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Time Saving Linux Desktop Tips?
dan_polt asks: "I currently use a Linux desktop system, at work. One of the great things about the Linux desktop is that there are lots of ways to save a lot of time from useful widgets and configuration to minimize the pain of repetitive tasks. Most of my work involves web/e-Mail/SSH access, and I have a very high spec'd machine with dual-head 1600x1200 screens. What software or configuration tips might Slashdot have for me to: make better use of my time; make the most of my screen real estate; and make my use of the desktop more effective?"
1. Give me your machine.
2. You have more free time.
3. ???
4. Profit!
Don't be posting to Slashdot and reading the trolls you will receive in response instead of working on that high-spec'd dual headed monster you got.
;)
That'll save you a ton more time than any of the advice given here
Personally, I have tried to use as much as I can via Putty (SSH+screen) and keep everything I do in one window. It cuts down on how much I have taking up my real estate and it seems to make me more productive.
Even with a 23" LCD it's nice to have everything in one place.
Try watching Star Wars and working at the same time! Wait a sec, maybe that wouldn't work...
make better use of my time
Quit f-ing around on Slashdot and get back to work!
First thing you do to increase productivity is turn off all the blinkenlight widgetry. Even if the frenetic distractions every second don't give you seizures, they'll certainly slow your mental processes down.
;)
Then, open a web browser in one window and a terminal in the other and get to work you slacker!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I use Linux mostly at work as well, I do work in a Windows-centric environment so I use VMWare to run Windows. Otherwise I would rather just use the virtual consoles, with ssh, elinks (for browsing), and rarely X. I do find X to be useful for things that I must use it for, but for the most productivity, nothing beats a console.
Get Slashdot to space the posts 10 hours apart. That'll increase geek-productivity worldwide in no time.
#!/bin/sh /usr/local/bin/games
rm -f
Engineering is the art of compromise.
GNU Screen is a featured packed window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes. You can detach from remote screen sessions and the program will continue to run. You can then re-attach later; an essential feature if you use ssh alot.
Just enter in Konqueror
fish://user@yourdomain.com
(yes that is fish) and you will be asked for your ssh password.
Your remote files appear in Konqueror & you can then copy/paste etc to your local filesystem.
See, Taco! I told you if you started filtering dupes, people would find a way to complain!
Back to the drawing board...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Of the four or so high-content-rate sites I frequent, none of them had anything happening in the last 10 hours. Would you prefer that Slashdot lower their content standards even further? Is that even possible?
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
What window manager/desktop environment are you using? In general, I would say make use of what you already have. Assuming you use FireFox, make liberal use of the tabs function; I prefer about five per window on my 1280x1024 single screen system, so you could probably do more without the tabs becoming too small. Also, when SSHing or doing general terminal work, use a terminal with tabs. The Gnome terminal will do this, but multi-aterm is less of a resource hog. (For some reason I can't seem to copy and paste into multi-aterm, something I can do in the Gnome term. If there's a way around this I would be interested; the copy and pasting is helpful.) I know this is not much, but I usually find that making more efficient use of your environment is more something to sit and think about a bit. It's better to try to work with what you have than to go and install a bunch of applications that may or may not help.
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
http://hocwp.free.fr/xbindkeys/xbindkeys.html
Some good ones from my .xbindkeysrc:
"xmms --stop" Mod4 + Up
"xmms --play-pause" Mod4 + Down
"xmms --fwd" Mod4 + Right
"xmms --rew" Mod4 + Left
"emacs" Mod4 + e
"firefox" Mod4 + m
"oocalc ~/aspreadsheet.sxc" Mod4 + c
There were 10 hours and 26 minutes between front page posts.
Given a choice between a few articles of high quality and many articles of low quality, I'd take fewer articles.
Of course, that's a false choice, in two senses. First, there's no correlation between the number of articles and the quantity of articles. Second, it's not a choice Slashdot offers.
Setting up an efficient workspace depends a lot on what exactly you do most of the time and how you prefer to work.
Keeping in mind that these tips might not be at all applicable to you, here are a few things I've found that help me to be more efficient.
When doing software development, I like to keep code open in one window and documentation open in another. This is much more useful if your working with an unfamiliar language or API.
When I'm doing web design or coding in PHP I like to keep code open in one window and a web browser open in the other for testing.
Avoid keeping email or IM clients open at all times one one monitor. Even if you are in regular communication with co-workers having these things open all the time is a great distraction.
Choose a good Desktop Environment. While I like KDE for regular non-work stuff, I find that I'm often a lot more productive using WindowMaker, not really sure why this is though to be honest.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Well, it is Thanksgiving weekend. Most people are out doing stuff with their physical world friends.
