screenshots

My work environment

Communications desktop. Mozilla Thunderbird for mail, Usenet news and RSS feeds. XChat for IRC chat, but also for chatting with IM users on Jabber, MSN, Yahoo! and AIM through the Bitlbee gateway.

Searching for local stuff. Recently, the Deskbar applet has become the center of all my searching on a GNOME desktop. You write a search phrase in to the box, and the applet gives you a list of possible search methods. In the screenshot we see a dictionary, the Beagle desktop search tool (which finds everything in your local information space: files, web links, mail, contacts, past chat discussions and more), and Tomboy, which keeps a little searchable wiki of your random notes and small pieces of infomation.

Office chores are naturally taken care of with the powerful OpenOffice.org suite. Just a spreadsheet and a presentation here, I don’t use the word processor too much for actual writing. Word processors in general are not very good for that. All in all, OpenOffice.org manages to be just about as irritating as Microsoft Office. More on writing later.

My writing environment. Any time I have to write anything more complex than a letter or a document longer than a few pages I prefer to use a proper typesetting language, namely LaTeX. I am not a LaTeX wizard, so I use the nifty LyX editor for that. It produces wonderful Postscript and PDF documents, ready for press. I keep my bibliographic database in BibTeX format, assisted by the Pybliographer front-end on the left. Shaded high up is a Postscript preview window for checking out if my output is pretty enough.

Multimedia is not a big hobby of mine, but I do like to listen to some ambient music while I’m working (instrumental clicks and beeps and buzzes take the edge off work). In the following screenshot I’m listening to a personalized net radio channel with the Last.fm player (up left, playing Massive Attack). In the middle is Rhythmbox, the awesome iTunes-inspired GNOME music player and manager. On the bottom right I put MPlayer just for the hell of it, to show that we do have nice video players too.

The Web needs our love in order to stay interesting! Usual suspects here. The Mozilla Firefox browser, Nvu HTML editor, gFTP, and Logjam, the LiveJournal blog editor (i used to keep my blog at LJ before migrating to WordPress).

Even Linux users don’t configure their desktops constantly, but I decided to take a screenshot of a few configuration apps. These are all regular GNOME tools, except KeyTouch at the lower left corner. It’s a great little tool to configure these wicked multimedia keyboards we tend to have these days, with nifty extra buttons but only Windows drivers.

Linux system administration is becoming easier all the time. These days, most common hardware tends to Just Work, and fiddling with the system is easy if you want to. The screenshot features the network configuration dialog, software management, printer configuration, user management, and of course the beloved Unix shell.

So there! :)