Debian install Step 3 - desktop software

Netinstall >

Light-weight web browsers

There plenty of light and fast web browsers to choose from if the sites you intend to visit work with them...



there's a useful list here at Arch wiki Web_browsers

mem usages: surf 140mb... dillo 12mb... elinks 12mb... luakit 79mb... dwb 53mb... uzbl 55mb


Midori is meant to be a light-weight web browser. although it ate up 11GB of mem the last time I used it. You need to enable the userscripts plugin in Preferences, then just find and install what you need.

To get flash working (could be old), run
 



Heavy-weight browsers

These will eat up some ram (typically 900mb+), and more with each tab opened...

Chrome-based: Chromium, Iron, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Yandex
Firefox-based: Waterfox, Icecat

Stopping the white background flash just before a page loads can be a real problem!






Image cataloguers/editors



XnView Multi Platform

A very cool image processing program available as a .deb at the forum, http://newsgroup.xnview.com/...

See my Xnview Tips page for help using XnView, setup and configuring appearance.


Darktable

offers many good tools for making your shots stand out.


And don't forget gimp and inkscape are useful graphics tools to have...
 







Libre Office


This is the office suite to have if you need document productivity - its by far the best developed in the Open Source world.

It's best to grab the latest from libreoffice.org/download/

And first remove the older version (because installing a newer version may leave the previous version in /opt - all 700mb of it), run..
 


extract from the downloaded tar file and cd to the dir and into the DEBS dir, and then:
 


Libre complains about having no Java Runtime Environment (even though it runs OK without)
 
Or run `apt search jdk` to find a package.

Tip: to change the toolbar icons to small, and tango for example, go to Tools > Options > LibreOffice > View




Desktop apps

 

that gets you... a light-weight a pdf viewer and cutter, basic x11 tools, clipboard manager, download manager, virus scanner, id3 tag writer, graphical disk map, file/directory comparison app, file text search/replace, system cleanup app, torrent downloader, help agent, x-selection tools, dictionary, grouped sticky notes, html editor, ftp manager, screenshot taker

transmission gets permissions error - right click on a torrent and > Set Location, select the actual download location.

for a fully functional DVD burner, there's xfburn (basic) or k3b with KDE bloat (unless you'd prefer an easy command-line tool like bashburn -which has gone from the package lists)
 

the last two packages there are to enable conversion of wav to mp3 or mp3 to wav (and other formats) -ie ripping an audio cd or making an audio cd in K3b...

Xfce stuff and panel plugins
 







Extra installs

 

evince, geekie - gui pdf and image viewers
pyrenamer, catfish - batch rename and file search gui tools
cheese, hasciicam - webcam apps
docky - app launcher dock
flush or transmission -bit torrent handlers
xpad - make notes
axel-kapt -download accelerator
tucan -upload-downloader for file share sites
pdfshuffler pdfchain -pdf cutters



 

gnome configuration editor - sets things in gnome app's
gnome system tools - enables user management
kdemultimedia-kio-plugins - enables reading and conversion of audio from CD's in KDE app's
mscorefonts - includes Times, Tahoma, Verdana, Ariel etc.



For backups...
 

there's 2x GUI and 2x command line utilities


Edu-games for learners
 



GPS

Handheld Garmin devices

With (old) devices that download the data through gpsbabel, you need to add your user to the plugdev group if not already added:
 

plus, add your user to the dialout group -as with my 60csx (firmware 4.0) it was picked up on /dev/ttyUSB0, which belongs to the dialout group


Viking

An excellent app for collating, sorting and editing GPS data. Its simple and (quite) stable. Files are saved as .vik and are only usable in Viking, and so data needs exporting to gpx format for sharing with any one else or with GIS map-making software. Exporting can be done by individual layer or all layers in one go.
 

Might need to make a symlink...
 


Install with apt or get the latest from here projects/viking/files/

might need these dependencies
 


See my GIS page for more details!



Quantum GIS

A powerful open source map making application.

To get the latest version, add the qgis gpg keyring with this...

 


Then just apt update and install with
 

(see the Qgis Debian install page here https://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/alldownloads.html)

Also, if you run a dist-upgrade at any time, it's possible that Qgis will be removed in the process, with python updates etc, so you will need to reinstall qgis.
In which case, try to sort it out with `sudo aptitude install qgis`






OpenGPG

-the open source standard for encrypting files and emails.

Both "Pretty Good Privacy" (PGP) and GnuPG implement OpenGPG. The latter is a command-line program for Linux, and there is a simple gui front-end to it, called GNU Privacy Assistant (debian gpa package). PGP works through the plugins for thunderbird or evolution email clients (see ubuntu help link).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GnuPrivacyGuardHowto
http://www.phildev.net/pgp/gpgsigning.html

 
A lot of useless keys appear in the gpa window.
solve this by either starting the program: gpa --disable-x509

or rename the file "com-certs.pem" and remove the .kbx files in ~/.gnupg and then restart gpa
 







ClamTK virus scanner

FAQ page A GUI frontend for Clamav - mainly it's used for scanning potentially infected files received from Windows machines to prevent sending on infected files etc. NO LONGER MAINTAINED!!

Install with apt. depends: libnet-dns-perl


To update clamav virus definitions, run
 

It's possible to update multiple machines remotely if you download the main.cvd and daily.cvd file (from the Upgading links at http://www.clamav.net/...) and copy it to /var/lib/clamav
 


Note: you must select options in Preferences in order to scan anything!




Anti rootkit

these are Linux-specific anti-trojan programs
 


To run them use these commands as root:
 

run an update with
 

 
I'm not exactly sure what this shows!

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/



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