Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

Hi,

This thread is to ease up the choice of desktop ED apps. Which app suits N900. When should be any chosen for N900. What are cons/pros for you. This should focus on apps which aren't available on Maemo natively anyway. If you think that a Debian app would work much better than any native, write why.

Example categories:

Word processor (Abiword, LO Writer)
Spreadsheet stuff (Gnumeric, KSpread, LO Calc)

sixwheeledbeast & other mods. You're permitted to add more entries to the next post when they get posted.

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

reserved for mod additions

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

Why thread, instead of editing wiki? Anyway, it may be good idea - thread results could get wikidi'zed, later.
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Chromium (chromium-browser from up to squeeze - wheezy version doesn't work on ARM at all) - with correct keybindings and settings, it works like native browser.

Using additions like scollbars-anywhere and no-scrollbars, we can mimic microB behavior of drag&drop scrolling, while having 100% of screen for web page content. Pages optimized for 1024x768 - especially, the ones that doesn't work on microB, due to far-left or far-right content being hidden and unreachable by scrolling - could get 100% usable, by scaling content to 86% (it makes 1024x* content to fit ideally into 800x*).

MicroB is damn good browser even today, but in rare cases where it fails, Chromium is all you need. And it works very fast (if using directory or partition based ED, as opposed to image-based one).

Cons:
To properly use fullscreen mode, one need start it via xephyr (lxde or other desktop environment). When run from Maemo's Ed without xephyr, context menu (right click) doesn't work (technically, it shows up *under* active layer). Chromium isn't only program affected by this - same apply to iceweasel, for example. LibreOffice is unaffected. No such problems under Xephyr.
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GIMP - for obvious reasons.
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UFRaw - it allows to fully manipulate RAW photos took using cssu'ish camera-ui or fCam&friends, without need for desktop. Further post-processing may be done with Gimp.
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LibreOffice - with correct UI size setting, it acts and looks like native Maemo application. Blazing fast, zero slowdowns.
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CUPS server - allows to connect suitable printers to N900, locally (via USB Hostmode) and print documents from LibreOffice/Photos after UFRaw/GIMP processing, without any desktop intervention. Awesome stuff.
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Audacity - for sound manipulation, works pret6ty fast (unless you decide to edit gigabyte-sized files on fly, that make them go into swap...)

/Estel

// Edit

Probably, one would be able to find some lightweight program for video editing, which we utterly lack under Maemo.

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

One man's obvious is another man's mystery ;) GIMP is such a monster that I hardly ever use on the desktop and can't imagine myself using it on a tiny screen of my N900 :)

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

...and for sure it doesn't comply with thread's title "lightweight" statement. Same apply to most of debian, though, nowadays ;)

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

So that other ppl can add something :)


And why not gnumeric/kspread? Any pros/cons in comparision?

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

The coolest program I'm running in easyDebian is the Lazarus Gui.

Now I can develop freepascal with a visual gui on the device.

(I'm running wheezy on a ext2/3 filesystem, on a 32GB card.)

You can design and compile directly on the device.
Or you can create a project on a PC with Linux, Windows or Mac and recompile the projet on the device. Then you can adapt the visual elements directly on the device.

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

moc: music player

lynx: web browser

:)

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

Hmmm maybe the most experienced ED users could post the best performance settings/tweaks? There are probably a few tips and tricks which could help not skilled useres with ED ;)

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

subdownloader works great and AFAIK maemo doesn't have anything similar that really works.

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

:eek: Isn't that what wiki is exactly meant for? Unless you're thinking about fact, that 90% of messaging board users have wiki editing phobia... (wikiphobia? wikeditophobia?)

/Estel

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

This may count as wikieditophobia but I would give marmistrz that:
1. You need to go through extra hoops to edit the wiki (another account to start with).
2. The UI of all the wikis I've used so far sucks. Not nearly as much as Sharepoint - that's impossible to beat - but they suck never the less. (Caveat: I have not tried editing the Maemo.org wiki yet. No phobia, just no reason yet.)

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

All wikis has a discussiongroup. Where the contents of each page is discussed, maybe this is the thread for its wikipage. all that is needed is that somebody sorts out the weeds and puts the useful information in the wiki.

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

But a thread gets more attention so it's more probable that someone adds anything. I, for example, wouldn't notice a discussion in the wiki.

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

mpd - or is this possible without ED? I've not yet tried ED and my search for mpd has only thrown up clients. But if it's easy with ED, it might push me to installing it.

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

Are there any discussion connected to the maemo-wiki? if so, i didnt know that...

What i meant was that a wikipage usually has a link to a maemo-forum thread where the discusion is going on, while usually only one person with engagement about the subject updates the wikipage with information learned from the thread.

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

audacity always crashes for me when i try to record, is that solved somehow?

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

Interesting, any errors in terminal (if you start it from terminal) when it crashes? Are you using full Squeeze image?

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

Well, since it seems to be a unusual problem... Then i think i should just upgrade ED, i have the first version that had soundsupport, so it was probably not so well implemented back then ;)

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

It's an old thread, but better than starting a new one I guess.

I wanted to report my positive experiences using Okular in Easy Debian. Okular is a document viewer that can read pdf, djvu, chm, comic book files, etc.

I didn't expect it to perform well, but I was absolutely wrong. It loads relatively fast, and after loading a document, it's very responsive.

Why okular? For me, for many reasons. But the most important is fully customizable zoom level. In a screen as small as the N900's, every milimeter counts. I used to be very frustrated with evince in Maemo for its inability to set custom zoom. The preset zoom levels were most often too much or too little, making for a bad reading experience. In okular, just click the Zoom button, then draw a rectangle with your stylus for the area of the document you want to occupy the screen, and you are done.

Other of the reasons I like okular is the great customizability. You can set key shortcuts for everything.

And the nifty auto-scroll feature. By default, hold the Shift key and then click the Up or Down keys. Multiple clicks increase or decrease the speed. Stop scrolling by clicking the Shift key once. Resume scrolling by clicking the Shift key again.

I wouldn't call okular "lightweight". If you haven't installed any of the KDE stuff before, expect the install to take around 200MB of disk space. It's worth it though.

Re: Best lightweight apps for Easy Debian
 

I use unison within ED