Debian Edu Common packages

The tool apt-listchanges can compare a new version of a package with the one currently installed and show what has been changed, by extracting the relevant entries from the Debian changelog and NEWS files.

It can be run on several .deb archives at a time to get a list of all changes that would be caused by installing or upgrading a group of packages. When configured as an APT plugin it will do this automatically during upgrades.

The arping utility sends ARP and/or ICMP requests to the specified host and displays the replies. The host may be specified by its hostname, its IP address, or its MAC address.

bash completion extends bash's standard completion behavior to achieve complex command lines with just a few keystrokes. This project was conceived to produce programmable completion routines for the most common Linux/UNIX commands, reducing the amount of typing sysadmins and programmers need to do on a daily basis.

GNU bc is an interactive algebraic language with arbitrary precision which follows the POSIX 1003.2 draft standard, with several extensions including multi-character variable names, an `else' statement and full Boolean expressions. GNU bc does not require the separate GNU dc program.

This package provides the 'host' program in the form that is bundled with the BIND 9.X sources.

The main purpose of cfengine is to allow the system administrator to create a single central file which will define how every host on a network should be configured.

It takes a while to set up cfengine for a network (especially an already existing network), but once that is done you will wonder how you ever lived without it!

The SMB/CIFS protocol provides support for cross-platform file sharing with Microsoft Windows, OS X, and other Unix systems.

This package provides utilities for managing mounts of CIFS network file systems.

ConsoleKit is a system daemon for tracking what users are logged into the system and how they interact with the computer (e.g. which keyboard and mouse they use).

It provides asynchronous notification via the system message bus.

This package provides the system daemon and tools to interact with it.

convmv can convert a single filename, a directory tree or all files on a filesystem to a different encoding. It only converts the encoding of filenames, not files contents. A special feature of convmv is that it also takes care of symlinks: the encoding of the symlink's target will be converted if the symlink itself is being converted.

It is also possible to convert directories to UTF-8 which are already partially UTF-8 encoded.

Keywords: rename, move

This package contains two utilities for inspecting and setting the CPU frequency through both the sysfs and procfs CPUFreq kernel interfaces.

By default, it also enables CPUFreq at boot time if the correct CPU driver is found.

The Common UNIX Printing System (or CUPS(tm)) is a printing system and general replacement for lpd and the like. It supports the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), and has its own filtering driver model for handling various document types.

This package provides the parts of CUPS which are needed for using printer drivers.

This package contains some small utilities for debconf developers.

The Debian project digitally signs its Release files. This package contains the archive keys used for that.

The Debian Edu project digitally signs its Release files. This package contains the archive keys used for that.

Installs cfengine config files to be used by the machines set up as part of the Skolelinux project.

The English version of the manual for the Squeeze and Wheezy based release of the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is included in this package, as well as the Rosegarden and Audacity manuals.

Debian Edu is a Debian project to make the best distribution for educational purposes. Skolelinux is the name of the Custom Debian Distribution which is produced by the Debian Edu project.

This package provides default answers for packages using debconf, and configures services to work out of the box after an installation.

This is part of the Debian Edu project.

deborphan finds "orphaned" packages on your system. It determines which packages have no other packages depending on their installation and shows you a list of these packages. It is most useful when finding libraries, but it can be used on packages in all sections.

This package also includes orphaner, a text menu frontend to deborphan. Please install the recommended packages dialog, gettext-base and apt when you want a working and fully featured orphaner.

This small tool provides an opportunity for a system administrator to perform a DHCP request to find out if a DHCP server is still running.

Dmidecode reports information about the system's hardware as described in the system BIOS according to the SMBIOS/DMI standard.

This information typically includes system manufacturer, model name, serial number, BIOS version, asset tag as well as a lot of other details of varying level of interest and reliability depending on the manufacturer. This will often include usage status for the CPU sockets, expansion slots (e.g. AGP, PCI, ISA) and memory module slots, and the list of I/O ports (e.g. serial, parallel, USB).

Beware that DMI data have proven to be too unreliable to be blindly trusted. Dmidecode does not scan the hardware, it only reports what the BIOS told it to.

This little program will eject CD-ROMs (assuming your drive supports the CDROMEJECT ioctl). It also allows setting the autoeject feature.

