Bonus: More from the deepest depths of Debian

That title is only partly accurate any more: I’ve added quite a few that are only found in Arch and some that aren’t in either distro. Be that as it may, the plethora of Debian-based titles were the original reason for this four–part series. So we’ll keep that for now.

Once again, the bulk of these require hardware I can’t muster, or software arrangements that would be of such an inconvenience as to make testing the program an egregious expenditure of time for me. A few others are obviously graphical, but managed to creep into The List anyway. 😡

It may be that you have the hardware or the software suite that streamlines testing, or don’t mind building a graphical game or utility just to try it out. If that’s the case, leave us a note and let us know how it went. Science demands an answer. 😉

• atom4: I haven’t been able to pin down a proper home page for this game, and to complicate things, I could only get the graphical version working in Mint. Which is strange, since it’s usually the other way around. …
• confy: This confy (and I say “this confy” because I found others) should work as a quick configuration file swapping tool, letting you run a program — console or otherwise — with a series of unique configuration files. Sounds great, but the version I tried from git was misnaming its targets, putting them in the wrong location, and couldn’t track its own actions. I think perhaps the author tried to update or change the way confy worked, but didn’t follow through and the version I got just didn’t perform. Not in Debian or Arch, I think.
• doomsday: This is in Debian, and is a graphical Doom-like game. I’m not sure how or when it added itself to my list. I should put a lock on the thing.
• dotfiles: Jon Bernard‘s dotfiles seemed like a viable solution for remote dot-file caching, but I only got python errors when I tried to use it. I tried the AUR version and a vanilla setup cloned straight from github, but didn’t get far. I think it is fairly popular though, and so the error might have been in my local configuration. That happens. Not in Debian.
• mgt: Another title I couldn’t find a proper home page for. This is in Debian as a recording tool for games of gnugo. I put the kibosh on it since it’s only intended for that one purpose, and didn’t seem to stand on its own. Didn’t see in Arch or AUR.
• netris: An attempt to build another networked version of Tetris, but the home page yields a 403 and the AUR version is orphaned. In Debian as well, even though the suggestion is made elsewhere on the Internet (and on the Debian package page) that it is incomplete.
• nfswatch: An NFS traffic monitor. In Debian but not Arch or AUR that I could find. Also in Fedora, if I remember correctly. I don’t have enough machines on hand right now to create the NFS arrangement to test it.
• plotgen: plotgen (and its successor, ficgen) bewildered me, and I’m not afraid to admit it. It’s a very large repository to clone, and what I was left with was not so much a tool or a series of tools for plot generation that I could see, but rather what appeared to be a series of smaller ditties for generating the lists and names and characters that could be used to … somehow … generate computerized fiction. In sum, I felt like I had downloaded all the notes, products and tools that the author had used to complete his own adventure in generating computerized fiction. If there was some sort of overarching utility that tied them all together, I couldn’t find it. Not in Arch or Debian, and perhaps that makes sense to me. There appears to be an online version of ficgen here.
• predict: An amateur radio utility that is useful for satellite tracking. I don’t have a satellite, and I suppose if I did, I’d have a hard time not tracking it, since it would probably take up my entire living room. In Debian only, but couldn’t come up with a home page for it. You try searching for “linux predict.”
• scottfree: An interpreter for a certain series of text-based adventures that I believe date back to the TRS-80. The interpreter alone doesn’t do much, and the link on the Debian package page to the adventure source file repo yields an error. It’s possible these have moved and still work. Not in Arch or AUR that I could find.
• tmon: “Monitoring and testing tool for Linux kernel thermal subsystem.” Strangely, this is in Arch but not in Debian. It’s possible that it’s hiding in another package though. The only home page I have is kernel.org.
• tomoyo-tools: This is in both Arch and Debian as a security testing tool. I read a little of the first pages and was hopelessly overwhelmed. 😦
• uhd-host: This appears as uhd-host in Debian and I believe its equivalent is ettus-uhd-git in AUR. A universal driver specific to an exact brand of hardware. I don’t recognize the brand, and I don’t believe I have anything that would use this driver.
• utalk and ytalk: These are both implementations of the GNU talk utility that didn’t work for me, oh-so-long-ago. I can find no home page for utalk, and the only link I have for ytalk comes from AUR and ends in a “page not found” page. Both are in Debian, but both gave me just as much attention in Mint as talk did everywhere else. 🙄
• varmon: A monitor for VA RAID equipment. The screenshot looks good, but I’m not going to go out and buy an entire arrangement of DAC 960 RAID controllers just to give this a try. In Debian only, I believe, although it may be masquerading as something else in Arch/AUR.
• wulfstat: I can find references to wulfstat on the net, and I see where it supposedly is (or was) part of the Debian entourage, but I’m not finding it in either Debian or Arch-plus. I believe (but I am not sure) that’s the correct home page. Supposedly a monitoring utility for networked systems and beowulf clusters. Sadly, I don’t have one of those. Oh, how I wish I did though. …
• xawtv: In both Debian and AUR, with a wide array of tools and utilities. But I have a strong suspicion this is a TV utility for a graphical environment.
• xcutmp3: Definitely graphical. Who put all these graphical programs in my list??! 😡
• xpacman2: This is in Arch, but it’s clearly a graphical program. Someone is playing a trick on me. …
• xview-examples: These are in Debian as example programs and source code from XView, which I’m not familiar with. I looked briefly at this but didn’t see much potential for programs to list here. If I was wrong, let me know.
• yorick-curses: Debian lists yorick-curses as specific text-based programs for use with the yorick programming language. AUR has a huge smattering of yorick-related programs. I have no experience with yorick and I have a feeling the time it would take me to learn it would not be recouped in the few text-based tools that might be available.
• zhcon: This is in both Debian and AUR as a framebuffer terminal emulator with support for double-wide (think: Chinese, Japanese and Korean, plus some other) characters. I was tempted to try it out, but anything I posted about it would be showing off another program, and not zhcon itself. If you use a language that needs that kind of support at the framebuffer, this might be a good place for you to start.

And there you have it: The last of the overflow from 2014. Again, listing a program here doesn’t mean it won’t work, only that it didn’t work for me, couldn’t work for me, or would have involved an inordinate amount of work to approach. If anything is better suited to your setup and you feel adventurous, please tell us about your experience. … 😉