Debian Package of the Day (static archived copy)

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

Zim is a desktop wiki. It’s a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor and works like a wiki, so you can have links between your pages, and pages are stored in a hierarchical structure, which makes them easy and to browse. Zim is the perfect application to take notes and keep TODO lists somewhere in an organized fashion. It is very easy to use and you can hide it in the traycon to keep it handy.

It’s written in GTK2-Perl, it’s very small and fast. You don’t need to run a Web server, as required for a standard Wiki like Mediawiki, or to run mono like Tomboy. If you run KDE, a similar program is BasKet, but BasKet is more oriented to note-taking and it it is not supposed to be a desktop wiki.

Files are stored as plain text files and organized in directories, so you can even manage them with VCS like Subversion.

Also, it allows you have multiple repositories independent of each other.

Zim is available in Debian etch and sid (but not in sarge). It’s also available in Ubuntu since Dapper. The only known bug that looks annoying is that it’s currently not possible to print notes from zim (one can still print the text files instead).

Screenshots

Here you have some screenshots taken from zim’s webpage:

The editor window with all widgets visible.

Minimalistic editor window with some links.

Showing the calendar and spell checking in action.

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

Quick overview

Krusader is the most advanced twin panel file manager for Linux with a bundle of features, that can not be all included in this simple package presentation.

Program description

Krusader as an advanced twin-panel (commander-style) file-manager provides all the file-management features you could possibly want. Its simple and straight forward interface provides great working environment for newbies as well as more expert users. While its features are usually described through extended and advanced functionality, it is basically still a file manager for everyone with simple ways for copying, moving, deleting, packing, editing and viewing files. on more advanced levels it features extensive archive handling, mounted file system support, FTP, an advanced search module, a text viewer/editor, directory synchronization, support for file content comparisons, powerful batch renaming, and a lot of other things only real expert users use.

Krusader follows the same paradigm as legendary console based Midnight Commander and windows rival Total Commander. Among Linux alternatives for graphical interface the closest is GNOME commander.

To be just a bit more verbose, Krusader uses two powerful panels, command line and optional terminal emulator, strong keyboard orientation and with it the ability to perform all functions without the mouse. Or with it, if you prefer it that way. It has context-dependent invocation of scripts and programs, history of almost everything, virtual file systems for remote connections, support for many archives, search results and synchronizer, a really powerful internal viewer and editor, advanced searching capabilities on the file system, but also inside archives and search content on remote file systems.
It has several panel view modes via the PopUp panel, locate GUI frontend and separate synchronize directories, mount-manager and disk usage module. It’s archive handling capabilities are wide in features and supported archives types. It utilizes many checksum creation-verification mechanisms, calculates occupied space of files and folders, archives and remote file systems, file splitter and synchronized browsing, it provides directory comparison and filtering and also file compare by content via external diff programs. It integrates powerful renaming via Krename. It simplifies overview and changing of file permissions and ownership with support for numeric permissions, selection filters in synchronizer and searcher. It is fully mimetype-aware, uses tabbed panels and integrates editor/viewer.

Screenshots

Screenshots from Krusader homepage.
Click on picture to see large version.

Additional Information

• Homepage: krusader.org
• Forum: krusader phpBB
• Programming language: C++ on Qt/KDE framework.
• Archive support: ace, arj, bzip2, deb, gzip, iso, lha, rar, rpm, tar, zip and 7-zip.
• Connections: ftp, sftp, lan, samba, NFS, fish.
• Checksum: md5, sha1, sha256, sha224, sha256, sha384, sha512, tiger, whirlpool, cfv and crc.
• External diff support: Kompare, Kdiff3 or xxdiff.
• Recommended packages: krename, kompare, kmail.
• Availability: Latest version are available both in Debian and Ubuntu. You also have an updated distro list at Distrowatch.

Last words

Krusader project gets a lot of appraisal in reviews. Still, it’s twin panel paradigm somehow, makes users distant. From early beginnings of thin panel file managers, the idea of constantly connected source and destination panels gives an impression of geeky interface and usage. It gets down to simple solution. Use it once and you will never look back.

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

Einstein is a game for playing a type of puzzle, attributed to Albert Einstein (hence the name). In its original form, the riddle asks the question “Who owns the fish?” and the player is given hints like “The Englishman lives in the red house” and “The owner of the green house drinks coffee”. The riddle can be solved by placing the five neighbours to the correct order and deducing the nationalities, house colors, favorite drinks, pets and the type of cigarettes they smoke.