On supported ATAPI/IDE multi-disc CD-ROM changers, it allows changing the active disc.

You can also use eject to properly disconnect external mass-storage devices like digital cameras or portable music players.

You can wake up WOL compliant Computers which have been powered down to sleep mode or start WOL compliant Computers with a BIOS feature.

WOL is an abbreviation for Wake-on-LAN. It is a standard that allows you to turn on a computer from another location over a network connection.

A feature etherwake seperates from other implementations is, that it also supports WOL passwords.

ethtool can be used to query and change settings such as speed, auto- negotiation and checksum offload on many network devices, especially Ethernet devices.

finger displays information about the system users.

Foomatic is a printing system designed to make it easier to set up common printers for use with Debian (and other operating systems). It provides the "glue" between a print spooler (like CUPS or lpr) and your actual printer, by telling your computer how to process files sent to the printer.

This package contains the architecture-dependent programs needed to set up and maintain the foomatic system. You will also need one or more database packages. The foomatic-db package includes drivers for most common printers using Ghostscript as the print processor, as well as some common glue code used in other filter systems.

Foomatic is a printing system designed to make it easier to set up common printers for use with Debian (and other operating systems). It provides the "glue" between a print spooler (like CUPS or lpr) and your actual printer, by telling your computer how to process files sent to the printer.

This package includes support for printers using the Gutenprint printer driver suite.

Home Page: http://www.openprinting.org/

Gutenprint is the print facility for the GIMP, and in addition a suite of drivers that may be used with common UNIX spooling systems using GhostScript or CUPS. These drivers provide printing quality for UNIX/Linux on a par with proprietary vendor-supplied drivers in many cases, and can be used for many of the most demanding printing tasks. Gutenprint was formerly known as Gimp-Print.

This is a dummy package to migrate from foomatic-filters-ppds to the combination of foomatic-db and foomatic-db-engine.

fping is a ping like program which uses the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request to determine if a target host is responding. fping differs from ping in that you can specify any number of targets on the command line, or specify a file containing the lists of targets to ping. Instead of sending to one target until it times out or replies, fping will send out a ping packet and move on to the next target in a round-robin fashion.

GDB is a source-level debugger, capable of breaking programs at any specific line, displaying variable values, and determining where errors occurred. Currently, gdb supports C, C++, D, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, OpenCL C, Pascal, assembly, Modula-2, Go, and Ada. A must-have for any serious programmer.

gdebi lets you install local deb packages resolving and installing its dependencies. apt does the same, but only for remote (http, ftp) located packages.

This package contains the graphical user interface.

gdebi lets you install local deb packages resolving and installing its dependencies. apt does the same, but only for remote (http, ftp) located packages.

This package contains the libraries and command-line utility.

The hddtemp program monitors and reports the temperature of PATA, SATA or SCSI hard drives by reading Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) information on drives that support this feature.

Get/set device parameters for Linux SATA/IDE drives. Primary use is for enabling irq-unmasking and IDE multiplemode.

This is a transitional dummy package to transition to uniformly named printer-driver-hpijs.

This package contains PPD (printer definition) files for the printers supported through the HP Linux Printing and Imaging System HPIJS driver.

These PPDs should work well with the matching versions of HPLIP and HPIJS, but may not be the most up-to-date PPDs available for a given printer. See http://www.openprinting.org/ for the latest version of the PPDs (which are not guaranteed to work well).

The HP Linux Printing and Imaging System provides full support for printing on most HP SFP (single function peripheral) inkjets and many LaserJets, and for scanning, sending faxes and for photo-card access on most HP MFP (multi-function peripheral) printers.

