This is a list of packages that I frequently use on Debian GNU/Linux. The descriptions of the packages below are extracted from the package's DESCRIPTION provided in the Debian GNU/Linux repository.
apt - Advanced front-end for dpkg
This is Debian's next generation front-end for the dpkg package manager. It provides the apt-get utility and APT dselect method that provides a simpler, safer way to install and upgrade packages.
APT features complete installation ordering, multiple source capability and several other unique features, see the Users Guide in /usr/share/doc/apt/guide.text.gz
auctex - An integrated environment for writing TeX/LaTeX documents.
AUC TeX can indent your text as you write it, let you run TeX/LaTeX and other LaTeX-related tools (such as a output filter or post processor) from within Emacs, and includes a wide range of Emacs macros to allow both easy insertions of LaTeX commands, and easy compilation, previewing, and printing of your TeX documents.
AUC TeX also lets you browse through compiling errors TeX reports, while it moves the cursor directly to the reported error and displays documentation for that particular error. This will even work when the document is spread over several files.
Currently XEmacs ships with its own AUC TeX, so this package should only be used with GNU/Emacs. (I.e., you don't need to install this package if your site uses only XEmacs.)
beav - Binary Editor And Viewer (beav)
beav is an editor for binary files containing arbitrary data. Text file editors, on the other hand, expect the files they edit to contain textual data, and/or to be formatted in a certain way (e.g. lines of printable characters delimited by newline characters).
With beav, you can edit a file in HEX, ASCII, EBCDIC, OCTAL, DECIMAL, and BINARY. You can display but not edit data in FLOAT mode. You can search or search and replace in any of these modes. Data can be displayed in BYTE, WORD, or DOUBLE WORD formats. While displaying WORDS or DOUBLE WORDS the data can be displayed in INTEL's or MOTOROLA's byte ordering. Data of any length can be inserted at any point in the file. The source of this data can be the keyboard, another buffer, or a file. Any data that is being displayed can be sent to a printer in the displayed format. Files that are bigger than memory can be handled.
btrfs-progs - Checksumming Copy on Write Filesystem utilities
Btrfs is a copy on write filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration.
This package contains utilities (mkfs, fsck) used to work with btrfs and an utility (btrfs-convert) to make a btrfs filesystem from an ext3.
ccache - Compiler cache for fast recompilation of C/C++ code
Ccache is a compiler cache. It speeds up recompilation by caching previous compilations and detecting when the same compilation is being done again.
curl - Get a file from an FTP, GOPHER, HTTP or HTTPS server.
curl is a client to get documents/files from servers using any of the supported protocols. The command is designed to work without user interaction or any kind of interactivity.
curl offers a busload of useful tricks like proxy support, user authentication, ftp upload, HTTP post, file transfer resume and more.
This package is able to handle SSL requests only if installed together with libcurl2-ssl.
More informations can be found at the curl web site http://curl.haxx.se .
dbskkd-cdb - The fastest dictionary server for SKK
dbskkd-cdb is an alternate version of skkserv using cdb.
diff - File comparison utilities
The diff package provides the diff, diff3, sdiff, and cmp programs.
`diff' shows differences between two files, or each corresponding file in two directories. `cmp' shows the offsets and line numbers where two files differ. `cmp' can also show all the characters that differ between the two files, side by side. `diff3' shows differences among three files. `sdiff' merges two files interactively.
The set of differences produced by `diff' can be used to distribute updates to text files (such as program source code) to other people. This method is especially useful when the differences are small compared to the complete files. Given `diff' output, the `patch' program can update, or "patch", a copy of the file.
docker.io - Linux container runtime
Docker complements kernel namespacing with a high-level API which operates at the process level. It runs unix processes with strong guarantees of isolation and repeatability across servers.
Docker is a great building block for automating distributed systems: large-scale web deployments, database clusters, continuous deployment systems, private PaaS, service-oriented architectures, etc.
This package contains the daemon only. For the command-line utility "/usr/bin/docker", please install the "docker-cli" package.
Using docker.io on non-amd64 hosts is not supported at this time. Please be careful when using it on anything besides amd64.
Also, note that kernel version 3.8 or above is required for proper operation of the daemon process, and that any lower versions may have subtle and/or glaring issues.
emacs-gtk - GNU Emacs editor (with GTK+ GUI support)
GNU Emacs is the extensible self-documenting text editor. This package contains a version of Emacs with a graphical user interface based on GTK+ for X11 and Wayland (instead of the Lucid toolkit provided by the emacs-lucid package).