Some of the ads are actually useful. My business partner's going to get a gift from ThinkGeek (better not say what it is here since he might be watching!) And it looks like I'll be using ServerBeach for my next venture. So I wouldn't give up on ads, and as you say I like supporting Slashdot.
As for your substantiative criticisms, are we really bleeding users? I certainly haven't noticed any lack of comments. In fact, it might not be so bad if we did. It sure was nice when I could actually read every comment on the articles that interested me. Now I'm lucky if I can finish the first page of ten!
Digg is so different from Slashdot in my experience that I don't see them as competitors. I visited there, didn't see what the fuss was about, and came back here.
That being said, to me it's always been about the comments, and the rich experience they bring us here. For example, I've wanted to learn about on-demand water heaters for some time, and all someone had to do was post an article about some bogus new on-demand technology, and whammo! I found out pretty much everything a person could conceivably want to know about them.
The moderation system is clever, and really works, and that seems to be the main value added that Slashdot's founders have created. Other than that, it's been being in the right place at the right time and having the right idea.
As long as there's a good and active user community here, I'm still loyal to it. The founders aren't the most literate bunch in the world, and they make all kinds of silly mistakes, but this place seems to work and generate interesting stuff, and for that I'm happy.
D
I press apple-space,j,c,k,j,n,s,n.
sounds pretty good but typing all of those commas would just frustrate me.
1) Don't be afraid to use newer versions of software, but don't try upgrading when you have deadlines pending. Switching from things like XTerm to more modern terminals (Gnome terminal, KDE's term app, whatever) will benefit you in the long run, but there's always quirks that will pop up, especially if the change requires installation or upgrading libraries. Be willing to try new software, but don't be too anxious.
2) Just like your desk, find out what needs to be where by trying new things. I find that email needs to be full-screen on a second monitor, and 'everything else' belongs on my l arger primary. I keep a few SSH terms open in virtual desktops so that I can have an open console when the poop hits the fan, but they're out of the way the rest of the time.
3) Use rsync or tar to backup your home directory frequently, because when you need to restore, you'll be glad you did. Most programming conventions in Linux make this much easier than in (say) Windows, as you don't have to worry about app config stored in weird places (registry), but you still need to be anal about backups.
4) Turn off the silly services to save CPU and Memory. 'chkconfig' in many modern distros (primarily redhat-based) will show you what's going to start at boot - turn off telnet, ftp (if you can use sftp), and the nfs daemons if you won't be serving NFS. Defaults suck, spend a few minutes tweaking these things and it'll help you much in the future.
5) Learn your favorite window manager well. If it's Gnome, or KDE, or whatever, learn it. Those of us who have been using Windows for a decade know the ins-and-outs of the Explorer interface, and it really saves us time - learning their equivalents in Linux will also save you time.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
The question you should ask is why the hell your company is giving you a "very high spec'd machine with dual-head 1600x1200 screens." if your work only "involves web/e-Mail/SSH access".
Really; is your company's IT department stupid? Is your company run by dot-com-bubble-wanna-be's who want to repeat the past? When your tasks are so system-resource-undemanding, why did they pay for that machine for you? You could do your work on a 486! Literally!
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Learn ruby/perl/python/something and automate *everything* the each time you find yourself repeating a task that could be easily parametrized. Most of this is an attitude thing. If repetitive tasks don't annoy you, then you're not going to be able to eliminate them from your life. It will never seem worth the effort.
Also, get a decent window manager like ion and learn its shortcuts. Developing more than a passing knowledge of Ion and Vim has doubled my productivity when debugging code. Ion makes one monitor feel like two, so I can imagine that on two it would be pretty damn good.
Install Microsoft Windows.
I've mentioned it before and I'll mention it again. I think we could use moderated stories. You could browse at +5 stories to cut out the crap or at 0: fark style. Moderate a story -1: dupe or +1: headline. Any reasons not to implement this?
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
As for your substantiative criticisms, are we really bleeding users?
Yes. Six to twelve months ago, there were a few news stories about the Slashdot effect losing its power, and since then, the traffic analyses a few companies do have shown Slashdot to be receiving less traffic. To add my own anecdote, I've noticed a number of the smarter users who used to contribute here no longer do, and I've certainly been coming less often.
The type of users that are staying is of crucial importance. I've noticed the same thing happen to quite a few Usenet newsgroups. A bunch of newbies come in and annoy people, the signal:noise ratio goes down, the regular contributers/experts leave, and a year later, the place is full of newbie noise and no real answers.
Slashdot can survive pretty much anything, except for one thing: losing the smart contributors. In the past year or so, I've noticed the quality of comments declining rapidly, and if this continues as it has been, I fully expect Slashdot to be a complete joke a year from now.