HPLIP is composed of:

• System services to handle communications with the printers
• HP CUPS backend driver (hp:) with bi-directional communication with HP printers (provides printer status feedback to CUPS and enhanced HPIJS functionality such as 4-side full-bleed printing support)
• HP CUPS backend driver for sending faxes (hpfax:)
• hpcups CUPS Raster driver to turn rasterized input from the CUPS filter chain into the printer's native format (PCL, LIDIL, ...). (hpcups is shipped in a separate package)
• HPIJS Ghostscript IJS driver to rasterize output from PostScript(tm) files or from any other input format supported by Ghostscript, and also for PostScript(tm) to fax conversion support (HPIJS is shipped in a separate package)
• Command line utilities to perform printer maintenance, such as ink-level monitoring or pen cleaning and calibration
• GUI and command line utility to download data from the photo card interfaces in MFP devices
• GUI and command line utilities to interface with the fax functions
• A GUI toolbox to access all these functions in a friendly way
• HPAIO SANE backend (hpaio) for flatbed and Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) scanning using MFP devices

USB, JetDirect (network) and parallel-port devices are supported.

Htop is an ncursed-based process viewer similar to top, but it allows one to scroll the list vertically and horizontally to see all processes and their full command lines.

Tasks related to processes (killing, renicing) can be done without entering their PIDs.

hwinfo is the hardware detection tool used in SuSE Linux.

In Debian Edu (Skolelinux) hwinfo has shown better results than discover when detecting mouse, keyboard and monitor.

hwinfo collects information about the hardware installed on a system. Among others, libhd contains information about cdrom, zip, floppy, disks and partitions, network card, graphics card, monitor, camera, mouse, sound, pppoe, isdn, modem, printer, scanner, bios, cpu, usb, memory and smp.

This package does not include the binaries hwscan, hwscand and hwscanqueue. If you think one or more of these should be included in the package, please contact the maintainer at hwinfo@packages.debian.org.

iftop does for network usage what top(1) does for CPU usage. It listens to network traffic on a named interface and displays a table of current bandwidth usage by pairs of hosts. Handy for answering the question "Why is my Internet link so slow?".

This package contains the ijsgutenprint binary which provides Ghostscript with a Gutenprint driver, including all printers supported by Gutenprint. ijsgutenprint is an IJS server (driver), which communicates with Ghostscript (an IJS client) using the IJS (InkJet Server) communications protocol. IJS is a method for separating ghostscript drivers from ghostscript, to allow ghostscript to be more extensible.

If you wish to print using Ghostscript and the Gutenprint drivers, install this package. This is typical for LPRng setups. If you are using CUPS, printer-driver-gutenprint is a better choice, but this package will still work with the appropriate foomatic setup if you wish to make use of foomatic.

Gutenprint is the print facility for the GIMP, and in addition a suite of drivers that may be used with common UNIX spooling systems using GhostScript or CUPS. These drivers provide printing quality for UNIX/Linux on a par with proprietary vendor-supplied drivers in many cases, and can be used for many of the most demanding printing tasks. Gutenprint was formerly known as Gimp-Print.

iotop does for I/O usage what top(1) does for CPU usage. It watches I/O usage information output by the Linux kernel and displays a table of current I/O usage by processes on the system. It is handy for answering the question "Why is the disk churning so much?".

iotop can only run under a Linux 2.6.20 or later kernel built with the CONFIG_TASKSTATS, CONFIG_TASK_DELAY_ACCT, CONFIG_TASK_IO_ACCOUNTING and CONFIG_VM_EVENT_COUNTERS build config options on.

This is a transitional dummy package to get upgrading systems to install the iproute2 package. It can safely be removed.

The arping command acts like the standard ping command except it pings a machine by its ARP address instead of its IP address. It is typically used to locate a machine if its hardware address is known but its IP address is unknown

This package provides "less", a file pager (that is, a memory-efficient utility for displaying text one screenful at a time). Less has many more features than the basic pager "more". As part of the GNU project, it is widely regarded as the standard pager on UNIX-derived systems.

Also provided are "lessecho", a simple utility for ensuring arguments with spaces are correctly quoted; "lesskey", a tool for modifying the standard (vi-like) keybindings; and "lesspipe", a filter for specific types of input, such as .doc or .txt.gz files.

This package contains a plugin for the Name Service Switch, providing host name resolution for the locally configured system hostname as returned by gethostname(2). It returns all locally configured public IP addresses or -- if none are configured, the IPv4 address 127.0.1.1 (which is on the local loopback) and the IPv6 address ::1 (which is the local host).

A lot of software relies on that the local host name is resolvable. This package provides an alternative to the fragile and error-prone manual editing of /etc/hosts.