If you are using Wayland, you may wish to install emacs-pgtk instead. Homepage: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
ffmpeg - Tools for transcoding, streaming and playing of multimedia files
FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge. . This package contains: * ffmpeg: a command line tool to convert multimedia files between formats * ffplay: a simple media player based on SDL and the FFmpeg libraries * ffprobe: a simple multimedia stream analyzer * qt-faststart: a utility to rearrange Quicktime files
file - Determines file type using "magic" numbers
File tests each argument in an attempt to classify it. There are three sets of tests, performed in this order: filesystem tests, magic number tests, and language tests. The first test that succeeds causes the file type to be printed.
fish - friendly interactive shell
Fish is a shell geared towards interactive use. Its features are focused on user friendliness and discoverability. The language syntax is simple but incompatible with other shell languages.
gdb - The GNU Debugger
GDB is a source-level debugger, capable of breaking programs at any specific line, displaying variable values, and determining where errors occurred. Currently, it works for C, C++, Fortran Modula 2 and Java programs. A must-have for any serious programmer.
gnuplot - A command-line driven interactive plotting program.
Package for making 2D and 3D graphs from data and functions. Supports lots of output formats, including drivers for many printers, (La)TeX, (x)fig, X11, PostScript, and so on.
Data files and self-defined functions can be manipulated by internal C-like language. Can perform smoothing, spline-fitting, or nonlinear fits. Can work with complex numbers.
grep - GNU grep, egrep and fgrep.
The GNU family of grep utilities may be the "fastest grep in the west". GNU grep is based on a fast lazy-state deterministic matcher (about twice as fast as stock Unix egrep) hybridized with a Boyer-Moore-Gosper search for a fixed string that eliminates impossible text from being considered by the full regexp matcher without necessarily having to look at every character. The result is typically many times faster than Unix grep or egrep. (Regular expressions containing backreferencing will run more slowly, however.)
indent - C language source code formatting program
The `indent' program changes the appearance of a C program by inserting or deleting whitespace.
`indent' also provides options for controlling the alignment of braces and declarations, program indenting, and other stylistic parameters, including formatting of both C and C++ comments.
lgrind - A pretty printer for various programming languages.
LGrind is a pretty printer for a large number of programming languages using LaTeX.
You might consider using the listings package instead, which is free. It also claims to be able to read the language definitions of LGrind.
make - The GNU version of the "make" utility.
GNU Make is a program that determines which pieces of a large program need to be recompiled and issues the commands to recompile them, when necessary. More information about GNU Make can be found in the `make' Info page. The upstream sources for this package are available at the location ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/make/
mew - mail reader supporting PGP/MIME for Emacs Mew (Messaging in the
Emacs World) is a user interface for text messages, multimedia messages (MIME), news articles and security functionality including PGP, S/MIME, SSH and SSL.
The features of Mew are as follows:
- POP, SMTP, NNTP and IMAP are supported.
- You can easily display a very complicated structured message.
- You can start to read messages before they are all fully listed.
- For refiling, default folders are neatly suggested.
- You can complete field names, e-mail addresses, receiver's names,
domain names and folder names.
- You can easily search messages with keywords etc.
- Thread, a mechanism to display the flow of messages, is supported. mpv - video player based on MPlayer/mplayer2
mpv is a movie player based on MPlayer and mplayer2. It supports a wide variety of video file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types.
Changes from mplayer2 to mpv include: * Removal of lots of unneeded code to encourage developer activity * Better OSD rendering * Cleaned up terminal output * Improved OpenGL output * Encoding functionality (replacement for mencoder) * Wayland support * Support for playing URLs of popular streaming sites * Screenshot improvements * ... See mpv(1) for more info regarding changes between MPlayer, mplayer2 and mpv.
mtools - Tools for manipulating MSDOS files
Mtools is a collection of utilities to access MS-DOS disks from Unix without mounting them. It supports Win'95 style long file names, OS/2 Xdf disks, ZIP/JAZ disks and 2m disks (store up to 1992kB on a high density 3 1/2 disk).
Also included in this package are commands to eject and manipulate the write/password protection control of Zip disks.
mupdf - lightweight PDF viewer
MuPDF is a lightweight PDF viewer and toolkit written in portable C. It also reads XPS, OpenXPS and ePub documents.
The renderer in MuPDF is tailored for high quality anti-aliased graphics. It renders text with metrics and spacing accurate to within fractions of a pixel for the highest fidelity in reproducing the look of a printed page on screen.
netpbm - Graphics conversion tools.
