Debian Package of the Day (static archived copy)

Entry submitted by Adam Victor Nazareth Brandizzi, Pedro Vaz de Mello de Medeiros and Pedro Araújo Chaves Júnior. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !

Gobby is a Free Software collaborative text editor. That means that various users can edit the same text file simultaneously.

Using Gobby is easy: just create a session, then other writers may connect to your host and subscribe to any publicly available documents in the Document List dialog, and/or create a new shared document. Files are opened in tabs in the main window, so that the user can edit them simultaneously. Any user can contribute with his own set of files to the pool of shared files, just like the session owner, and anyone can save a local copy of them.

The user interface is very clear and simple: the main window is divided in two parts: the text being edited on the top and a chat window below with an IRC look and feel (but only one IRC command is supported, though: the good old /me ;)). In the main window, each fragment of text is colour-coded to indicate which user wrote it. The list of currently connected users, along with their corresponding colours, can be checked in the Online node in the User List dialog.

Gobby has support for some common text-editing features such as auto indenting, tab-to-space replacement, smart Home key, font selecting, syntax highlighting by file type, etc. Gobby will try to guess the right file type, but if it doesn’t, syntax highlighting can be changed on the fly from a long drop-down menu list. It is also possible to define a password-protected session; this is useful if you want to control which users are allowed to connect.

The chat functionality provides a separate channel that allows authors to communicate and coordinate their efforts —even if they are not physically close to each other—, which can be particularly useful if they want to discuss, for instance, guidelines or other things that don’t exactly translate to text editing. Or you can just fire up Gobby to have a simple and lightweight chat session with some friends ;).

The Gobby developers also provide the specifications of the Obby protocol used for implementing the collaborative editor, sobby, the Obby dedicated server, and libobby, the library for developers interested in creating their own clients and servers.

Known issues:

There are some reports about crashes on the Gobby site. We have not observed any of them ourselves, though. On functionality, Gobby does not provide any Undo/Redo capabilities —and we have really missed them. Also, there is no way to keep track of deleted text. Another missing feature is a graphic representation of the cursors of all users and means to distinguish them from each other, but this functionality is already expected for Gobby v0.5.0.

License:

Gobby is licensed under the GNU General Public License (v2).

Availability:

Gobby is available in Debian Etch and Sid, as well as in the Ubuntu Universe since Breezy Badger. You can get more information at the Gobby home page.

Entry submitted by Gaurav Vaidya. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !

Fortune cookie programs store long lists of quotes, sayings, aphorisms, adages, IRC transcripts, and any other text which might be interesting. Since time immemorial (okay, okay, since 1979) Unix users have added fortune cookies to their .bashrc (or equivalent) files, displaying a random quote every time a terminal is created. Quotes are drawn from subjects and sources of interest to geeks, from William Shakespeare to Douglas Adams, from Ambrose Bierce to Ziggy, from Linus Torvalds to the Fortune editors themselves.

On Debian/Ubuntu, the fortune cookie program of choice is available through the package fortunes.

Usage

The program is ridiculously simple to run: executing /usr/games/fortune (or /usr/bin/fortune) displays a pithy quote:

       "I assure you the thought never even crossed my mind, lord."
       "Indeed?  Then if I were you I'd sue my face for slander."
               -- Terry Pratchett, "The Colour of Magic"

Or perhaps something insightful:

It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.  :-)
            -- Larry Wall in <199801141725.JAA07555@wall.org>

Or even self-referential:

This fortune would be seven words long if it were six words shorter.

Although the program works fine without any arguments, the following
may be helpful:

-o

Display only offensive fortunes (you will need to install the offensive fortunes first; they are available in the fortunes-off package).

-a

Display both offensive and non-offensive fortunes.

-w

Wait for a while after displaying the comment, but before exiting. The amount of time waited depends on the number of characters in the fortune displayed; longer quotes will be ‘waited for’ longer. Very nice for scripting; for instance, running while true; do fortune -w; done; in a Bourne shell will display fortune after fortune, with a convenient pause after each one. My preferred script, while true; do echo === `date` ===; fortune -w; echo; done; will do the same, except with a time-stamp at the top of each fortune.

Installing

To install, you will need to install the fortunes package. This package contains 15,000 quotes itself, and depends upon fortune-mod, which contains the executables, and fortunes-min, which contain other fortunes. These packages have been available in Debian and Ubuntu since long ago.

Other packages (available for both Debian and Ubuntu) allow you to install quotes in Chinese, Bulgarian, Portuguese, Czech, Slovak, German, Esperanto, Spanish, French, Gaelige (Irish), Italian, and Polish, as well as Debian hints and BOFH excuses.

The quotes used in this submission are from fortune-mod version 9708.

Entry based on submissions from Oliver Kiddle, Tore Morkemo and Gwern Branwen. Yes! Three independent readers wrote about it, it must be good :-)
Remember, DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !

Do you ever find that occasionally the mouse pointer obscures just the bit of the screen with the word you’re currently reading? Having to move the mouse or guess the word under the pointer is only a minor irritation but it can be an irritation none-the-less.

