A small collection of cool Unix tools for the X Window System. For cool terminal tools, see Kristof Kovacs’ list. All applications have been tested on FreeBSD but should run on other Unix-like operating systems as well.
A small collection of cool Unix tools for the X Window System. For cool terminal tools, see Kristof Kovacs’ list. All applications have been tested on FreeBSD but should run on other Unix-like operating systems as well.
Xbill! That’s a blast from the past, for sure.
Xroach is fun, but I’ve always found it to be… buggy….
I had a good laugh at the updated version, XLennart. Embrace, extend, extinguish comes to Linux via systemd (or so the game seems to indicate).
They forgot XBoing…
Just try to lose.
obscure? gvim, glxgears, Xcalc Xkill and XScreenSaver ..? Some are really not that “obscure”. Just today I rediscovered good old X “panning” to optimize my 2019 Desktop Linux OBS live streaming setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ2jU6cxeJM – XSnow is cool though, I loved it when I discovered Linux two decades ago (1996-ish)!
While I wouldn’t call them “obscure unix tools”, the second link https://kkovacs.eu/cool-but-obscure-unix-tools highlights some extremely useful console tools that can dramatically enhancing the native tools included with most unix systems. I’ve bookmarked the page because it’s very nice to have a page that lists so many of them with screenshots. Thanks!
If you want a cool x11 tool (and have an old CRT monitor) try Tempest for Eliza.
http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/
Now that is an obscure x11 tool. Never heard of it. But it does remind me of some embedded systems I was working on, where a tech discovered that touching the right capacitor caused the device to turn into a fm radio that picked up our local top 40 station.
Cool.
I thought it was funny that quite a few of the application have the “Prone to crashing” disclaimer. That’s definitely uncool!
Besides that, I’m appalled that Xcalc, Credit, Xeyes, etc are considered obscure. I would consider these the last obscure applications ever, especially since they used to be part of the standard X distribution until Xorg went modular. Next thing, TWM is going to be an obscure window manager.
One of my all time favourites is xdiskusage (http://xdiskusage.sourceforge.net/). I know there are more colourful tools out there, but I find this one easier to navigate and can also read the input from du, so you can get a visual output from a remote server, for example. It’s really cool.
When I left school for my first job early summer -92 we all had Sun Workstations on the desktop. At the time MS could muster Windows 3.1 and had not yet hit the office market like they did with windows 95.
We used SunOs 4 and olwm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olwm) as the graphical desktop. This was before Sun branded it’s unix to Solaris and before CDE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment) that replaced as the default desktop. Anyway, as part of the desktop apps in the owlm environment was many of the application mentioned in the list and I have used many of them. Most common was the mail notifier with a sampled voice jelling “You got mail”. The Xeyes was cool, just sitting there and lurking. I am missing a strange spring-design-thing where you could draw strings and trigger them to move. Totally pointless but a bit mesmerizing 🙂
My college that was more into UI showed us that it was possible to define a window using postscript and did so with a round window with round borders. It was cool but quite useless 🙂
At the time there was a standardization journey started. I was never into the graphics environment but the movement strive towards motif and some other standards as addressing unix in it self.
When I started this job I was a MS-DOS junkie. We did have Sun-stations at the last year at school but I never liked them and I had my 386 full tower with math co processor instead. I even managed to be allowed to used my own computer instead of the Sun station on the C++ exam. When I actually started to use the Sun stations and learned a bit I was hooked on unix and have been ever since.
We worked with C++ development and managed our code using sccs (gnu version is calles cssc) which worked quite well. Sun compiler collection was used for building code but initially we used the nihcl library with perhaps an early version of gnu cc that actually precompiled c++ into c and used the c-compiler making some of the C++ constructs missing.
I had a Sun workstation on my desktop until I left that job at the summer of 2000 and by then I was a total unix addict. Funny enough I have been involved in unix/linux software since then and never really touched windows software. All by accident. Unix have been strong on the back-end courtesy Sun I’d say.
I now have my own company and am my own IT responsible. I am using 99% Linux but am still unable to find a legal bookkeeping software for Linux. I have a virtual box with windows 8.1 for that. The online versions with the functionality I need is 10 times as expensive on a yearly basis so I stay with the windows version. It is in fact a software written in VB6 but sadly does not work properly in wine 🙂 (no, I am not a dinosaur quite yet).
