (hintnone/hintslight/hintmedium/hintfull)
# xft-rgba=Type of subpixel antialiasing (none/rgb/bgr/vrgb/vbgr)
# onscreen-keyboard=Whether to enable the onscreen keyboard (true or false)
# high-contrast=Whether to use a high contrast theme (true or false)
# screen-reader=Whether to enable the screen reader (true or false)
# play-ready-sound=A sound file to play when the greeter is ready
# hidden-users=List of usernames that are hidden until a special key combination is hit
# group-filter=List of groups that users must be part of to be shown (empty list shows all users)
# enable-hidpi=Whether to enable HiDPI support (on/off/auto)
# only-on-monitor=Sets the monitor on which to show the login window, -1 means "follow the mouse"
[Greeter]
background=/home/rachel/Pictures/wallpapers/buster.png
draw-grid=false

This shows available options, but most of them are good out-of-the-box so I've only enabled two. You wallpaper path will be different, adjust it. The wallpaper fades in after about a full second on my system, which is too slow but really looks cool when it happens. The default background-color is black, but you can add any color via hex-code, example...

[Greeter]
background=/home/rachel/Pictures/wallpapers/buster.png
background-color=#ffff00
draw-grid=false

Logout to see the changes.

If you'd like to show the users (I'm on a laptop that nobody else uses, I don't need the extra security of entering my user name), edit /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/01-debian.conf...

# Debian specific defaults
#
# - use lightdm-greeter session greeter, points to the etc-alternatives managed
# greeter
# - hide users list by default, we don't want to expose them
# - use Debian specific session wrapper, to gain support for
# /etc/X11/Xsession.d scripts

[Seat:*]
greeter-session=lightdm-greeter
greeter-hide-users=false
session-wrapper=/etc/X11/Xsession

Also hide the systemd Core Dumper entry from the login screen in /etc/lightdm/users.conf...

#
# User accounts configuration
#
# NOTE: If you have AccountsService installed on your system, then LightDM will
# use this instead and these settings will be ignored
#
# minimum-uid = Minimum UID required to be shown in greeter
# hidden-users = Users that are not shown to the user
# hidden-shells = Shells that indicate a user cannot login
#
[UserList]
minimum-uid=500
hidden-users=nobody nobody4 noaccess systemd-coredump
hidden-shells=/bin/false /usr/sbin/nologin

Logout to see your changes.

-edit- The keyboard shortcut for Restart/Shutdown is FnF10, then use your arrow keys.

hhh · 2018-07-13 05:00:58

I forgot that slick-greeter can auto-detect HiDPI, or it can be set manually.

There's a GUI config for it called lightdm-settings that hasn't made it into Debian yet. Ubuntu has it packaged and it installed for me in sid, just needed 2 or 3 dependencies. I haven't installed in Buster, I don't need it now that I have manually configured the greeter.

The wallpaper fade-in isn't working for me ATM, I don't know if it was from an update and I haven't bothered to check the apt logs to see.

martix · 2018-07-16 18:10:06

^That's a beautiful login screen, slick-greeter looks nice imho. thank you for the steps.

Just came across a CLI tool to write bootable USBs (if someone does not want to use dd directly). It's called bootiso.

bootiso is a bash script. Features: "A confirmation prompt is displayed before erasing and partitioning USB devices; Inspects the ISO file and choose the best copy mode; Checks if the ISO has the correct mime-type and exists if it doesn't; Makes sure the device you select is actually connected via USB and exits if it's not, preventing any possible system damages; Checks if the selected item is a partition and exits if it is; Handles external command failures; The script itself is linted and validated with shellcheck and formatted with shfmt to ensure code quality."

johnraff · 2018-09-26 07:37:15

ddrescue

This literally rescued some files off a hard drive that was almost dead, just last week. Bit-perfect. It takes some time, but goes in very carefully, trying not to damage the disk any more, and finally does the job, pretty much automatically.

A web search will come up with plenty of returns from the usual places, but not so much about picking out individual files, which is possible, and sometimes (as in my case) what you want, instead of trying to make a clone of the whole drive.

What I did:
1) Boot off a live system, like BL, on a usb drive so the hard drive isn't used.
2) Make sure at the BIOS screen that the HDD is still recognized, even if flagged as BAD. If not, I think you can only take it to a specialist.
3) In the live system, run 'sudo fdisk -l' to see if the system recognizes the HDD. This is necessary because we need the device path in order to mount it. Usually ddrecue runs on unmounted disks (I think) but to rescue an individual file we need the path.
4) Mount the disk read-only to minimize interference from well-meaning system daemons:
sudo mkdir -p /disk
sudo mount -o ro /dev/sdX /disk
5) Plug in a drive to save the rescued file to, and mount that too, if it isn't automatically done.
6) I found you can run ddrecue default mode with no options, and it did the job:

ddrescue /disk/path/to/important_file /path/to/other/mounted/drive/directory /path/to/other/mounted/drive/directory/mapfile

A copy of important_file should eventually end up in directory/.

