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I am always skeptical about all this “new” social media sites popping up every day. I am finding it hard to maintain the six social media sites that I am already active in. The last thing I need is twitter… so I signed up for twitter. It’s not really that bad; I think it can be a very good source of interesting information. Thanks to twitter, I got to know about “Chrome for Linux” before any of my feed readers (200+) picked it up; I also got to know about one of the most interesting song (On the Radio — Dancing Choose) in a long time (Thanks Kevin).

I wanted to write a tutorial about how to update your twitter from the terminal with bash scripts and everything; but after looking at my previous post about not having to use the terminal, I think it would be a little bit hypocritical :), so I might get back to that when the dust settles a bit. What I really need is lots of friends for my twitter account, apparently no one seem to like me (only 4 followers!!). So if you like this blog and use twitter you might consider following me. I promise to not update every five minutes; for the next five minutes.

A common misconception with Linux is that you have to know how to use the terminal in order for you to use linux. The fact is you won’t have to use the linux terminal more than you would use CMD in Windows or the terminal in Mac OSX. Today we will look into some of the applications that a “normal” computer user would use without having to know the terminal. Here the term “normal” is vague; since every computer users needs are different from one another, but we will try to cover some basic applications that a normal computer user might use.

Web Browsing: Links and Lynx are great for web browsing on the terminal, especially if you like showing off; practically speaking it has little advantage over a full blown graphical web browser. Most of the popular web browsers can also be used with linux. Here is a list of 9 Web Browsers for Linux. If you are too attached to IE (why??), you could use IEs4Linux to install IE on your linux system.

Text Editors: Vim - Emacs - nano are not practical text editors. Powerful editors? Yes. Practical? No . What a “normal” computer user needs is a simple text editor for simple text editing; gedit and kate are the best text editors out there for linux. If you are too attached to windows notepad; you can use it under linux too with wine, which is installed by default.

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Not yet; at least not any official native release by Google that we know about. But if you would really like to try out chrome without the hassle of having to install MS windows in a virtual machine, try out Crossover Chromium. This is not a native port of chrome for linux, but a package installer to be used with wine embedded. Also, this is nowhere close to being as stable as it is under windows and as rightfully pointed out by the developers; this is essentially a proof of concept to show Wine’s capabilities of running native windows application. Packages are available for debian and RPM based linux systems; Mac OS build is also available. Have Fun.

A few weeks ago I became the proud owner of an Acer Aspire One Linux edition (reviewed here). Out of the box, this little wonder comes with the relatively unknown Linux distribution Linpus Linux Lite, which has been customized somewhat by Acer to make the most of the hardware in the Aspire One. The screenshot above and many more pictures of Acer’s version of Linpus are available at Golem.de, or you can find captures of the vanilla Linpus Lite 9.4 here.

The installation is indeed very ‘Lite’, and brings up the desktop from suspend in less than 10 seconds, or from cold boot in around 20 seconds. Part of the reason for these amazing startup times is that Linpus doesn’t attempt to start up a fully blown integrated desktop environment like Gnome or KDE, and is in fact based on XFCE, including the XFCE’s Terminal and Thunar Filemanager.

A big selling point for Linpus is it’s support for Asian languages out of the box, and the Acer version is no exception: I was able to type Thai characters with the default setup, and there are additional smart input managers for Korean, Japanese and both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

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