I hesitate to select flashrom because it is a program that should be used with the utmost caution and because it doesn’t yet work as well as I would like. However, it shows great promise and offers functionality that is currently lacking in Linux. Quite simply it is an open source application that allows the user to flash their BIOS from Linux. Usually, to flash the BIOS of a machine I tend to use a boot cd to load a DOS environment from which I can run the BIOS update utility. With flashrom I can flash the system BIOS from Linux and reboot at my leisure.

It’s hard to discount how useful partimage can be. It’s an essential tool for system backup and recovery. I find myself using it for backup before making any major changes to disk. It’s got a nice curses based interface which makes it fairly easy to use.

I feel that many of my package picks are console tools, more appropriate for system administrators and advanced users. So this week I Wanted to pick a GUI app and so I picked smplayer. Smplayer is a frontend to mplayer which is a highly compatible video player. Smplayer adds what I consider to be a nice interface which has led to it becoming my video player of choice.

There are many ways to manage large numbers of computers. The premise of clusterssh is to define clusters of computers that can be connected to through ssh (telnet and rsh are also supported) so that commands can be passed to all sessions at once. What separates clusterssh from other solutions is that it displays all windows at once and allows the user to enter commands into any one window as well as all windows quite easily. These features make it better than using terminal programs with tabs that the user must toggle input between 1 and all sessions.

“Backupninja is a silent flower blossom death strike to lost data.” That about sums it up. The premise of backupninja is fairly straightforward: allow packages and users to create backup jobs by putting a file in a directory called /etc/backup.d. These jobs rely on a handler script to execute and handler scripts can be customized to handle a particular type of backup job.

If there’s a graphical equivalent to xtail I would be very interested in learning about it. If there isn’t I hope that somebody writes on. I find xtail to be so valuable that I consider it nearly indispensible to any system administrator. And that seems odd when what it does is so simple: it watches multiple files (presumably) logs and prints their changes. But as simple as it sounds its value as a diagnostic tool is significant.

This package downloads and installs the “Microsoft Core Fonts”. This is extremely useful for web developers but also beneficial to users since many websites are designed with these fonts in mind and specify them in their cascading stylesheets (css). So with these fonts installed more websites will be displayed as intended. The installation is simple: once the package is installed it downloads the fonts from the web and installs them into the system.

I decided to see if I could find a better bittorrent client than azureus which has been my bittorrent client of choice for years. Most bittorrent clients are pretty basic but deluge-torrent seemed to be aware of the strengths of azureus with its numerous plugins and emulated that. The package comes bundled with numerous plugins, many of which had similar functionality to [[azureus] plugins. It also seemed that deluge-torrent despite being new to Ubuntu (in 7.10) was fairly mature and since it was written in Python instead of Java I hoped it would be much less resource intensive.

Every computer needs a vrms, that is, a virtual Richard M. Stallman. This package tells you what packages installed on your computer are not licensed under a free software license. This is extremely useful information even if you don’t make any changes to your system because of it. I also think it’s good to strive for a totally free system, though I imagine it will still be a while before I ever get there.

The package cron-apt is a great example of powerful flexibility. By default, once the package is installed, a cron job is set to run at 4am to check for new packages (apt-get update) and download any new packages (apt-get dist-upgrade -d. Of course, running at 4am is good for servers (unless you want them to check for updates more frequently) but the average desktop user may not have their computer on at that time.