ConsoleKit is a system daemon for tracking what users are logged into the system and how they interact with the computer (e.g. which keyboard and mouse they use).

This package provides a PAM module which can be used for console logins. Graphical login managers should talk to ConsoleKit directly.

Many programs use $TMPDIR for storing temporary files. Not all of them are good at securing the permissions of those files. libpam-tmpdir sets $TMPDIR and $TMP for PAM sessions and sets the permissions quite tight. This helps system security by having an extra layer of security, making such symlink attacks and other /tmp based attacks harder or impossible

libwww-perl (also known as LWP) is a collection of Perl modules that provide a simple and consistent programming interface (API) to the World-Wide Web. The main focus of the library is to provide classes and functions that allow you to write WWW clients. It also contains general purpose modules, as well as a simple HTTP/1.1-compatible server implementation.

Updates config files of different programs so they use the right language by default.

This package is based on locale-config-skolelinux from the Skolelinux Project (now Debian Edu Project), which it replaces.

A small tool to provide detailed information on the hardware configuration of the machine. It can report exact memory configuration, firmware version, mainboard configuration, CPU version and speed, cache configuration, bus speed, etc. on DMI-capable x86 systems, on some PowerPC machines (PowerMac G4 is known to work) and AMD64.

Information can be output in plain text, HTML or XML.

Uses information in sysfs (Linux kernels 2.6.0 and later) to list all scsi devices (or hosts) currently attached to the system. Options can be used to control the amount and form of information provided for each device.

This package provides the man command, the primary way of examining the on-line help files (manual pages). Other utilities provided include the whatis and apropos commands for searching the manual page database, the manpath utility for determining the manual page search path, and the maintenance utilities mandb, catman and zsoelim. man-db uses the groff suite of programs to format and display the manual pages.

This package contains GNU/Linux manual pages for these sections:

 4 = Devices (e.g. hd, sd).
 5 = File formats and protocols, syntaxes of several system
     files (e.g. wtmp, /etc/passwd, nfs).
 7 = Conventions and standards, macro packages, etc.
     (e.g. nroff, ascii).

Sections 1, 6 and 8 are provided by the respective applications. This package only includes the intro man page describing the section.

The man pages describe syntaxes of several system files.

GNU Midnight Commander is a text-mode full-screen file manager. It uses a two panel interface and a subshell for command execution. It includes an internal editor with syntax highlighting and an internal viewer with support for binary files. Also included is Virtual Filesystem (VFS), that allows files on remote systems (e.g. FTP, SSH servers) and files inside archives to be manipulated like real files.

Memtest86+ scans your RAM for errors.

This tester runs independently of any OS - it is run at computer boot-up, so that it can test all of your memory. You may want to look at `memtester', which allows to test your memory within Linux, but this one won't be able to test your whole RAM.

It can output a list of bad RAM regions usable by the BadRAM kernel patch, so that you can still use your old RAM with one or two bad bits.

Memtest86+ is based on memtest86 3.0, and adds support for recent hardware, as well as a number of general-purpose improvements, including many patches to memtest86 available from various sources.

Both memtest86 and memtest86+ are being worked on in parallel.

Examines and sets the MII registers of network cards.

This is a general program. You can find specialized programs for several network cards in the nictools-pci and nictools-nopci packages.

mlocate is a new implementation of locate, a tool to find files anywhere in the filesystem based on their name, using a fixed pattern or a regular expression. Unlike other tools like find(1), locate uses a previously created database to perform the search, allowing queries to execute much faster. This database is updated periodically from cron.

Several implementations of locate exist: the original implementation from GNU's findutils, slocate, and mlocate. The advantages of mlocate are:

• it indexes all the filesystem, but results of a search will only include files that the user running locate has access to. It does this by updating the database as root, but making it unreadable for normal users, who can only access it via the locate binary. slocate does this as well, but not the original locate.

• instead of re-reading all the contents of all directories each time the database is updated, mlocate keeps timestamp information in its database and can know if the contents of a directory changed without reading them again. This makes updates much faster and less demanding on the hard drive. This feature is only found in mlocate.