Be sure to specify a mapfile name in the third argument (it needn't exist yet) because that lets you re-run the ddrescue command with other options that you might have found on the net and want to try. (I found the --reverse mode seemed to speed it up at one point.) Multiple runs won't overwrite good sections, but gradually build up the file till it reports 100% success. Maybe an hour, maybe a day, and some people reported ddrecue running for months! I got back 20~30GB of data in 2~3 hours.

You can't do a recursive rescue of a directory, though some people suggested running a find command to rescue all the files in a directory. To get a bunch of downloaded music files (after doing the more important stuff) I just used a for loop, something like:

src=/disk/path/to/youtube_downloads
trgt=/path/to/other/mounted/drive/saved_music
for file in "$src"/*; do [[ -d $file ]] && continue; ddrescue "$file" "$trgt" "$trgt/music_mapfile"; done

I hope you never have to use ddrescue, but I was quite impressed with it.

NOTE: There is another ddrescue (not in Debian) whose command is dd_rescue. I know nothing about that one.

Last edited by johnraff (2018-10-03 03:38:45)

Jimbo_G · 2018-09-26 08:20:17

Really good to know; I hope I'll remember ddrescue exists if I ever have to use it!

S7.L · 2018-10-19 15:04:00

I would like to nominate ReText

ReText is a simple but powerful editor for Markdown and reStructuredText markup languages. ReText is written in Python language and works on Linux and other POSIX-compatible platforms.

https://github.com/retext-project/retext

Im learning how to create my own website/blog etc and this has come in very handy.
I was getting to know atom but i found it slow and a bit too feature rich for my liking. Give me retext and geany any day over atom.

Last edited by S7.L (2018-10-19 15:05:44)

vasa1 · 2018-10-19 15:23:18

Thanks, grapefruit & ohnonot for the posts about sct! Love it!

S7.L · 2018-12-17 11:52:22

Hi again Bunsenlabs.

Finally found a way to read pesky PDF's in better view on my rather small screened smartphone.It is a program run from the terminal called K2pdfopt.What it does is converts PDFs so they are easier to read on small screens (PDF Re flow tool). Ive tried converting pdf's to epub/mobi format using calibre but i just cant figure it out properly so this is the next best thing in my opinion.

Read about it here: http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/

Download and build from source and install here: http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/download/

Im on arch Linux for now, couldn't find it in Debian stable but it is available in testing/unstable: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/k2pdfopt

The version i built and installed was from the arch aur and it is not a GUI program, not sure if that is the same for the Debian version but i think it is. Anyhow I can now read a PDF file i have been wanting to read without having to squint, hope someone finds this post helpful.

ohnonot · 2018-12-19 06:59:04

^ my last phone came with an app preinstalled that did that on the fly (called it Mobile View), i think it was called WXOffice.
i thought there were some apps on f-droid that also do that, but i don't seem to have any installed.

S7.L · 2018-12-22 05:59:31

sorry for the late reply ohnonot, been away from the forums for a few days.

My phone is a just a rather cheapy huawei brand, probably 3 year old entry level model, runs the android lollipop 5.1 cant update it any more than that, so i think maybe yours might have a later release that has that mobile view added maybe or just your provider added it?

I couldnt find wxoffice in google play or fdroid, did you mean wps office maybe?

Last edited by S7.L (2018-12-22 06:00:28)

ohnonot · 2018-12-22 10:21:10

yes maybe it was wps office and it was on kitkat.
it came preinstalled. maybe it's this one here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta … cn.wps.pdf

BLizgreat! · 2019-01-29 23:49:35

Just that, the reason for this stupe thread is what I think is a decent disk usage utility. It's called ncdu and is in the standard software repositories.

Well, noticed my main OS was about twice the size it should've been and thought, hmmmm. Being an uber l33t nix ninja I knew what to do immediately. Google !!! The culprit turned out being a bunch of .iso's in my users Downloads directory.

Wound up stumbling over this sucker during said l33t google session, while like most things gnu/Linux there's 40 gazillion ways to do about anything but like this and so wanted to mention it. Using ncdu.

Without any other options, looks like the thing just shows the total disk used and size of the files in the current working directory. Which of course tends to be your /users/home when you launch a terminal. To run it just type "ncdu".

ie: For this install that's ...