Netpbm is a toolkit for manipulation of graphic images, including conversion of images between a variety of different formats. There are over 220 separate tools in the package including converters for more than 80 graphics formats.
ngrep - grep for network traffic
ngrep strives to provide most of GNU grep's common features, applying them to the network layer. ngrep is a pcap-aware tool that will allow you to specify extended regular expressions to match against data payloads of packets. It currently recognizes TCP, UDP and ICMP across Ethernet, PPP, SLIP and null interfaces, and understands bpf filter logic in the same fashion as more common packet sniffing tools, such as tcpdump and snoop.
nkf - Network Kanji code conversion Filter
Nkf is a yet another kanji code converter among networks, hosts and terminals. It converts input kanji code to designated kanji code such as 7-bit JIS, MS-kanji (shifted-JIS) or EUC.
patch - Apply a diff file to an original
Patch will take a patch file containing any of the four forms of difference listing produced by the diff program and apply those differences to an original file, producing a patched version.
perl - Larry Wall's Practical Extraction and Report Language.
An interpreted scripting language, known among some as "Unix's Swiss Army Chainsaw".
Perl is optimised for scanning arbitrary text files and system administration. It has built-in extended regular expression matching and replacement, a data-flow mechanism to improve security with setuid scripts and is extensible via modules that can interface to C libraries.
ps2eps - convert PostScript to EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) files
ps2eps is a tool to produce Encapsulated PostScript Files (EPS/EPSF) from usual one-paged Postscript documents. It calculates correct Bounding Boxes for those EPS files and filters some special postscript command sequences that can produce erroneous results on printers. EPS files are needed for including (scalable) graphics into TeX (or even Word) documents. Other programs like ps2epsi do not calculate the bounding box always correctly (because the values are put on the PostScript stack which may get corrupted by bad PostScript code) or rounded it off so that clipping the EPS cut off some parts of the image. Therefore ps2eps uses a resolution of 144 dpi to get the correct bounding box.
pstoedit - PostScript and PDF files to editable vector graphics converter.
pstoedit converts Postscript and PDF files to various editable vector graphic formats including tgif, xfig, PDF graphics, gnuplot format, idraw, MetaPost, GNU Metafile, PIC, Kontour and flattened PostScript.
python3 - interactive high-level object-oriented language (default python3 version)
Python, the high-level, interactive object oriented language, includes an extensive class library with lots of goodies for network programming, system administration, sounds and graphics.
This package is a dependency package, which depends on Debian's default Python 3 version (currently v3.13).
qutebrowser - Keyboard-driven, vim-like browser based on Python and Qt
qutebrowser is a keyboard-focused browser with a minimal GUI. It's based on Python and Qt and was inspired by other browsers/addons like dwb and Vimperator/Pentadactyl.
qutebrowser supports the rendering engine QtWebEngine.
rcs - The GNU Revision Control System
The Revision Control System (RCS) manages multiple revisions of files. RCS automates the storing, retrieval, logging, identification, and merging of revisions. RCS is useful for text that is revised frequently, for example programs, documentation, graphics, papers, and form letters.
redshift - Adjusts the color temperature of your screen
The color temperature is set according to the position of the sun. A different color temperature is set during night and daytime. During twilight and early morning, the color temperature transitions smoothly from night to daytime temperature to allow your eyes to slowly adapt.
This package provides the base program.
rsync - fast remote file copy program (like rcp)
rsync is a program that allows files to be copied to and from remote machines in much the same way as rcp. It has many more options than rcp, and uses the rsync remote-update protocol to greatly speed up file transfers when the destination file already exists.
The rsync remote-update protocol allows rsync to transfer just the differences between two sets of files across the network link.
rxvt - VT102 terminal emulator for the X Window System
Rxvt is an 8-bit clean, color xterm replacement that uses significantly less memory than a conventional xterm, mostly since it doesn't support toolkit configurability or Tek graphics, but also since features can be removed at compile-time to reflect your needs.
The distribution also includes rclock, the smaller/better xclock replacement with appointment scheduling and xbiff functionality.
screen - a terminal multiplexor with VT100/ANSI terminal emulation
screen is a terminal multiplexor that runs several separate "screens" on a single physical character-based terminal. Each virtual terminal emulates a DEC VT100 plus several ANSI X3.64 and ISO 2022 functions. Screen sessions can be detached and resumed later on a different terminal.
