Kubuntu Documentation

Utilities

Contents

  1. Utilities
    1. Kate
    2. Ark
    3. Klipper
    4. Knotes
    5. Kcalc
    6. Kmag
    7. Konsole
    8. Firewall configuration
    9. Other Useful Utilities
  2. Back Home

Utilities

Your newly installed Kubuntu system has some utilities already installed. One of the most useful is not in your menus; just press the ALT key and F2 (alt+f2). Look at the top of your screen; there is one of your most powerful utilities, called Krunner. See more here: Krunner.

Kate

Kate is the pre-installed text editor for KDE. It has many great features for editing plain text or writing code in many different languages. For more information see Kate Handbook.

Ark

Ark is a tool for handling archives of files such as tar, gzip, bzip2, zip, rar and 7z; pre-installed.

Klipper

Klipper is a clipboard to hold copied text for later use. Unlike other clipboards it will hold your entire copied text, rather than just one line; pre-installed.

Knotes

Knotes is a sticky-note application to post notes on your desktop; pre-installed.

Kcalc

KCalc offers basic calculator functions and much more; pre-installed.

Kmag

KMag is the screen magnifier from KDE; pre-installed.

Konsole

Konsole is the kde terminal emulator, it can be used to run console shells.

Sh

The Bourne shell (sh) was one of the major shells used in early versions of the Unix operating system and became a de facto standard. Every Unix-like system has at least one shell compatible with the Bourne shell. The Bourne shell program name is sh and it is typically located in the Unix file system hierarchy at /bin/sh. The Bourne shell is usually used as fallback for Bash or another shell. The features of the Bourne shell are quite limited if compared to something like Bash.

Bash

Bash stands for "Bourne again shell", a bit of a play on words. For many Linux distribution Bash is the default shell. The Bash command syntax is a superset of the Bourne shell command syntax. Among the features of Bash are: command line editing, command history, the directory stack, the $RANDOM and $PPID variables, and POSIX command substitution syntax $(..)/ When used as an interactive command shell and pressing the tab key, Bash automatically uses command line completion to match partly typed program names, filenames and variable names. Bash syntax simplifies I/O redirection in ways that are not possible in the traditional Bourne shell. For example Bash can redirect standard output (stdout) and standard error (stderr) at the same time using the &> operator.

Using the Terminal

Zsh

The Z shell (zsh) is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a powerful command interpreter for shell scripting. Zsh can be thought of as an extended Bourne shell with a large number of improvements, including some features of bash, ksh, and tcsh. Among its features are: programmable command-line completion, sharing of command history among all running shells, spelling correction, theme-able prompts and it is fully customizable. Attesting to the sheer size of this shell is the famous first sentence of the shell's manual page, which reads "Because zsh contains many features, the zsh manual has been split into a number of sections", and then goes on to list seventeen items.

For a comparison of command shells see this page: Comparison of command shells

Firewall configuration

Ufw

Ufw is the default commandline configuration tool for the firewall. Ufw stands for Uncomplicated Firewall, it is develop to ease iptables firewall configuration. For more information about ufw see: UFW

Gufw

Gufw is a GUI frontend to ufw. By default it is not installed, to install it run the following command from a terminal (Konsole):

sudo apt-get install gufw

For more information about gufw see: Gufw

Other Useful Utilities

Available in the repositories.

  • Filelight creates an interactive map of concentric, segmented rings that help visualise disk usage on your computer.
  • Yakuake is a drop-down terminal emulator based on KDE Konsole technology.
  • Synaptiks is the KDE touchpad configuration tool.

KDE also brings you utilities, tools, and accessories to ease your work. See Utilities & Tools for more.

Back Home

Back to Kubuntu Docs.

The material on this wiki is available under a free license, see Copyright / License for details.