It’s (not) Alright

I am back with another post from the CLI series. This time it is a console IM client. People using Linux would surely have heard about pidgin, formerly knows as gaim. Pidgin is an IM that has support for,

• AIM
• Bonjour
• Gadu-Gadu
• Google Talk
• Groupwise
• ICQ
• IRC
• MSN
• MySpaceIM
• QQ
• SILC
• SIMPLE
• Sametime
• XMPP
• Yahoo!
• Zephyr

Finch, is a fork of pidgin. It has support for all the protocols stated above but it does not have a GUI. It is built using nCurses and so the UI is elegant enough. Finch tries to imitate the GUI of pidgin. I could not find any good guides about using finch, so, I set it up with a friend of mine, Mehul Ved and we found some things out. Continue reading »

\\ tags: Console, Internet, IRC, Linux, Software, Tools

I have already written about my experiences with other torrent managers and rTorrent in this series before in this post. Now I am set to review rTorrent because, believe it or now, I am actually using it as my primary torrent manager for past 1 month. Don’t worry… I am not going to write a “1 month with rTorrent” here. I am going to review it in short for performance and how to optimize it to use it better. I will start with a short review of rTorrent.

rTorrent - Review

As I said, after using it for a whole month, I am beginning to like it and also getting a little anxious for future releases. As already mentioned, I had many problems with other torrent clients. You can read more about them here. And then came the day when I decided to take a brave step and use a client that is completely based on *nix console. I am happy to say that I, in no way, regret that decision.

Things started with little bumps along the way. I had to do a little research on the site of rTorrent and find some settings which would work on my system. Then I began downloading.

I was immediately surprised with 2 things. First was that even though there Continue reading »

\\ tags: Bit-Torrent, Console, HowTo, Internet, Linux, Old PC, Review, rtorrent, Software, Tools

Hey people, this is another post from my “Going the CLI Way” series. Check the Console category for more details. Today, I am going to write about the mp3 player, mp3blaster that I mentioned in my last post.

Mp3blaster is a command line mp3 player for *nix operating systems. It is built using ncurses. Its interface is entirely text based, thereby eliminating the need for a graphical environment like X-Windows. This does not limit the way you can control the player whilst playing though; just like any graphical mp3 player, there are CD-style buttons like play, stop, pause, next track, etc.

The development is stalled though. There has been no release since August 2006. So, if you want improvements, you will have to code yourself. But as far as now, I have felt no need for that.

Mp3blaster has got keys to do all the jobs. It has an ‘rc’ file (similar to a configuration file) that holds all the keybindings for the player. By default the keys to open files and playlists are F1 and above. So if you are going to use it under X, then you will have to change it as F1 - F12 keys have special meanings in X. So you will have to edit your mp3blasterrc file. Continue reading »

\\ tags: Console, Linux, mp3, mp3blaster, music player, Old PC, Software

It seems like I am going the console way now. Fully and as much as possible. I have already written about the Bit-Torrent client rTorrent that I am using for managing torrent downloads in console.

Now, today, after monitoring the performance of rTorrent for about a week, I have decided that, rather I think I would be right in believing that console based applications, though they lack the appearance and maybe some features, are way better in almost more than half the cases.

For instance, I have been using pidgin for IRC chatting. Pidgin is good, and I liked it a lot. It does not consume much RAM and processor, but I still needed something better suited for my needs. Pidgin is built as all in one IM. IRC, Yahoo, Gmail, MSN, AOL… all is built in inside it. But all I wanted was an IRC client. There are many options available, but I decided to go Continue reading »

\\ tags: Bit-Torrent, Console, IRC, irssi, Linux, mp3blaster, Old PC, rtorrent