 Tool of the Month: Netwox and Netwag
The featured tool this month was sent in by Laurent Constantin, maintainer of Netwox and Netwag. Netwox is a "network toolbox" that contains a wide variety of network testing tools — as well as a few miscellaneous goodies that might come in handy. Netwag is a GUI front-end for Netwox that makes Netwox even easier to use.
July 2004 Tool of the Month: rpl
This month, I'll introduce a tool that is handy for admins, programmers, and anybody who works with text files on a regular basis. The utility is rpl, short for "replace strings", which is exactly what it does. rpl is a simple utility that searches files for a text string and replaces that text string with another that you specify.
June 2004 Tool of the Month: Debian Goodies
Zonker covers an interesting Debian package. The "Debian Goodies" package is actually a collection of several small apps that work with the Debian packaging system.
May 2004 Tool of the Month: EasyTAG and retawq
This month, I 'll cover a couple of tools that I've found useful lately. The first is EasyTAG, a program for viewing and editing the ID3 tags of MP3s, Ogg Vorbis files and other files that use ID3 tags. The other application is retawq, a text-mode Web browser with some interesting features.
April 2004 Tool of the Month: gLabels
This month, I'll introduce an application I stumbled on while trying out the latest version of GNOME. One of the "rules" for *nix applications is that every program should do one thing and do it well. That's a rule that gLabels adheres to very well.
March 2004 Tool of the Month: ApacheTop & iftop
Zonker covers two tools this month: ApacheTop and iftop. ApacheTop is used to monitor Apache in real time and generate a top-like output. iftop displays a table of current bandwidth usage in a top-like format.
February 2004 Tool of the Month: Kuake & XBindKeys
This month, I have a couple of interesting tools you might want to add to your software toolbox. The first is Kuake, a console application with a twist. The second is XBindKeys, a program that you can use to create hotkey combinations to launch your most-often used applications and scripts in X.
January 2004 Tool of the Month: cdargs
This month, I'll discuss cdargs, a tool that simplifies using the command line. cdargs is a handy little utility that provides browsing and bookmarks for cd.
December 2003 Tool of the Month: Perltidy and Snownews
This month, I have two helpful programs to discuss. The first is Perltidy, a program that helps make Perl scripts more readable. The other is Snownews, a console-based RSS aggregator.
November 2003 Tool of the Month: Powertweak Linux and XFce Desktop Environment
This month, I want to cover programs — the first is a program called Powertweak Linux, which allows the user to tweak system settings and view information system information. The second program is the XFce Desktop Environment. I've been using XFce off and on for a number of years now, but I'm really hooked on XFce 4.
October 2003 Tool of the Month: Popsneaker
This month, I'll discuss Popsneaker, a program that is designed to do away with all the waiting for unwanted email.
September 2003 Tool of the Month: XtermControl and e2undel
This month, I'm going to look at two small programs that can be useful from time to time. The first is XtermControl, a nice little tool for changing the parameters of a running xterm. The second is e2undel, a program for recovering recently deleted files from Ext2 filesystems.
August 2003 Tool of the Month: apt-iselect
Since the package-creation tools covered recently have been such a hit, I'll touch on another package-related tool this month. In this column, I present a tool that makes installing packages on Debian GNU/Linux systems even easier. The tool is an interactive tool called apt-iselect that uses apt-cache to search for packages matching one or more terms using a text-mode menu.
July 2003 Tool of the Month: CheckInstall
There comes a time in every admin's life when you have to face creating your own packages for your favorite distribution. Maybe there's a package you want to use that isn't prepared by your favorite vendor, or maybe you just haven't gotten around to making a package for the latest bleeding-edge release of your favorite application. It can take quite a while after a major release of KDE, for example, before some of the distribution vendors make packages available. Or, maybe you want to distribute a package that you're responsible for — either to company machines that you're responsible for, or to the world at large.