Screen also supports a whole slew of other features. Some of these are: configurable input and output translation, serial port support, configurable logging, multi-user support, and utf8 charset support.
sed - The GNU sed stream editor.
sed reads the specified files or the standard input if no files are specified, makes editing changes according to a list of commands, and writes the results to the standard output.
skk - Simple Kana to Kanji conversion program
SKK is a very fast and efficient Japanese input system written entirely in emacs lisp.
skkinput - X input method for Japanese for SKK method.
skkinput is application to input Japanese for X application using protocols such as kinput2/XIM/Ximp protocol. skkinput communicates with skkserv using Berkeley Socket. Without skkserv, local dictionary files is used.
ssh - Secure rlogin/rsh/rcp replacement (OpenSSH)
This is the portable version of OpenSSH, a free implementation of the Secure Shell protocol as specified by the IETF secsh working group.
Ssh (Secure Shell) is a program for logging into a remote machine and for executing commands on a remote machine. It provides secure encrypted communications between two untrusted hosts over an insecure network. X11 connections and arbitrary TCP/IP ports can also be forwarded over the secure channel. It is intended as a replacement for rlogin, rsh and rcp, and can be used to provide applications with a secure communication channel.
In some countries, particularly Iraq, and Pakistan, it may be illegal to use any encryption at all without a special permit.
stow - Organiser for /usr/local/ hierarchy
GNU Stow helps the system administrator organise files under /usr/local/ by allowing each piece of software to be installed in its own tree under /usr/local/stow/, and then using symlinks to create the illusion that all the software is installed in the same place.
strace - System call tracer
strace is a system call tracer, i.e. a debugging tool which prints out a trace of all the system calls made by another process/program. The program to be traced need not be recompiled for this, so you can use it on binaries for which you don't have source.
System calls and signals are events that happen at the user/kernel interface. A close examination of this boundary is very useful for bug isolation, sanity checking and attempting to capture race conditions.
sudo - Provides limited super user privileges to specific users.
Sudo is a program designed to allow a sysadmin to give limited root privileges to users and log root activity. The basic philosophy is to give as few privileges as possible but still allow people to get their work done.
tcpdump - A powerful tool for network monitoring and data acquisition
This program allows you to dump the traffic on a network. tcpdump is able to examine IPv4, ICMPv4, IPv6, ICMPv6, UDP, TCP, SNMP, AFS BGP, RIP, PIM, DVMRP, IGMP, SMB, OSPF, NFS and many other packet types.
It can be used to print out the headers of packets on a network interface, filter packets that match a certain expression. You can use this tool to track down network problems, to detect "ping attacks" or to monitor network activities.
Further information is available at <URL: http://www.tcpdump.org/>
tgif - Interactive 2-D drawing facility under X11.
Tgif has little to do with GIF files. It is a 2-D vector based drawing program which can produce output suitable for LaTeX or in PostScript.
wdiff - The GNU wdiff utility. Compares two files word by word.
`wdiff' is a front-end to GNU `diff'. It compares two files, finding which words have been deleted or added to the first in order to create the second. It has many output formats and interacts well with terminals and pagers (notably with `less'). `wdiff' is particularly useful when two texts differ only by a few words and paragraphs have been refilled.
wget - retrieves files from the web
Wget is a network utility to retrieve files from the Web using http and ftp, the two most widely used Internet protocols. It works non-interactively, so it will work in the background, after having logged off. The program supports recursive retrieval of web-authoring pages as well as ftp sites -- you can use wget to make mirrors of archives and home pages or to travel the Web like a WWW robot.
Wget works particularly well with slow or unstable connections by continuing to retrieve a document until the document is fully downloaded. Re-getting files from where it left off works on servers (both http and ftp) that support it. Both http and ftp retrievals can be time stamped, so wget can see if the remote file has changed since the last retrieval and automatically retrieve the new version if it has.
Wget supports proxy servers; this can lighten the network load, speed up retrieval, and provide access behind firewalls. http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/
xdu - display the output of "du" in an X window
XDU is a program for displaying a graphical tree of disk space utilization as reported by the UNIX utility "du". You can navigate up and down in the tree, sort things, and print out information.
xinput - Runtime configuration and test of XInput devices
Xinput is an utility for configuring and testing XInput devices.
tigervnc-viewer - Virtual network computing client for X
VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is, in essence, a remote display system that allows you to view a computing `desktop' environment not only on the machine where it is running but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures. For this purpose, it implements a client/server model.
This package provides a VNC client for X. With this you can connect to a VNC server and display its content. There are VNC servers available for other operating systems.
wodim - command line CD/DVD writing tool
wodim allows you to create CDs or DVDs on a CD/DVD recorder. It supports writing data, audio, mixed, multi-session, and CD+ disc and DVD data and video disks on DVD capable devices, on just about every type of CD/DVD recorder out there.
Please install cdrkit-doc if you want most of the documentation and README files.