Making better use of your desktop real estate means getting rid of a lot of junk. If you haven't already, I'd try saying goodbye to KDE/Gnome and getting the lightest possible window manager for the job: That's Fluxbox, ICEwm, Fvwm, or the desktop environment Xfce. (I'm low on sadism, so I won't recommend TWM. Anybody that 1337 wouldn't be posting this question.) This doesn't sound like much, but trust me, when you do away with that extra time waiting for KDE to load, you'll be faster and only have (in Fluxbox's case) a tiny slit in your way. No icons cluttering things up (yeah, we need a home directory icon on the desktop when it's in our menu, too! Sheesh!). Every Linux program on your system can be started from any window manager's menu, it's just a matter of editing the menu to launch the program. Too bothered to edit text menus? Then from the console, try "kicker" for KDE's panel, "gnome-panel" for Gnome's, and "xfce4-panel" for Xfce's, depending on what you have installed. I've tried them all and they work even from TWM!
As for time-saving: the key here is "automate". Anything you type in a terminal more than once is grounds for automation. Simply take the same commands you type and save them on a line each in a plain text file with the line "#!/bin/bash" at the top and the line "end" at the bottom. Save that file somewhere in your executable path (type "echo $PATH" if you don't know), and type "chmod +x [name of your program]". You can now execute it just like any other system program.
The next level of automation is programs that require interaction. Two work-arounds exist for this: "Here" documents are little scriptlets you can slip into Bash scripts to do simple keyboard commands for interacting with command-line programs that insist on recieving input. The more sophisticated approach is Tcl/Tk's "expect", which can be used to script damn-near anything (take a command-line web browser like lynx and feed it an expect script with the right instructions, and you can auto-post B1FF comments to Slashdot, even! (Provided you had a nick signed in.), sorry, guys, the secret's out!) I can't think of anything having to do with ssh and email accounts that couldn't be handled with all of the above.
This might be overkill, but anybody who's read "Beginning Linux Programming" by Neil Matthew and Richard Stones, courtesy of www.wrox.com, wouldn't have to post this question. I promise you could skip the GTK and Qt parts and brush up on Bash, at least, which is easier than BASIC on the Apple ][.
Doubtless, part of the indiference/hostility in here is because this is also the kind of question spammers ask, and you wouldn't find any people on Slashdot who deal with too much spam, now would you? I don't mind answering because, if you're a *good* wizard, you deserve to know this stuff as well as I do, and if you're a *bad* wizard, I haven't given you a damn thing you couldn't have gotten from a few hours of Googling.
It might embarrass the editors.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Actually you were right both times. Posting the same article 6 times (as was done a few days ago) shows there is no correlation betwen the number of articles posted and the quantity. It was 1 article (number) posted 6 times (quantity). It's slash-math. Don't try to understand it - it'll give you a brain aneurism :-)
He already has the operating system set up... you should really read the post before replying.
If you crank up your history list to a few thousand entries and set it to forget dupes, you can recall any command you've issued in the last couple of months with just a couple of keystrokes.
Easy
execute the following as root:
echo "127.0.0.1 slashdot.org www.slashdot.org" >>
After this one command, you will start making better use of your time.
Almost every nerd I know (myself included) wastes more time trying to set up the machine 'just so' to make every task super conveinent and easy than they actually save. I suggest getting the machine in a minimally working configuration and only trying to save time when a task becomes really burdensome and repetitive. Even then I would think twice and ask how much time it really takes and how much time it would take to make it faster.
Of course that wouldn't be anywhere near as much fun. That's what you should do if you are really interested in saving time. If you just want to have the enjoyment of knowing your machine is optimally set up to do whatever it is you do then follow the other suggestions you find here.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
I was, once upon a time, a young developer in the same position. I had a fast computer, dual flat screens, and free reign to do as I pleased. Here is what I found to be most helpful (assuming you are using KDE/Gnome, but should be appropriate to most desktop environments):
* Create key bindings. If you don't go to the mouse as often, not only will you be more productive, but you will also prevent RSI's. I could open a terminal window, browser, maximize both, and move either to another virtual desktop with just two fingers on the left hand.
* speaking of virtual desktops, Use virtual desktops. I like having everything maximized, but I quickly run out of space that way. Normally, I have the terminals on one desktop, the code on another, my reference documents/browser windows on the third, and then the forth for everything else --normally a running version of the project I'm fixing. Figure out what apps you use most, and designate a v.desk to each which makes it easier for the mind to find that information it was looking for.
* Love the terminal window. By making use of aliases, scripts and various other 'hacks,' most tasks can be boiled down to a handful of keystrokes. It is worth the time to learn either shell scripting and/or perl so that more complicated tasks can still be done rapidly with a reduced chance of error.