Unclutter is a small but unique package for X11. What it does is very simple: if you aren’t using the mouse, it hides the mouse. This is useful simply because if you aren’t using the pointer, there’s no reason for it to be visible. This may not sound particularly useful, but making the mouse be invisible frees up screen real estate, prevents it from distracting you, and just generally makes for a much more pleasant experience, particularly when reading a document or using primarily keyboard-based applications.

Unclutter is easy to use. Just put a line like this in your .xsession, .gnomerc, “Startup Programs” or wherever you enter commands to be run at startup/login:

unclutter &

Now, if you stop moving your mouse, the cursor will disappear after 5 seconds.

Unclutter has a few nice arguments worth checking out:

• -idle 2 : hide the mouse after 2 seconds, instead of the default (5).
• -keystroke : tells unclutter to hide the mouse cursor when you start typing on the keyboard.
• -not : don’t hide the cursor in windows listed as arguments.

There are more options, just check out the man page.

Unclutter is a maintained, stable & largely bug-free package which has been included in basically all versions of Debian and Ubuntu.

Entry submitted by arno. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !

FIGlet is a command line tool. It’s purpose is to draw nicely formatted big characters. For example, the output of command figlet debian is:

_ _ _
__| | ___| |__ (_) __ _ _ __
/ _` |/ _ \ ‘_ \| |/ _` | ‘_ \
| (_| | __/ |_) | | (_| | | | |
\__,_|\___|_.__/|_|\__,_|_| |_|

To get more fancy outputs, FIGlet comes with a set of 18 fonts, and more than 400 fonts are available for download. For example, bubble font writes each character encircled in a bubble, and script font imitates handwriting. You can get the list of installed fonts, along with output samples, with command showfigfonts. Here is output of figlet -f script debian:

_
| | | o
__| _ | | __, _ _
/ | |/ |/ \_| / | / |/ |
\_/|_/|__/\_/ |_/\_/|_/ | |_/

FIGlet stands for Frank, Ian and Glenn’s LETters, because it was inspired by Frank’s email signature, written (mostly) by Glenn, and Ian helped. First version was written in spring 1991. FIGlet has since become a well known software in (and even outside) the UNIX world, and has been declined in multiple ways, like a XChat, or an Eclipse plug-in, a PHP class, and many web based FIGlets.

Related software

People who like to write fun stuff may also be interested in command banner from package bsdmainutils. It also outputs large characters, but unlike FIGlet, draws them vertically. It was not designed as a fun stuff, but as a way to separate printings documents from each other. Other tools have been designed specifically to write fun stuff. Among them, Cowsay is one of the most worthwhile. Toilet is very similar to FIGlet for Unicode systems. It comes with many new features, such as colour fonts, or HTML and SVG output.

Links:

• FIGlet homepage
• The FIGlet Fonts Library
• A history of FIGlet

So, FIGlet is a really nice software that will make your emails cool and pleasant. But please, do not overuse it in mailing lists!

FIGlet is available in both Debian and Ubuntu in all distributions.

MultiTail is an extremely configurable monitoring tool. With it one can monitor not only logfiles but also output of other commands as well (like rsstail, wtmptail (see users login and logout), nagtail (for nagios status).

MultiTail is a tool for the console. One can also run it, of course, in a terminal window.

When it runs, it can splitup the terminal in multiple smaller windows:

It can not only display in seperate windows but merge as well. So you can display the apache error logging merged with the access logging and if you like you can merge the output of, say, ping and rsstail as well. There are no limits to the number of windows or number of files/commands you merge.

A powerful feature is that it can apply colorschemes:

Multitail in action inside a gnome-terminal:

Colorschemes are available for all major applications (postfix, apache, sendmail, tcpdump, squid, etc), and adding new ones can be done easily.

Of course it can also filter out lines (or parts of lines) like with grep and sed but it can also convert parts of lines. E.g. in squid and qmail logging the timestamp can be converted to something more readable. It can also convert ip-addresses, errno-numbers and lots more. And if you would like to extend the conversions, you can let MultiTail invoke external scripts (perl, bash, python, etc.) for these conversions. Those external scripts can be used for the coloring as well.

Everything MultiTail can do can be configured in the configuration-file or via the commandline. As the number of options it has are quite large, it has on-line help as well. Also, if one doesn’t like commandline parameters then everything can be setup via interactive menus. When that is finished, MultiTail can write a shell-script to disk with which MultiTail can be started exactly like it ran previously.

It has too many features to list here, but they’re all listed here.

MultiTail is available in Debian stable (3.4.8), testing/unstable (4.2.0) and experimental (4.3.1) and in Ubuntu since Warty. The latest upstream version is 4.3.3. MultiTail is actively maintained. Requests for new functionality are very welcome and most of the time implemented in a few days. Bugreports too, of course.

Target users: everyone who uses the ‘tail’ command

Links:

• multitail’s homepage: http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/
• More screenshots http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/screenshots.html