What’s nicer than a free bag of candies? The debian-goodies package is just that: A bunch of small and useful utilities to make your daily tasks easier.

Take dpigs, for instance. Just type “dpigs” and it will show you who’s “pigging out” your system, meaning, what packages are taking the most disk space. There’s also dgrep and dglob, to search for files in packages or to generate a list of packages matching a certain regexp. debget will fetch a “.deb” file for a package in the APT database, debman will show the man page from a “.deb” file without installing it. There’s also checkrestart, which will find and restart processes that are using old versions of upgraded libraries and popbugs to display a list of release-critical bugs in the package you use.

• Debian debian-goodies page

Keywords: Daily Debian, debian-goodies, utilities, dpigs, dgrep, dglob, debman

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Keeping a set of directories perfectly synchronized across two computers is more difficult than it sounds. The problem hit me when I had to keep my home directory synchronized between my laptop and a desktop server. My gut reaction was to use rsync, but rsync is actually more of a fancy remote copy program than a synchronizer. I tried all sorts of contraptions with varying degrees of success, until I found unison.

Unison is a bi-directional file synchronizer. Unlike most “synchronizers” out there, unison keeps the state of your two “replicas” and propagates the changes made to the first replica into the second, and vice-versa. Removing a file, or directory, from one of the replicas will cause unison to remove that file or directory from the other replica. The same happens if you modify or add files. Conflicts are handled gracefully by unison too; the program pauses and asks the user what it should do: copy from A to B, copy from B to A or try to merge.

Unison can use SSH as a transport to the remote replica, and also offers a whole array of configuration options to fine-tune the replication process.

The unison package provides a text-mode version of unison, suitable for usage in a batch environment. Those afflicted by command-line applications will find relief in unison-gtk, a version of unison that provides a clean and functional GTK interface.

• Debian unison Page
• Debian unison-gtk Page
• unison Page

Keywords: Daily Debian, unison, unison-gtk, rsync, replication, synchronizer, mirror

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Dillo is an incredibly fast, lightweight web browser based on GTK. It is specially useful as a graphical alternative to text-mode html browsers like lynx and w3m. Dillo is lean on memory, and occupies around 5MB (RSS) when viewing Yahoo! for instance.

Dillo is my browser of choice for small HTML viewing tasks, and is my default browser to see HTML mail when I’m using mutt in a graphical environment.

• Debian dillo Page
• dillo Page

Keywords: Daily Debian, dillo, browser, web-browser, www, html, lynx, w3m

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dpkg-repack creates a “.deb” file out of an installed package. It is specially useful when trying out new packages (you can easily go back to the previous version), or to “archive” an important package for future use. A simple tool that can save a great deal of time in certain occasions.

• Debian dpkg-repack Page

Keywords: Daily Debian, dpkg-repack, rebuild .deb, apt, dpkg

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The scenario is all too common: You install a new package, and the package requires a number of libraries. Apt-get, in its blind usefulness, automatically installs the libraries. A few days later, you decide to remove the package from the system. The libraries stay behind, not being used by anyone, taking disk space.

If that seems familiar, you may wish to try deborphan. Deborphan is a command-line tool that lists all library packages in the system that are not being used by any other application. Besides the basic report, it is also possible to show all library dependencies (deborphan -d), or all packages that no other packages depend on (deborphan -a), among others. Deborphan also comes with “orphaner”, a full-screen dialog front-end to help in the task of removing packages from the system.

Deborphan is a small and useful utility that will help save disk space and keep a tidy system. No Debian sysadmin should be without it.

• Debian deborphan Page

Keywords: Daily Debian, deborphan, orphaned packages, libraries, sysadmin

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