System and File Management

The following section provides an overview of Linux tools for system and file management. Get to know text and source code editors, backup solutions, and archiving tools.

Table 24.5. System and File Management Software for Windows and Linux

Task

Windows Application

Linux Application

File Manager

Windows Explorer

Dolphin, Nautilus, Konqueror

Text Editor

NotePad, WordPad, (X)Emacs

kate, GEdit, (X)Emacs, vim

PDF Creator

Adobe Distiller

Scribus

PDF Viewer

Adobe Reader

Adobe Reader, Evince, Okular, Xpdf

Text Recognition

Recognita, FineReader

GOCR

Command Line Pack Programs

zip, rar, arj, lha, etc.

zip, tar, gzip, bzip2, etc.

GUI Based Pack Programs

WinZip

Ark, File Roller

Hard Disk Partitioner

PowerQuest, Acronis, Partition Commander

YaST, GNU Parted

Backup Software

ntbackup, Veritas

KDar, taper, dump


Adobe Reader

Adobe Reader for Linux is the exact counterpart of the Windows and Mac versions of this application. The look and feel on Linux are the same as on other platforms. The other parts of the Adobe Acrobat suite have not been ported to Linux. For more details, see http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readermain.html.

Ark

Ark is a GUI-based pack program for the KDE desktop and supports common formats. You can view, select, pack, and unpack single files within an archive. For more details, read Section “Displaying, Decompressing, and Creating Archives” (Chapter 2, Working with Your Desktop, ↑KDE User Guide).

Dolphin

Dolphin is the default file manager for KDE 4. Dolphin offers several view modes, file previews and split views. For more details, see http://dolphin.kde.org/ or read Section “Using Dolphin File Manager” (Chapter 2, Working with Your Desktop, ↑KDE User Guide).

dump

The dump package contains both dump and restore. dump examines files in a file system, determines which ones need to be backed up, and copies those files to a specified disk, tape, or other storage medium. The restore command performs the inverse function of dump—it can restore a full backup of a file system. For more details, see http://dump.sourceforge.net/.

Evince

Evince is a document viewer for PDF and PostScript formats for the GNOME desktop. For more details, see http://www.gnome.org/projects/evince/.

File Roller

File Roller is a GUI-based pack program for the GNOME desktop. It provides features similar to Ark's. For more details, see http://fileroller.sourceforge.net/home.html.

GEdit

GEdit is the official text editor of the GNOME desktop. It provides features similar to Kate's. For more details, see http://www.gnome.org/projects/gedit/.

GNU Parted

GNU Parted is a command line tool for creating, deleting, resizing, checking, and copying partitions and the file systems on them. If you need to create space for new operating systems, use this tool to reorganize disk usage and copy data between different hard disks. For more details, see http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/.

GOCR

GOCR is an OCR (optical character recognition) tool. It converts scanned images of text into text files. For more details, see http://jocr.sourceforge.net/.

gzip, tar, bzip2

There are plenty of packaging programs for reducing disk usage. In general, they differ only in their pack algorithm. Linux can also handle the packaging formats used on Windows. bzip2 is a bit more efficient than gzip, but needs more time, depending on the pack algorithm. For more details about gzip and tar, refer to Abschnitt „Dateiverwaltung“ (Kapitel 7, Shell-Grundlagen, ↑Start).

Kate

Kate is a module of the KDE suite. It has the ability to open several files at once either locally or remotely. With syntax highlighting, project file creation, and external scripts execution, it is a perfect tool for a programmer. For more details, see http://www.kate-editor.org/.

KDar

KDar stands for KDE disk archiver and is a hardware-independent backup solution. KDar uses catalogs (unlike tar), so it is possible to extract a single file without reading the whole archive and it is also possible to create incremental backups. KDar can split an archive into multiple slices and trigger the burning of a data CD or DVD for each slice. For more details, see http://kdar.sourceforge.net/.

Konqueror

Konqueror is a file manager that can also be used as a Web browser, document and image viewer, and CD ripper. For more details, see http://www.konqueror.org/ or read Chapter 13, Browsing with Konqueror to learn about Konqueror's Web browsing functions.

Nautilus

Nautilus is the default file manager of the GNOME desktop. It can be used to create folders and documents, display and manage your files and folders, run scripts, write data to a CD, and open URI locations. For more details, see http://www.gnome.org/projects/nautilus/ or read Section “Managing Folders and Files with Nautilus” (Chapter 2, Working with Your Desktop, ↑GNOME User Guide).

Okular

Okular is the document viewer for KDE 4 which is replaces KPDF. Apart from PDF files, Okular allows you to view a great number of file formats. Its functionality can be easily embedded in other applications. For more details, see http://okular.kde.org/ or read Chapter Viewing PDF Files and Other Documents with Okular (↑KDE User Guide).

taper

Taper is a backup and restore program that provides a friendly user interface to allow backup and restoration of files to and from a tape drive. Conversely, files can be backed up to archive files. Recursively selected directories are supported. For more details, see at http://taper.sourceforge.net/.

vim

vim (vi improved) is a program similar to the text editor vi. Users may need time to adjust to vim, because it distinguishes between command mode and insert mode. The basic features are the same as in all text editors. vim offers some unique options, like macro recording, file format detection and conversion, and multiple buffers in a screen. For more details, see http://www.vim.org/.

GNU Emacs and XEmacs

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor. XEmacs is based on GNU Emacs. Both offer nearly the same functionality with minor differences. Used by experienced developers, they are highly extensible through the Emacs Lisp language. They support many languages, like Russian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. For more details see http://www.xemacs.org/ and http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html.

Xpdf

Xpdf is lean PDF viewing suite for Linux and Unix-like platforms. It includes a viewer application and some export plug-ins for PostScript or text formats. For more details, see http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/.