More linux

Ok, now let's make some compliments, shall we? :)

- amaroK: It changed my perception on what a mp3 player should look like.
I was used to the old winamp (2.8), and liked the idea that a mp3 player should be fast, small memory consumption and minimizable :)
But that was when I had only one workspace (on windows).
amaroK makes everything I want and then some more. It downloads the cd covers from amazon, organizes the files using metadata, downloads lyrics on demand, and even sugests more music based on the playing ones.
I still want a advanced Graph Equalizer (with a good range of presets). It seems to be available on the current release but the debian's unstable repositorie doesn't update amaroK for a long time.

UPDATE: Got the .debs from amaroK site, works like a charm.

- Mplayer: Now this is the kind of player every windows user dreams about. It plays everything, it has a lot of options (configurable by cli or gui) and can do amazing things, like playing remote dvds. And it's also fast, very fast.

- Firewall: On windows I had a personal firewall that used to work very well, but it was a pain to mantain it, not to mention that I don't like to "see" things running, and hate those annoying icons on the tray. On linux, IP tables works wonders, a friend gave me a very nice and simple script (thanks J.) to set up as a service in /etc/init.d and it works very well. If anyone wants a copy of this script, mail-me. (or leave a message)

- SSH: It's the most useful thing on earth. period.

- SCP: It's a nice complement of the most useful thing on earth :)

- Mrtg: What kind of nerd has a computer at home and doesn't want to know more about it than he should?
mrtg is a free graphic generator, it sends SMNP requests to a given device and makes a nice looking page and graphs about a lot of stuff, I still use it just for bandwidth usage (my router at home is so nice it even has SNMP!). Install info is available at http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/
The installation in linux is straightforward, all done with a couple of commands, the page mentioned above is very detailed, but if you still have questions about it, let me know..

- Sensors & fancontrol: Sort of the same situation as above, "sensors" is great, it gets a lot of info about motherboard temperature, cooler rotation and so on. Fancontrol uses AMD's Athlon64 Cool'n'quiet technology to control the fan speed, based on cpu's temperature (why keep a fullspeed cooler when the cpu is cold enought to slow it down?) the configuration file has some parameters to set the maximum speed, minimum speed and temperatures.. It is great.

- Powernow: This guy gave me a headache (I'll focus on him here, but may explain the whole story later on).
powernow is the cool'n'quiet deamon to control clockspeed based on utilization, my processor has 3 steps:
1-1000Mhz
2-1800Mhz
3-2000Mhz
The calculations are very fast, ie, the moment I start to process something very hard, it goes straight to step3 and keeps there until it finishes.
This is great because it saves power (the motherboard reduces the amount of power sent to the processor) and keeps the cpu cool.