3 useful applications

I’ve just dis­cov­ered these 3 appli­ca­tions two days ago and I think it worth to give it a try.

Conky

Conky is light­weight sys­tem mon­i­tor.  Screen­lets might be great, but I don’t find it inte­grated good enough to my desk­top and makes my ses­sion to load slower. Conky is avail­able in the Ubuntu repos.

Ter­mi­na­tor

I was nor­mally using Gnome Ter­mi­nal as my main ter­mi­nal emu­la­tor. It sup­ports tabs and other great fea­tures but it’s slighty slower than, let’s say xterm. Ter­mi­na­tor is fast, but above all, fea­tures screen split­ting just as Screen does. This can be incred­i­bly use­ful. You can have for exam­ple, a README file opened in one half, and you can keep work­ing in the other one, or have your code in one half, gdb run­ning just under and com­pile on the other side. Ter­mi­na­tor is also avail­able in the Ubuntu repos. Wouldn’t it be great if Ter­mi­na­tor could “snap” your ses­sion and reload it ?

Guake

Guake is also a ter­mi­nal emu­la­tor that can be opened from the tray  by press­ing F12 (defalt). There’s noth­ing fancy about this but what makes Guake so inter­est­ing is its great inte­gra­tion within the desk­top. In fact, Guake is rather slick and won’t appear in the task bar.You can only get the pro­gram  by com­pil­ing it by hand. This is not a huge deal since all the depen­den­cies can be sat­is­fied by installing addi­tional pack­ages from the repos.

You might encounter a run time error which says some­thing like:

“Guake can not init! Gconf Error. Have you installed guake.schemas properly?”

In this case, sim­ply run this command:

gconftool-2 –install-schema-file=/usr/etc/gconf/schemas/guake.schemas

The loca­tion of this file might changes depend­ing on your sys­tem. It can eas­ily be located by run­ning the com­mand “locate” (updat­edb must be exe­cuted prior to that to keep the search index up to date).