In Einstein, the player is given 6 groups of different types of tiles, with 6 tiles in each and a number of hints. Only one type of tiles can be found in a row. There are four different types of hints.

• X is in between Y and Z hints tell that the three tiles in question are in successive columns, but the order of Y and Z is not fixed.
• X is on the right side of Y hints tell how the two tiles are situated relative to each other, but they may have one or more columns in between of them.
• X is next to Y hints tell that the two tiles are in neighbouring columns.
• Finally, the X is in the same column as Y hints tell that the two tiles are, well, in the same column.

The gameplay consists of elimination and deduction according to the hints. For example, the “x … I” rule above reveals that “x” can’t be in the rightmost column since that would leave no room for having “I” anywhere. A click of the right mouse button removes that tile from consideration. Left clicks are conversely used to mark that the tile in question is in the claimed position. Unneeded hints can be removed from view by right clicks too.

Random clicking or guessing rarely lead anywhere, since the game mercilessly declares the game over from one wrong guess.

Einstein’s homepage is at http://games.flowix.com
It is available in Debian unstable and Etch. And in Ubuntu since Feisty.

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

ccze is a log coloriser. It can parse log files, understand them (with regexes), and displays a nicely formatted output. It becomes easier to catch important information from a log file.

To cope with different kind of logs, ccze uses different plugins, each able to understand one type of file. Currently, ccze support 19 different plugins, such as exim, httpd, procmail, and much more. If a line is recognized by no plugin, a default parsing and coloration are available. You can also add support for a new type of file, by creating a plugin and copying it in /usr/lib/ccze, or $HOME/.ccze.

By default, ccze uses ncurses for output, but you can also display on standard output, or to format a report in html. Czze is based on colorizer, an older log coloriser. Actually, ccze was a rewrite in C language to make it faster (coloriser was written in perl language).

Related tools

Other log colorizer in Debian and Ubuntu include lwatch and loco. Loco is a nice tool, but only uses a generic parser. Therefore, output is sometimes less accurate than ccze. With lwatch, you can define your regexps in a configuration file. So, it’s more easy to add a new type of file. Lwatch reads data from named fifo, so it is not really suitable for use from the command line.

Target Users:

• System administrators.
• Users that watch their log regularly, and/or need to get a quick grasp of what’s going on their system.

Further reading:

Loganalysis.Org has online bibliography on logging and related topics. You can consult it at http://www.loganalysis.org/frames/left-navbar-library.html

Links:

• ccze homepage
• ccze documentation
• Example of html output (1)
• Example of html output (2)

Latest ccze release is available in both Debian and Ubuntu.

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

Agave (formerly GNOME Colorscheme) is a simple GNOME utility for generating colour schemes.

Select a base colour and Agave will suggest a small set of colours which complement it. You can choose from several types of colour scheme; for example, selecting ‘Monochrome’ results in a scheme of different shades of the same colour, whereas ‘Complements’ just gives two colours which complement each other. If the scheme Agave suggests isn’t ideal, you can increase and decrease both the brightness and saturation of the scheme as a whole using the buttons on the toolbar.

You can select any colour on the screen as a base colour by using the ‘dropper’ tool (hidden away in the colour picker dialog). Three different representations of the colours in your colour scheme are given: Hex, RGB, and HSV, and copying the colours into a graphics application is simply a matter of dragging-and-dropping them. If you design websites and edit CSS, Agave may come in useful - particularly when your imagination fails you. The random button generates a random colour scheme, and repeatedly pressing it soon results in a usable combination of colours for you to use.

A small irritation is the limited number of colours allowed per colour scheme. While 2-3 colours may be fine when decorating a room, websites and graphics projects often require several more. Apart from this, Agave appears to have no major bugs, and most of the issues filed in its bug tracker are feature requests. There are several translations available, too. KColorEdit (the KDE equivalent) can handle colour palettes, which makes it more useful to graphics designers at the moment. However, Agave is still a young project and offers some novel features which anyone working with colour will appreciate.

Agave is available in Ubuntu Edgy (universe) and Debian Etch.

Links

• Agave home page
• Project page on Gna!
• Screenshot gallery