March Linux Freeware

A grab bag of utilities.

By James Morris

Developed by Peter Zelezny, X-Chat is a very usable GTK based IRC client with a similar look and feel to AmIRC.

After joining a channel, the text will scroll up the main window as per standard IRC clients, and you may configure some things such as the foreground and background colours and fonts. A window on the right-hand side displays a list of users on the current channel, indicating their status (a green dot next to the nickname means they have channel 'ops'). You may select users individually from this list for private chat, file transfer and various probings such as ping times and 'whois' information.

Multiple channels may be managed, with each channel selectable from the main window using a tabbed interface. When a channel is active and you're not looking at it, the tab for that channel displays the channel name in red so you can quickly switch to see what's happening there.

This is a very clean and simple IRC client for X. Although it has a few annoying bugs and lacks extensive features, X-Chat is under active development and appears to be evolving into a solid, useful application.

Developed by Eddie Kohler, gifsicle provides an enormous amount of flexibility when working with GIFs. In its most typical use, gifsicle would be used at the command line to merge a collection of images into an animated sequence.

Options are provided to specify delay time between frames and the total number of loops for the sequence. While a number of tools exist for creating such animations, gifsicle provides additional features important in the production of high quality Web graphics. It allows you to specify a colourmap, and the standard Netscape colour cube palette is built in. This helps to ensure that images display correctly across a majority of platforms.

Images may also be manipulated on the fly with cropping, rotation and clipping; while transparency, background colour and interlacing may also be introduced if required. Animations may be additionally optimised to reduce total file size, where only the changes between frames are stored.

As well as creating GIF animations, gifsicle is able to 'explode' animations into separate images. Existing animations may also be edited at the command line, where frames may be deleted, replaced or inserted as needed.

For anyone working in the area of Web development -- and particularly with animated GIFs -- gifsicle is a powerful and effective tool.

A popular feature of Windows (including NT) systems is an application launcher (aptly titled Run) hanging off the Start menu. gRun is a GTK-based tool which is aimed at providing a similar function and a familiar interface.

Very simple in concept, gRun may be added to a window manager menu to provide easy desktop access to applications. When started, gRun presents a simple text box in which you may type the name of the application to be launched. Previous entries are available via a drop-down history control, and a Browse button opens up a file selection window.

Non-executable files may be associated with applications based on their file extension in a manner similar to Windows systems. For example, gRun can be configured to launch your favourite image viewer when a JPEG image is selected.

Installation of gRun from source requires that the GTK and X development libraries are first installed, then you just type './configure' and 'make' to build.

If you want to use file associations as mentioned above, you need to type './configure --enable-associations' before building the application, then copy the sample file 'gassoc' to '~/.gassoc'. Further details for configuration and advanced use may be found in the README file accompanying the package.

It is possible that your window manager has something like gRun built in, but if not, and you are looking for a desktop application launcher, then this is probably worth checking out.

As the author of WMitime says, "who knows if it'll go anywhere", but it's certainly something a little different for your desktop.

XGlobe utilises the Qt toolkit from Trolltech, which you will need to download if it is not already installed (see http://www.troll.no/). Maps also need to be obtained separately, details are included in the documentation accompanying the package.