Let’s face it, there are literally millions of programs and utilities available for Linux users. Luckily, they are almost all free (I think I have seen a couple that have to be paid for) and if you don’t like something that you have installed, you can just remove it. However, I have come across a couple that I like to have on any Linux box that I access or use and one of them is quite useful as well.

Starting with the less useful, but somewhat entertaining Uptime Daemon. Uptime Daemon (UD) runs in the background constantly checking the current uptime against your 3 best uptime records. If the current uptime surpasses a record, that becomes the new record. By using a template UD can create HTML files that shows the current uptime records. I personally have never used the HTML features of this utility, but just enjoy dropping in to a shell from time to time and typing “ud -d” to find out how long my system has been on since the last reboot.

This command displays four lines of information:

Now: –shows your current time since last reboot–
One: –shows the longest the machine has been on since the utility was installed–
Two: –second longest–
Three: –third longest–

From what I found at the man page, this utility was written by Matthew Trent. I was unable to locate any official homepage for the daemon, but “aptitude install ud” still works on a Debian system. There is another utility that is quite similar called Uptimed that will supposedly do about the same thing, but I have never used that one. UD seems to do what I want it to and I haven’t had any problems with it.

Moving on to the more useful utility, Midnight Commander is very helpful when trying to administer a linux box. It seems to work a little better locally that over a ssh connection, but is still useful in both situations. When using this utility locally, it seems to work better outside of the X windows system (Ctrl + Alt + F2). I like to use this when I have to edit files as root. Just go to a console, log in as root, type mc to open the Midnight Commander, and go from there. It seems a bit easier to learn/use than Vi and I don’t have to log in to an X session as root to get things accomplished. Of course, there are many other uses for this utility and this is just an example. You may also want to check out what Wikipedia has to say about it. In Debian, using “aptitude install mc” will get this utility installed for you if it isn’t on your machine by default, or you can download and install from source using the ibiblio link above.