* Thing about the ergonomics. You are obviously a professional computer jockey, otherwise you wouldn't have dual monitors being driven by linux. Until your computer responds to 'computer,' you're going to need your wrists, so take five minutes to consider how you could improve the layout to minimize the chances of an RSI or other strains and pains -- this includes neck strains which is a very common pain resulting from dual monitors. Although this is not a time saving tip per se, it will add years to your useful geek life.
Well, that is all of the advice I can think of right now. The most important thing you need to consider is ways to eliminate repetition. Anytime I type anything more than 3 times, or click an icon that is more than 2 levels deep, I will consider, if only for a second, alternative means to envoking that task.
Good luck and good hunting.
Yes, and it does seem to be down. Try enlightenment.org.au, enlightenment.sf.net, or http://get-e.org/ (thanks to the helpful people in ##enlightenment at freenode)
About: root-tail is a program that allows printing of text directly to the X11 root window wherever you choose, much like running rxvt with a pixmap background but without the hassle and with more features.
Some code I use with it (there's TONS of options):
Dollar Highway Financial News
Umm... Some articles posted within the 10 hours before this one include this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one.
Go Here, I think that enlightment.org is down,but definitely check it out. It's my fav. Linux. Go to EliveCd to get a nice live version that you can install to the hard drive if u like it enough. Then check out this review for some good tips. Enjoy:)
I recommend running Xdmx and xmove. Possibly NX as well.
Xdmx will allow you to have very, very flexible control over how your dual monitor setup works. It not only supports your local two monitors, but will allow you to strap network pc's/monitors on to your existing setup with little fuss. I ran a six induvidual laptops as my primary display at work for some time with xdmx, and it worked very well. The only downside was my desktop was not quite beefy enough to handle a display size of 3072x1536. It also handles bezel sizes, if you prefer the "looking through a window" perspective versus xinerama's standard continuous desktop. It will support just about any monitor layout you want.
xmove gives you screen-like functionality for your desktop. Get up from your workstation, jump on a laptop with wifi, and xmove will pull the display output across the network - just like screen. Send the applications back to your desktop, and shut your laptop down. Bazing!
NX suppliments this with fantastic compression and will allow you to do stupid things, like do xmove/remote x work at home. Or resume a particularly stunning game of bejewled.
Un
(whomever caused this behavior to be default; a pox on you)
p.s. Some bonehead in Usenet advises frobbing your terminal type to vt100 to get the same result. Do not do this. If you don't know why then especially don't do this!
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
1) install KDE 3.4 (it's faster, it's better all-round).
/usr/lib/mozillaNNNNN and /usr/lib/kde3 to
/etc/default/rcS and replace
/etc/default/hal and make sure DROP_DAEMON_PRIVS is
/etc/hal/device.d and do this: /usr/bin/fstab-sync 50-fstab-sync.hal
/etc/profile and add this:
2) run prelink -v --conserve-memory -q -a
but first add
prelink.conf (and any other software such as openoffice)
3) on debian, edit
FSCKFIX="n" with FSCKFIX="y"
4) on debian, install hal, dbus-1 and udev, and then edit
commented out (this will make it possible for you to
mount auto-detected USB drives etc.)
5) cd to
ln -s
5) edit
export KDE_IS_PRELINKED="1"
these simple things will make your system faster, more robust in the face of complete technically incompetent blithering idiots who would otherwise blindly press ctrl-d when faced with a prompt saying "your filesystem is corrupted. give root password for maintenance or press ctrl-d", and also provide automatic access to USB devices that is otherwise bloody inconvenient.
Simple is good. Bling Bling is bad. I personally choose enlightenment.
You just literally made me choke on my breakfast. Bad!
Well, choke laughing, so it's not all bad.
The problem I have with these tactics is that obfuscation strategies don't work against a sufficiently clever and determined opponent. And I'm very clever and determined when it comes to avoiding work.
No, the important thing to do is to sap your determination for wasting time. The reason people waste time is that they have so many commitments they can't keep them straight, although they're rattling around somewhere in their head.
The mind is like a thick, opaque stew -- you can only be aware of what happens to boil to the surface at the moment. We toss all the commitments we make to ourselves and others into the pot, and pretty soon its beyond us to know all the things that are in there. It's very common to harbor a unnamed suspicion that that something nasty like a severed human finger could surface at any second. This creates a tremendous resistance to even looking at the stew, much less stirring it up to find something important you've lost.
The secret to productivity is to change your mind from stew to consommé. To do this, you have to find some place other than your mind to put all your commitments. Then you have to look at all those things on a regular basis, because they'll sneak into your head if you don't. That's what people miss when they "get organized".
Simple program to clear your mind of frightening junk:
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.