tlp – optimize and maximize your battery power.

If you are concerned about the battery life on your Linux laptop, then you should consider using tlp. tlp customizes your Linux distribution for maximum battery life and thus helps improving battery longevity when on Linux.

TLP brings you the benefits of advanced power management for Linux
without the need to understand every technical detail. TLP comes
with a default configuration already optimized for battery life.
Also an optional install of the smartmontools package enables hard
disk SMART data in tlp-stat (smartctl).

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Backup – simple and intelligent

However much you stress on the importance of backupm people will forget about keeping it. So, if you do need a completely automated and simple backup then consider using “Back In Time“.

Description:

BackInTime is a simple backup system for Linux inspired from
“flyback project” and “TimeVault”. The backup is done by taking
snapshots of a specified set of directories.
This package contains the GNOME frontend of BackInTime.

For installation:

x2go – possible replacement to VNC

If you are accessing you Linux machine from VNC then you can try x2go.

Pretty straight forward installation, with packages available for both Ubuntu and Fedora and most other common distros as well. Just install, change one line ( visit the link above) and you are done. Neat, I must say.

Do try it when you feel the need to do something new.

unrar or unar – go open source way

Recently there was a utility released called unar, a open source replacement for unar.

Description::

The command-line utilities lsar and unar are capable of listing and extracting
files respectively in several formats including RARv3. unar can serve as a free
and open source replacement of unrar.

To install on fedora:

yum install unar

The utility provides 2 commands called lsar and unar, which can be used to list and extract rar archives.

terminal in browser.

Quite a lot of time, we are spending most of the time on Browsers and during this time, leaving the browser just to do some ls or some command for quickly checking something does not look productive and here is where butterfly is useful.

Just install butterfly with:

pip install butterfly

and then head over to :

http://localhost:57575

and voila you have a terminal in your browser.

sunflower – file manager.

Sunflower file manager is a new file manager that has couple of interesting features, that I liked, not that I use graphical file managers much.

It has a in-built command line, terminal and other interesting features, so what are you waiting for just head over and download and install :

rpm -ivh http://sunflower-fm.org/pub/sunflower-0.1a.58-1.noarch.rpm

Or head over to their downloads page at :

http://sunflower-fm.org/pub/

There is still no home-page and might come soon.

Xephyr – Nested X Server

Nested X-Server is running a X server root window within your running X-windows session like Gnome or KDE. This could be useful if you want to keep all you ssh windows in one window or maybe run all you IRC, firefox, chat and others inside one window, or maybe run another window manager itself.

Lets first install ::

sudo yum install xorg-x11-server-Xephyr

Once done, you can define an alias to do the magic with your nested server. So, lets define an alias: