RPi4 – adding/removing my favorite programs
Along with a full install of LibreOffice, I was tickled to see that VLC, (my favorite multimedia player), was loaded by default in the latest “full” version of Raspbian “Buster” off of the provided “NOOBS” installer provided by Canakit.
I did install a few more packages by force of habit soon after the install and shared the following with Phil, thought I would share it here too.
I use these programs on both Windows 10 and Linux Mint at present, chose to install them using the available GUI to kind of get used to it:
Clicked on the Raspberry | Preferences | Add/Remove Software – then used the search function at the top left to locate each package name I was interested in installing – for common packages like those listed below, it is a lot easier than using “sudo apt install” on the command line. Out of the list of “finds”, put a check mark in the box to the left of the one you decide you want and click the “Apply” button in the lower right to do the install. Just a note, in today’s packages on both Raspbian and Linux, they are smart enough to go ahead and load any dependencies, like any necessary library files, that you don’t already have on your system – that is a NICE thing. (In the 90’s you had to figure out what was missing yourself).
gimp – Gnu Image Manipulation Program. I love this one for editing image files of all kinds – use the windows version routinely to do things like resize images or crop photos.
filezilla – A very good FTP (file transfer protocol) program. Not used as often these days but this was my primary tool for moving files across a network or the internet long ago.
thunderbird – This is my go to email program and has been for lots of years. Know there are probably better ones available, but this is the Mozilla product, same as the FireFox web browser, and therefore devil I know.
aisleriot solitare – it comes up in the search as “GNOME solitaire card game collection”. As we mentioned on the air, I also like Klondike, Heidi likes Spider single deck.
I sent the following additional note to Phil via eMail:
“Later on I added the “gparted” package that I want to play with for manipulating, storage device partitions/format/cloning/etc. While I love command line tools like fdisk, dd, grep, etc. – when I remember how doggone hard it was to learn them and all of the associated arguments I kind of shudder. Now, its been long enough that I’m kind of having to go through some of that again and think its finally time for me to move over go the more modern “graphical” tools available, so will be having a look at gparted and some other packages until I find one I like. Getting old and lazy I guess, but back then all we had were floppy disks, then later hard drives. Today we have stuff like USB sticks, SSDs, SDs, and so forth.”
Wanted to make a blog post on this stuff a kind of “food for thought” post and will hopefully serve to show/remind you of an easier way to install packages on Raspbian.
73, dave/W6TUX