Some web mail services, such as gmail, provide POP3 access for free. Unfortunately, this good example has not (yet) been followed by Yahoo! Mail, which charges a fee for this service.

With fetchyahoo, you can download your email from Yahoo! Mail without having to pay extra for POP3. fetchyahoo can deliver the email to a local mailbox, to a mail filter (such as procmail, or forward the email to another account.

Note: Yahoo recently changed the layout of their pages, and with this the fetchyahoo package in “stable” is not working. The “unstable” version works perfectly.

• Debian fetchyahoo Page
• fetchyahoo Homepage

Keywords: Daily Debian, fetchyahoo, fetchmail, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo, pop3, procmail, mail

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Printing used to be a very simple business in the old days. All you needed was to set up lpd running locally, with a parallel printer connected to “/dev/lp” and everybody would be happy. Programs were configured to use lpr to do the actual printing, and lpr would take care of spooling the output to the default printer. Simple and beautiful.

Since then, the complexity of the printing environment has grown enormously. There are different kinds of printers with different drivers and capabilities. To make full use of these capabilities, stations need to use CUPS. Most printers are networked and the average user has access to at least three to four printers. The old “just send to the default” printer approach does not work anymore. lpr is still useful, but won’t to the job alone.

gtklp is a substitute for the old lpr and lp command-line clients, but it is also a graphical front-end for CUPS. Just configure your clients will to call “gtklp” as the printing client, and your users will be presented with a graphical dialogue where they can choose the printout destination. With gtklp, it is also possible to change other printing parameters, such as the number of copies, the page orientation and layout, margins, text size and spacing, among others.

gtklp is very useful if you have more than one printer, and extremely useful if you need to support end-users that need access to more than one printer.

• Debian gtklp Page
• gtklp Homepage

Keywords: Daily Debian, gtklp, printer, printing, cups, lpr, lprng, lpd

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dict is a quick command-line dictionary client for the dictd daemon. In its default configuration, dict consults a remote dictionary server at dict.org, but it can also be configured to consult a local dict daemon.

Those who prefer a graphical version of dict may want to check the kdict package.

• Debian dict Page
• dict Homepage

Keywords: Daily Debian, dict, dictionary, thesaurus

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If we could score a package by usefulness divided by its size, wondershaper, would get as close to a division by zero as we comfortably can.

wondershaper manipulates your “queueing disciplines” to maintain a low latency for interactive traffic at all times (its main goal), but it also improves “surfing” by making sure HTTP traffic is always at a reasonable speed, even during network peak times. Another common problem that wondershaper solves is the unnaceptable download performance during heavy uploads with DSL lines.

The DSL experience is much better after wondershaper. This is one of those tiny packages that improve the overall quality of your system by huge amounts.

• Debian wondershaper Page
• wondershaper Homepage

Keywords: Daily Debian, wondershaper, qdisc, tc, DSL, upload, traffic-shaping

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darkstat is a network analyzer along the lines of ntop, but with a much smaller memory footprint.

darkstat runs as a daemon, and collects information passing through the configured network interfaces. The results can be seen by browsing to the host where darkstat is running, port 666. All the usual stats are available, such as network usage per host, ports, protocol, graphs, etc…

With a good set of features and modest memory requirements, darkstat is a good solution for those who don’t want to deal with the complexity of ntop, or for servers with less resources to spare.

• Debian darkstat Page
• Darkstat Homepage

Keywords: Daily Debian, darkstat, network monitoring, ntop, 666

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