I have Gentoo on my desktop, Funtoo on the servers and Artix (arch without systemd) on my laptop. I synchronize work-files using syncthing. My main software today is Archi for IT, business and enterprise architecture, inkscape for drawings and libreoffice for office documents which I make a lot of. Notes in my own desktop wiki “Neville the Remeberall” (https://bitbucket.org/ridderby/neville/). Everything I do is stored in git, also the office documents and modell. I have a concept with a directory structure for each custommer/project where I isolate them form each other including software settings where possible. Entering a project begins at the command prompt and I am very happy having it like that.
Cheers
/ Erik
ErikR,
I have the same difficulty sourcing business software, especially when it comes to tax & accounting. It’s quite inconvenient since I don’t have windows on my main computer any more. While I still need a windows computer anyways to do windows development for client work, I do wish it were easier to buy business software in linux desktop flavors as most vendors don’t even bother with it.
What exact functionality are you looking for? I’ve been using GnuCash for at least 15 years (don’t remember exact date) and find it extremely usable and featureful. More recently, I’ve started using it for a business. The reports are great at the end of the year, all I do is print out the related ones and give it to my accountant.
teco.sb,
If you’re paying an accountant to transcribe everything then I guess it’s no problem, but last time I checked I couldn’t find any open source solution to file taxes for federal and state agencies. It takes me around two days every year filling out some 80 pages of forms for business and personal taxes. Without software capable of calculating the numbers automatically, this is not only tedious but error prone, so software support is extremely important for me, it just sucks that the government doesn’t make it easier and doesn’t have an open source/cross platform mandate. Hell, I wish they’d simplify everything about taxes. Too often the tax code is influenced by accountants who selfishly prefer complexity for their own job security 🙁
I think we might be talking about 2 different things. He mentioned bookkeeping software. What you’re talking about is tax preparation software. I pay an accountant to prepare my taxes because they are pretty complicated, so the online offering like Turbo Tax or H&R Block charge me almost as much as the accountant.
That being said, I can correlate everything on a GnuCash report to a number in a tax form (excluding calculated numbers). If you can keep your books organized, preparing taxes become fairly trivial.
Additionally, keep in mind that in the US the tax code changes almost yearly. So no open-source/free solution will ever exist. At least, not fast enough for you to file your taxes by mid-April.
teco.sb,
I tried gnucash several years ago and came away disappointed.
https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/gnucash-could-be-a-quickbooks-killer/
Maybe I could learn to live with it, and I don’t know maybe it’s gotten better. Still, the lack of tax features is still a negative.
I’m well aware, nevertheless, it’s a problem for a pure linux accounting (unless you don’t mind going the route of entering your data on a website and have an accountant to do this for you). It’s a completely solvable problem, one that companies including turbotax, h&r block, and others solve every year, they just don’t offer linux support 🙁
Ideally the government wouldn’t effectively outsource the gathering of tax submissions to private companies because that’s where everything starts to breaks down and we’re at the mercy of private corporations.
In Sweden there is a lot of regulations around book keeping software. For example I am not allowed to manage the books in LibreOffice Calc or similar.
Note: In Sweden we use Kr or SEK which is the same; Swedish Krona. 100 SEK = 10,3 USD
Perhaps I confuse Accounting with Bookkeeping – I am not native English. With bookkeeping I imply the general the process of accounting but also sales tax management and a ton of economical rules that changes every year. For example how much am I allowed to spend on a lunch with you, am I allowed at a and in what contextl? And what about clothing. Then we have the procedures around how to pay the employees (me that is) that is changed radically recently. All this and more, with up to date rules is needed to be efficient.
The foundation in Swedish accounting is a set of accounts called BAS (www.bas.se) where 1910 is the cash, 1930 is the bank account and 2650 is the general sales tax account. Every time I purchase something for 100 SEK I book 100 SEK on 1930, 80 SEK on a spending account to tell what kind of expense this is and 20 SEK on a specifik Sales Tax Account (2641) . Every month/3-month/annually depending on the company I file the income tax to the Swedish IRS. This implies a special and up to date report. When filed I also need to create a transaction where the summary of 264* shall be booked towards 2650. When I pay or refund the sales tax I create a new transaction between 2650 and 1930 (bak account). To make this work there is a SRI-code on each account that is used for reporting and to make sure things end up on the right square in the reports.
The software needed is full of those rules and automatic transactions, and they all need to keep up to date. Changes comes every year. Besides, the rules are specific for Sweden. Denmark and Norway have different rules.
There used to be a few software options for Linux some years ago but they have mostly vanished. The general trend is now to move more of this software to the cloud, which make it available for Linux but shit expensive. Like 10 times. I pay 780 SEK annually for the software I am using and with everything I need would cost almost that every month for a cloud solution.
One of the major companies no longer have locally installed software.
