autossh starts an instance of SSH and monitors it for failures, restarting the client if it goes down or if network problems disrupt the connection. In order to speed up the recognition of network failures, autossh creates a “loopback” connection, using SSH’s port forwarding between local and remote ports. A probe is periodically sent through this connection and, if not received within a configurable amount of time, the connection is pronounced dead and restarted.

Autossh is a great tool if you need to make sure your tunnels are always available.

• Debian autossh Page
• autossh Page

Keywords: Daily Debian, ssh, tunnel, vpn, autossh, port forwarding

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Someone once said that a mouse is a device that allows the user to open multiple Xterm sessions. While this may not be so true these days, a lot of time is still spent typing commands on terminal emulators.

When asked what to use as terminal emulation program, most will blindly respond “Xterm”. While xterm is a mature and stable program, it is good to know that there are other lightweight and feature rich alternatives out there.

One of such alternatives is aterm, a terminal emulator based on rxvt. Aterm provides everything xterm does, plus transparency, fast transparency with tinting, and more. Aterm was created with AfterStep window manager users in mind, but does not require any special libraries to run. As a bonus, aterm is very light on memory consumption — a must if you keep a large number of terminal sessions open.

• Debian aterm Page
• aterm Page

Keywords: Daily Debian, aterm, xterm, rxvt, terminal-emulation

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PySol is a solitaire game written in Python. PySol features over 200 different solitaire games, sounds, music, and a huge collection of cardsets. To help you master new games, Pysol offers a “playable preview” of available games and Hints during gameplay.

If you like PySol, you should also check the pysol-cardsets package, which adds extra cardsets to the game. To add sounds and music to PySol, make sure you get the pysol-sound-server and pysol-sounds packages too.

• Debian PySol Page
• PySol Page

Keywords: Daily Debian, pysol, python, solitaire, games, card games

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Why are you on the computer today? You should be planning your New Year’s eve party, or at least getting together with friends and having a good time! Life is more than browsing the net, and it goes by FAST. Before you know it, you’ll be wishing you spent more time offline…

No packages for today! Just my wishes of a Happy 2006 and all that good stuff that comes with it.

— Marco Paganini

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If you use mutt as your mail user agent, you probably know that “print mail” produces output ugly enough to scare babies. muttprint, greatly improves mutt’s default “print” function, producing neatly formatted message printouts. You can also configure muttprint to print an “OS Logo” (penguin, Debian Logo) letterhead on all printed messages.

Despite its suggestive name, muttprint can also be used with other mail clients, such as XFMail, Pine, Sylpheed, Gnus, and exmh.

• Debian muttprint page
• muttprint page

Keywords: Daily Debian, mutt, muttprint, thunderbird, kmail, print, printer

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