Quite often we stagnate a bit on MDK RPM's or what is installed by default and sometimes another distro will include a great piece of software and draw out attention to it.

Then i find the RPM is already done, i just handn't tried it.....

So post any great killer apps here, with a short description and why you think they are killer...

preferably they should be open source and applicable to everyone...

I'll start by nominating nvu from Linspire... fills a niche for easy web editors.

ScummVM... a rather straightforward way to actually play some adventure games on Linux... there are a few freely available as well (Beneath a steel sky, flight of the amazon queen, ...)

KAF: an xmame frontend that I use every day. I even have a seperate desktop for it so I don't have to open it.

....the killer apps that make my day awesome...

screen
My most usefull would be gnu 'screen' I can't survive without it. It's a cli app, you could almost describe it as a window manager for command lines. it has a wealth of features, some i still havnt discovered - but it's like christmas when i do discover a new one There's rpms about the place.
http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/screen.htm
howto here:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/9/16838/14935

Music player daemon
http://www.musicpd.org
Awesome music player, better than rhythmbox, beep-media-player, muine, whatever you use, it's awesome. Works on a client server base, so the server still play's it's music even when X goes down or the client's window is closed. There are plenty of frontends too, my favourite being the GNOME Media Player Client. It's easy to use, and sustains a large library of Music better than any other program out there.

bashpodder:
http://linc.homeunix.org:8080/scripts/bashpodder/
http://aslan.no-ip.com/~iphitus/downloads/...ams/bashpodder/
It's a basic bash podcasting client. There isnt anything all to special about it, you put your podcasts into a config file, which it reads and then downloads where you want it. Works well when thrown into cron to automate the task Either way it does an awesome job, and i prefer it over the gui jPodder.
See here: http://mandrakeusers.org/index.php?showtopic=21360

Blam!
Imendio's Blam! is an awesome rss aggregator that I use. It does a great job, is fast, clean, easy to use and stable. Looks good too
http://www.imendio.com/projects/blam/

iphitus

BitchX
kiss-ass ncurses based IRC client [ urpmi bitchx]

KDissert
mind mapping tool
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=12725

Aterm (urpmi aterm)
http://aterm.sourceforge.net/
highly configurable console with colorised transparency

e.g.
aterm -tr -tint blue -bg black -fg yellow

more examples: http://aterm.sourceforge.net/features.php

Celestia (urpmi celestia)
3D solar system explorer. highly recommended.

in terms of graphic-design, we all know gimp. many know sodipodi. and inkscape was the "little brother" that few used. now, inkspace is perhaps the best open-source vector drawings program that closes the gap to adobe illustrator at an amazingly fast pace. i guess two or three years and it will be ready to lure graphic-designers away from adobe. now if we only had a good alternative to quark xpress... (scribus is miles! awayand more of a pagemaker rival...)

inkscape was actually a fork of sodipodi caused by frustration with sodipodi's development policies, wasn't it? I've heard it's good, though.

Not really an app, but my one of my favourite Things - adblock plugin for Firefox (and any other Gecko browser) - http://adblock.mozdev.org/ . Be sure to visit the 'advanced filters' sticky thread on the forum for the best filters. Banner ads? What are they?

bluemote - lets you use bluetooth-enabled Ericsson cellphones as a PC remote control. http://www.geocities.com/saravkrish/progs/bluemote/

units - console-based conversion of just about *any* unit to any other. It's probably already installed on your system but you also probably didn't know about it :). Just type 'units' at a console, then try and fool it.

sound-juicer - lovely HIGified CD ripping goodness for GNOME. It uses gstreamer and both a) actually works and B) shows why gstreamer is really good - it uses gstreamer's pipeline-based design to rip direct from CD to ogg in a single process, rather than the two-stage -> wav -> ogg process most rippers use. Once it has quality settings (next version, supposedly) I'll actually use it instead of grip. :)

Maybe my favourite window manager: Matchbox. It's fast, light, and perfect for weak PC, or living-room PC.

I like those for mail handling: BincIMAP for accessing Maildir mail, and PopFile for categorizing it (I don't want to delete SPAM, just set it appart, just in case of "false positives").

Yves.

OK I gotta try that

Draksync. It's the best way to sync directories and files (including email and documents) period. I use it in my office as a primary backup tool. All the people need is just to press the button, enter their password, and everything will be synced into the server. All I need to do is just backup the /home partition and I'm done

Stardict. Find the translation of any highlighted word. It even have English - Indonesian dictionary.. I use this one a lot

autossh

pretty handy tool

since I"m a fedora only user i don't know if there is a mdk package but you could build from source or try Dag's src.rpm or spec file on mdk I guess ;-)

http://dag.wieers.com/packages/autossh/


iphitus will appreciate this:

gowator - to save you some heartache when you do, this is what I need to do to make it work on Cooker. (maybe it works better in 10.1, but just in case :>)

before calling bluemote, do this as root:

# mknod -m 666 /dev/rfcomm0 c 216 0
# rfcomm bind /dev/rfcomm0 bt.ad.dr.es.so.fp.ho.ne

(you can find the bt address of the phone from hcitool scan)

Now when you run bluemote it'll actually work, as opposed to not talking to the phone at all . Just super-in-case, I found before I did *anything* with my phone via bluetooth I had to force the two to pair up, which I did by:

# rfcomm connect /dev/rfcomm0 ad.dr.es.so.fp.ho.ne 5

that forces a connection between the two, the phone will detect a new device, ask if you want to pair with it, then ask for the pin (mandrake default 1234). Then you can just ctrl-c the connection. Now they're paired for ever, you only need to do this bit once. I couldn't find a more elegant way to make 'em pair up. You can use gnome-obex-send or kdebluetooth to send files to the phone, you should be able to receive from the phone too but at least in Cooker it's broken. I'm gonna try and get MDK to make all this a lot smoother for the next release. It's still better than it was a year ago, when you had to build half the tools from source

If only my isp didnt block incoming connections :(