Useful Ubuntu Linux applications that you mightn’t have heard of

This is simply a list of some useful Ubuntu Linux applications that you mightn’t have heard of. This post has been inspired by the ubuntuforums.org thread: “Cool applications you use that others might not know of”

All applications listed below are available in Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) repositories. Links will bring you to packages information at packages.ubuntu.com where you’ll get all the information you need; link to homepage, source packages, current and original maintainer etc.

These are only a few personal choices of applications that I used to use, use currently, or am planning to use. When writing this post the Cool applications you use that others might not know of thread had 134 pages, so it’s full of suggestions and “unknown to you” software recommendations.

AllTray With AllTray you can dock any application with no native tray icon (like Evolution, Thunderbird, Terminals) into the system tray. A high-light feature is that a click on the “close” button will minimize back to system tray.

Comix is a comic book viewer. It reads zip, rar, tar, tar.gz and tar.bz2 archives (often called .cbz, .cbr and .cbt) as well as normal image files.

Cowbell is an elegant music organizer intended to make keeping your collection tidy both fun and easy. It allows viewing and editing of the tags, guessing of tag information with the help of Amazon Web Services and has an easy-to-use interface.

Devil’s Pie This tool will find windows as they are created and perform actions on them, such as resizing, moving to another workspace, or pinning them to all workspaces.

dvdisaster provides a margin of safety against data loss on CD and DVD media caused by scratches or aging media. It creates error correction data which is used to recover unreadable sectors if the disc becomes damaged at a later time.

ELinks is a feature-rich program for browsing the web in text mode. It is like enhanced Lynx and Links.

EasyTAG is an utility for viewing, editing and writing the ID3 tags of different audio files, using a GTK+ interface.

GCO (Gnome Comic Organizer) is a database for keeping track of your comics collection. It supports titles, publishers, types, writers, pencilers, inkers, cover prices, current prices, comments, and much more.

Gmount-iso is a small tool written using PyGTK and Glade. It allows you to easily mount your cd images. This is a frontend to the 'mount -o loop -t iso9660 foo.iso /mountpoint' command

Griffith Adding items to the movie collection is as quick and easy as typing the film title and selecting a supported source. Griffith will then try to fetch all the related information from the Web.

HomeBank is a fast, simple and easy to use program to manage your accounts. It differs from gnucash for the better look and feel, and for the greatest start-up speed.

Htop is an ncursed-based process viewer similar to top, but it allows to scroll the list vertically and horizontally to see all processes and their full command lines.

OnTV is a GNOME Applet written in Python using PyGTK, it uses XMLTV files to monitor current and upcoming TV programs.

PDFedit Complete editing of pdf documents is made possible with PDFedit. You can change either raw pdf objects (for advanced users) or use predefined gui functions.

Picard is the next generation MusicBrainz tagging application. This new tagging concept is album oriented, as opposed to track oriented like the others taggers are.

Planner is a Project Management application that supports Gantt charts, resource allocation and integration with other GNOME applications.

scrot (SCReen shOT) is a simple commandline screen capture utility that uses imlib2 to grab and save images. Multiple image formats are supported through imlib2’s dynamic saver modules.

StarDict is a cross-platform and international dictionary written in GTK+ 2.x. It has powerful features such as “Glob-style pattern matching”, “Scan selection word”, “Fuzzy search”, etc.

WeeChat (Wee Enhanced Environment for Chat) is a fast and light IRC client for many operating systems.

Workrave is a program that assists in the recovery and prevention of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). The program frequently alerts you to take micro-pauses, rest breaks and restricts you to your daily limit.

So what applications are you using, that I mightn’t have heard of?