June 2003 Tool of the Month: Reconstructing RPMs
This month, I'm going to talk about a nifty program I found on Freshmeat not long ago — rpmrebuild. This is one program that I wish I'd had years ago. As the name suggests, it's a tool for rebuilding RPMs, which it does this by reconstructing the package from files installed on your system and information in the RPM database.
May 2003 Tool of the Month: Index and MultiTail
This month I'm going to talk about two smaller tools that I like. One is the ultimate in minimalist personal databases, and the other is an extension of an idea that's been with Unix for a long time.
April 2003 Tool of the Month: Keeping Users in Check
This month, I'm covering two tools — the first is scponly, a tool that allows you to restrict users to using scp to copy files (so they can't get shell access), and the other is the KNOPPIX live-on-CD Linux distribution.
December 2002 Tools of the Month: KnowIt and Memtest86
This month, I'm writing about two programs that I find fairly useful -- one I've been using every day since I discovered it, and the other I only need to
use occasionally when I'm testing hardware.
November 2002 Tool of the Month: K3b
Do you miss the nice, slick GUI CD burning programs under Windows and Mac OS X? Or just want to stop using command-line tools to burn your CDs? K3b might just be what the doctor ordered.
September 2002 Tool of the Month: tui-sh
This month Zonker features not one, not two, but more than a dozen shell scripts that are included with a package called "tui-sh," short for "Texts Users Interfaces on Shell." Now, the odds are you won't make use of all the scripts, but there's something for almost anyone in this collection of shell scripts.
August 2002 Tool of the Month: MlView
Zonker looks at an XML editor/validator called MlView. MlView is an XML editor/validator that has some features that may be of interest to anyone working with XML documents.
July 2002 Tool of the Month: Lay Siege to Your Web Site
Efficiently running Web servers is more of an art than a science. You need to have a way to benchmark your servers to see what they can take when real users get a crack at them. Joe looks at two tools, scout and siege, that you can use to stress-test your Web sites.
June 2002 Tool of the Month: MySQL Backup
Backing up data stored on a MySQL database isn't too hard using mysqldump, but I'm always looking for ways to make my life easier. So, when I stumbled upon MySQL Backup, I decided to give it a try.
May 2002 Tool of the Month: Web Mail Folder
Web Mail Folder (WMF) can convert mail to HTML. Zonker discusses configuration and use of WMF and shows how to create an HTML archive using WMF and procmail.
April 2002 Tool of the Month: Incyte Project Manager
Zonker reports on an open source project management solution that's Web-accessible and easy to use.
March 2002 Tool of the Month: rain
Zonker showcases a packet builder that can help you stress-test your hardware and software.
February 2002 Tool of the Month: TWiki
Zonker turns the spotlight on TWiki, a tool for creating collaborative online environments where potentially anyone can add or edit material.
December 2001 Tool of the Month: Vipul's Razor
There are few things in life that annoy me as much as spam -- and I'm not talking about the canned meat by-product variety. Unsolicited ads are annoying in any form, but the nature of spam is parasitic as well: it steals time and bandwidth. So, for my money, anything that helps defeat spam is a Good Thing.
November 2001 Tool of the Month: J-Pilot
If you're like me, you'd forget everything without a trusty PIM. For me, it's a rapidly aging Palm III. Unfortunately, Palm doesn't produce software for operating systems other than Windows and the MacOS. Naturally, *nix geeks don't want to have to maintain a Windows system just to sync their Palm Pilot or Palm compatible. Luckily, there are some options.
October 2001 Tool of the Month: Quanta Plus
Zonker's been using Vim, but is he about to make the Quanta leap?
September 2001 Tool of the Month: HTML Tidy
One thing I love about the UNIX philosophy is the idea that each program should do one job and do it really well. There are zillions of small tools for UNIX-type OSes that make life much easier and are hugely useful, but they don't necessarily get written about. They certainly don't receive the same kind of coverage that Apache and Sendmail receive. One of my favorites, HTML Tidy, is a tool for HTML/Web development that I think will interest a lot of folks. HTML Tidy cleans up HTML produced by WYSIWYG editors and such.
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