124.7 MiB [####### ] /.cache
58.0 MiB [### ] /Downloads
48.7 MiB [## ] /.mozilla
9.5 MiB [ ] /.config
148.0 KiB [ ] /.local
76.0 KiB [ ] /.pki
48.0 KiB [ ] /.fluxbox
24.0 KiB [ ] /.thumbnails
24.0 KiB [ ] .xsession-errors
16.0 KiB [ ] /.gconf
12.0 KiB [ ] /.icons
8.0 KiB [ ] /.gnupg
8.0 KiB [ ] .bash_history
8.0 KiB [ ] tint2rc.bak
e 4.0 KiB [ ] /Videos
e 4.0 KiB [ ] /Templates
e 4.0 KiB [ ] /Public
e 4.0 KiB [ ] /Pictures
e 4.0 KiB [ ] /Music
e 4.0 KiB [ ] /Documents
e 4.0 KiB [ ] /.nano
4.0 KiB [ ] .bashrc
4.0 KiB [ ] .profile
4.0 KiB [ ] .xinitrc
4.0 KiB [ ] .gtkrc-2.0
4.0 KiB [ ] .bash_logout
4.0 KiB [ ] .gmrun_history
4.0 KiB [ ] .Xauthority
4.0 KiB [ ] .fehbg
4.0 KiB [ ] .bash_aliases
Total disk usage: 413.4 MiB Apparent size: 406.4 MiB Items: 4773

Think it's cool and you can also do something like "ncdu /var/log" or any other location in the file system you have an interest in.

Have mentioned it before but here it is again. It's called "apt-show-versions", you can check which packages you have installed, are from which source repository or branch, such as stable, testing, unstable etc. To check which are installed from the repo in sources named stretch-backports.

apt-show-versions |grep /stretch-backports

Which is what it'll do, show all the packages installed on that OS from that repository and whether or not they are up to date.

Some which supposedly help speed up upgrades and installing packages from software repositories you have enabled.

netselect-apt: Haven't used it in awhile, it's use is really straight-forward. Here's a link just for the sake of it. Then there's this sucker, it's called apt-fast , notice that the source is github, I don't necessarily endorse this, haven't used it from there or for that matter haven't bothered using it at all but the thing is supposed to give apt a real boost in terms of speed and some use bash aliases with it.

Then the good ole namebench (available in stock repositories), used for the purpose of testing and seeing which DNS server is fastest, can also include censorship checks. Which is supposed to see if that DNS server maintainer is censoring websites on it. For me when I ran it ended up being 8.8.4.4 Google Public DNS ipv4. Run it in run dialogue or terminal or whatever just by typing out it's name, "namebench".

That's it for this nonsense, any comments, additions of other cool appage/utils etc all welcome.

Last edited by BLizgreat! (2019-01-30 00:14:53)

BLizgreat! · 2019-01-30 00:03:10

Going back to oops.

Last edited by BLizgreat! (2019-01-30 03:22:58)

ohnonot · 2019-01-30 07:18:50

nice.
installed ncdu & apt-show-versions on my non-gui server.

on my gui system, i like to use QDirStat.
It's surprisingly responsive, and quickly gives a deeper overview of where stuff is taking up (too much) space.

johnraff · 2019-01-30 07:53:23

@BLizgreat! ncdu is well worth a bit of publicity - thanks!

Could this thread perhaps be merged with Application(s) of the Day though? Seems to be on the same topic, and could use some new blood.

Bearded_Blunder · 2019-01-30 09:46:22

ohnonot wrote:

on my gui system, i like to use QDirStat.
It's surprisingly responsive, and quickly gives a deeper overview of where stuff is taking up (too much) space.

I put that on my LXQt system, where it sits very nicely, looks almost exactly like WinDirStat on windows, but seems to work way faster. Though that may be a function of just how much stuff & cruft is on my Windows box.

brontosaurusrex · 2019-01-30 12:46:38

ncdu's lil brother, duh version 2
https://github.com/brontosaurusrex/stre … r/bin/duh2
Unlike in ncdu, bottom is fatter here.

(version 1 was just : du -hca --max-depth=1 "$@" | sort -h )

Usage example:

cd somedir
duh2

Last edited by brontosaurusrex (2019-01-30 12:49:53)

#21 2018-06-22 03:01:55

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#22 2018-06-22 03:06:13

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#23 2018-06-22 03:44:47

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#24 2018-07-01 19:52:32

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#25 2018-07-13 05:00:58

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#26 2018-07-16 18:10:06

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#27 2018-09-26 07:37:15

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#28 2018-09-26 08:20:17

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#29 2018-10-19 15:04:00

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#30 2018-10-19 15:23:18

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#31 2018-12-17 11:52:22

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#32 2018-12-19 06:59:04

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#33 2018-12-22 05:59:31

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#34 2018-12-22 10:21:10

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#35 2019-01-29 23:49:35

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#36 2019-01-30 00:03:10

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#37 2019-01-30 07:18:50

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#38 2019-01-30 07:53:23

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#39 2019-01-30 09:46:22

Re: Application(s) of the Day

#40 2019-01-30 12:46:38

Re: Application(s) of the Day

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