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This is the tenth in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small, indispensable utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. For this article, we’ll look at ddrescue. Anyone who cares about preserving their data should invest a bit of time in learning about this utility.

CommonMark is a strongly defined, highly compatible specification of Markdown, along with a suite of comprehensive tests to validate implementations against the specification.

A desktop environment is a collection of disparate components that integrate together. They bundle these components to provide a common graphical user interface with elements such as icons, toolbars, wallpapers, and desktop widgets. Additionally, most desktop environments include a set of integrated applications and utilities.

Nmap is widely regarded as the de facto standard tool for network exploration and security auditing. Network administrators use Nmap to identify devices running on their systems, discover available hosts and the services they offer, finding open ports and detecting security risks. While Nmap is often used for such security audits, many systems and network administrators find the tool helps with routine tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime.

A computer algebra system is mathematical software that can manipulate mathematical formulae in a way similar to the traditional manual computations of mathematicians and scientists. This type of system supports a wide range of mathematics including linear algebra, calculus, and algebraic and ordinary differential equations.

Recently, a new method of installing integrated solutions has been introduced: virtual app appliances, which are basically VirtualBox or VMware images that consist of the apps, UCS management system and the UCS runtime environment. It gets ready-to-use pre-configured applications installed on private server with minimum expertise.

AsciiDoc is a lightweight markup language for writing notes, documentation, articles, books, ebooks, slideshows, web pages, man pages and blogs. It’s a plain text human readable/writable document format that dates back to 2002.

journalctl is used for querying and displaying messages from the journal. Since the journal comprises of one or more binary files, journalctl is the standard way to read messages from it.

Even if you’re a vinyl junky, when it comes to convenience, flexibility, fluidity, and time, the best way to DJ is on a digital system. And with a digital system, you’ll need good software. DJ software allows users to mix and perform music in the same style, and using the same methods as a traditional vinyl DJ.

imgp is a Python-based command-line tool that lets you resize and rotate JPEG and PNG files. The software can resize (or thumbnail) thousands of images with a single command. The software is a standalone utility, it’s not tied to a file manager or other software.

Catfish is a well-designed, mature, and functional graphical file search utility. It offers good search performance, good support for themes, and is frugal with resources.

Textile is a lightweight and simple markup language that makes it easy to structure content for articles, blogs, wikis, and documentation. It’s origin traces back to the blogging software Textpattern.

It’s been a long time since we covered news aggregators, and there’s been notable entrants and leavers to the scene. With regard to the leavers, Google Reader was discontinued in July 2013. And software like Newsbeuter, RSSOwl, Blogbridge, and Bloglines have been abandoned by their respective developers. Fortunately, there’s a number of great replacements that have filled the void.

This is the sixth in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities.

piu-piu follows in the footsteps of well-traveled games. It’s a terminal based horizontal scroller game. There’s absolutely no fancy graphics, or immersive effects here. It’s ASCII graphics on the console.

Many people who regularly use computers suffer from eye strain and fatigue. Looking at a monitor for a long time can strain your eyes or can make any other problems you are having with your eyes seem more apparent. There is also research to show that late-night exposure to bright lights can affect sleep quality. This can be mitigated by reducing blue-light exposure.

inxi is a command line system information script built for the console as well as Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The software also crops up in forum technical support for debugging purposes. It helps people to determine users’ system configurations and hardware without having to ask a lot of questions.

Linux has lots of terminal emulators. What distinguishes Alacritty from the vast majority of terminal emulators? It differentiates itself by offering GPU-acceleration combined with a minimal feature set.

Many users associate desktop Linux with their daily repetitive grind. However, we are always on the look out for applications that help make Linux fun to use. It really is a great platform for entertainment.

If you’re like me, you often forget useful commands, particularly ones with lots of flags. You can create aliases or use the history command combined with grep to alleviate this issue. But pet arguably offers a slicker way, as it lets you search the snippets to quickly find what you need.