I can mention that there in fact are ONE Linux bookkeeping software. It is a software from BL Admin (https://www.bjornlunden.se/ebokforing), it is a local java based client with cloud storage. This however will still require additional licenses for some of the services I plan to use that is included in the software I purchase today. I have evaluated this software several times and concluded I stay with the one I have. The option need to be more simple that to fire up the Virtualbox or an old laptop with crashed screen and Windows 7.
The main thing that is expensive is to close the books and make the final tax calculations my self every year. It is a costly process and if I want to be able to do this with any of the cloud options I need an additional 200-300 SEK per month. I have been searching for books and information on this process but honestly, it seems like a deep secret that is kept by the accountant firms and shall not be possible unless you have an accountant degree.
Last two years the process is simplified by Swedish IRS and there are in fact books now on how to do it your self.
An open source accounting software for companies need to be a general framework for accounting and a specific application for each country that is maintained. I think this shall be possible, there is a lot of reusable stuff out there. I am a Qt person which will work multi platform. Accounting is not an OS intensive task so multi platform shall be fairly easy. Perhaps one can combine it with a block chain to make it interested (but it will complicate things for the user though). This is however crucial that there are some educated economics involved to support with specification of the software, the reports and the automatic stuff.
ErikR,
It’s the same sort of thing here in the US, it’s just too complex IMHO. Things can change year to year, depending on the cities you work in and live in, the dates that you acquire new equipment to depreciate or go on business travel, etc. Keeping up with everything you need for your yearly/quarterly taxes is quite a hassle. With my income hiring an accountant is out of the question, but at least it helps to have software to tabulate the numbers. Unfortunately I haven’t found any software that does a great job guiding the user though tough tax questions, most of it just assumes you already know which IRS/state forms®ulations apply to you.
I see it as a guild, an accountant guild. The accountant guild have their guild secrets that we outside is not allowed to know. Everything to make us keep paying them to do things that, at least mathematically, is fairly simple.
Anyway, Sweden is not that volatile, dates are fairly strict but new laws are passed and makes effective twice a year normally which have to be considered. There is a pile of guild-books to purchase where everything is explained and the Swedish IRS have courses, for free I think. But open source is not generally written at daytime, it is a task after work. Few have time to spend on courses. Contributions can off course be spent on books but perhaps a evening hacker is not keen to read them.
But I am certain that if there is an accountant Linux enthusiast out there reading this blog an thinking that “hey, if I only to write code I would love to contribute to the open source world” he or she would be key to build an open source accountant software.
I used to work for the Swedish Governmental Social Security agency and that is a hell when it comes to volatile software. Laws are changing rapidly and sometimes shake the very foundation of how things work. So we centered it all around a rule engine. Every rule had a date span and we was in fact able to reapply rules retrospectively because an several year old value (income for example) was changed or because the rule changed and everything was recalculated. This beast calculated pension, sick leave support, parental leave support etc etc.
I think this is the way to go. A foundation that is common with accounts and stuff. A rule engine where rules are time spanned (from date and to date) when they apply. Perhaps (I am a Qt person) the foundation shall be typical a C++ framework and the rules and rule based UI shall be in JavaScript working on the C++ objects to acquire the changeability needed. C++ and QML like KDE and Jolla. You know how to patch the jolla; there is in general a QML-text file that can be patched on the phone. Sudo into root, find the file or get a patch-file, make changes and reboot to clear the cache. Viola, the annoying to loud volume warning is vanished of there are extra settings for something. I have also fixed bugs in my own software like this, on the phone using a terminal.
This is the kind of flexibility I would like for an accountant software as well, this is the kind of changeability that would allow for an open source global accounting software for small and medium companies, and associations.
GVim (or rather, Vim) is not obscure; it’s a standard editing app on most Unix/Linux systems now. Some of those were part of every X11 distribution but many have been superseded — you can get an ‘eyes’ app for the modern environments that fit onto panels and the like. Likewise with the calculators and calendar apps and Xterm; nobody would use it when the desktops have better replacements (and there were better terminals even in 1995).
As for C development I find Eclipse based IDEs quite irritating then I personally have opted for Vim on Windows on a daily bases. So Vim as obscure is certainly not true. I have couple of other developers who have opted for Vim also.
However in the two lists, there are quite many apps that I find personally quite interesting.
I adore the look of these X11 apps, each with its own little set of UI conventions and UI elements. But then things like menus and scrollbars don’t work and context menus spill over to the other screen, and I am immediately reminded why giving so much low-level UI control to the programmer by default is ultimately a bad idea