8 Great Linux Apps Worth Bragging About, part 2
Honorable Mentions
Carla Schroder
Wednesday, May 27, 2009 04:40:28 PM
Celestia Space Exploration
Celestia is a gorgeous 3D astronomy program. Your perspective is not limited to the traditional planetarium view of what can be seen from Earth, but you can actually "travel" up close and personal to objects in the solar system, and far-away deep-space objects. It requires OpenGL, so for Linux users this means any 3D video card with decent Linux drivers. License: GPL.
More Great Linux Apps
Sweet Home 3D is a Java-based interior design application that runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows. You need 3D video acceleration and Java 6, and the Java browser plugin so you can test-drive it inside a Web browser. On Ubuntu you can get these by running
$ sudo aptitude install sun-java6-plugin
Sweet Home 3D license: GPL.
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RecordMyDesktop is a nice desktop session recorder that captures both audio and video. In other words, everything that you see on your screen can be captured by RecordMyDesktop, which makes it a great tool for tutorials of all kinds. Currently it is only sort-of maintained, so if you use it and like it consider supporting it in some way. License: GPL.
sshfs is my workhorse for wandering around the house during my workday. sshfs mounts any remote directory on your local machine, so you can work on remote files just as though they were local. It's faster than using something like VNC or FreeNX because you're not exporting an entire X session and running applications over the network; you're using local applications on remote files. It's like a Samba or NFS share except it's faster and easier to set up.
Carla Schroder is the author of the Linux Cookbook and the Linux Networking Cookbook (O'Reilly Media), the upcoming "Building a Digital Sound Studio with Audacity" (NoStarch Press), a lifelong book lover, and the managing editor of LinuxPlanet and Linux Today.
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