Installing mlocate will change the /usr/bin/locate binary to point to mlocate via the alternatives mechanism. After installation, you may wish to run /etc/cron.daily/mlocate by hand to create the database, otherwise mlocate won't work until that script is run from cron itself (since mlocate does not use the same database file as standard locate). Also, you may wish to remove the "locate" package in order not to have two different database files updated regularly on your system.

Mtools is a collection of utilities to access MS-DOS disks from Unix without mounting them. It supports Win'95 style long file names, OS/2 Xdf disks, ZIP/JAZ disks and 2m disks (store up to 1992kB on a high density 3 1/2 disk).

Also included in this package are commands to eject and manipulate the write/password protection control of Zip disks.

mtr combines the functionality of the 'traceroute' and 'ping' programs in a single network diagnostic tool.

As mtr starts, it investigates the network connection between the host mtr runs on and a user-specified destination host. After it determines the address of each network hop between the machines, it sends a sequence ICMP ECHO requests to each one to determine the quality of the link to each machine. As it does this, it prints running statistics about each machine.

mtr combines the functionality of the 'traceroute' and 'ping' programs in a single network diagnostic tool.

As mtr starts, it investigates the network connection between the host mtr runs on and a user-specified destination host. After it determines the address of each network hop between the machines, it sends a sequence ICMP ECHO requests to each one to determine the quality of the link to each machine. As it does this, it prints running statistics about each machine.

mtr-tiny is compiled without support for X and conserves disk space.

Ncftp allows a user to transfer files to and from a remote network site, and offers additional features that are not found in the standard interface, ftp. This version has Readline support enabled.

These tools can help you to diagnose problems with your ethernet cards or - in some cases - give those cards the final hint, to work in your network.

 alta-diag     : Diagnostic and setup for the Sundance "Alta" NIC
 eepro100-diag : Diagnostic and setup for the Intel EEPro100 Ethernet cards
 epic-diag     : Diagnostics and EEPROM setup for the SMC EPIC-100
 myson-diag    : Diagnostic and setup for the Myson mtd803 Ethernet chip
 natsemi-diag  : Diagnostic and setup for the NatSemi DP83815 Ethernet chip
 ne2k-pci-diag : Diagnostics and EEPROM setup for PCI NE2000 clones
 ns820-diag    : Diagnostic and setup for the NatSemi DP83820 Ethernet chip
 pcnet-diag    : Diagnostic and setup for the AMD PCnet/PCI Ethernet chip
 rtl8139-diag  : Diagnostics and EEPROM setup for RealTek RTL8129/8139 chips
 starfire-diag : Diagnostic and setup for the Adaptec Starfire DuraLAN
 tulip-diag    : Diagnostic and setup for the Digital DC21x4* Ethernet chips
 via-diag      : Diagnostic and setup for the VIA Rhine vt86c100 and vt3043
                 Ethernet chips
 vortex-diag   : Diagnostics and EEPROM setup for the 3Com Vortex series
 winbond-diag  : Diagnostic and setup for the Winbond w89c840 Ethernet cards
 yellowfin-diag: Diagnostic and setup for the Packet Engines Yellowfin chips
 pci-config    : Show and manipulate PCI configuration space

Nmap is a utility for network exploration or security auditing. It supports ping scanning (determine which hosts are up), many port scanning techniques, version detection (determine service protocols and application versions listening behind ports), and TCP/IP fingerprinting (remote host OS or device identification). Nmap also offers flexible target and port specification, decoy/stealth scanning, sunRPC scanning, and more. Most Unix and Windows platforms are supported in both GUI and commandline modes. Several popular handheld devices are also supported, including the Sharp Zaurus and the iPAQ.

nullidentd is a small, fast and secure identd daemon. It returns a static string for every query.

The inetd server is a network daemon program that specializes in managing incoming network connections. Its configuration file tells it what program needs to be run when an incoming connection is received. Any service port may be configured for either of the tcp or udp protocols.

This is a port of the OpenBSD daemon with some debian-specific features. This package supports IPv6, built-in libwrap access control, binding to specific addresses, UNIX domain sockets and socket buffers tuning.

This is the portable version of OpenSSH, a free implementation of the Secure Shell protocol as specified by the IETF secsh working group.

Ssh (Secure Shell) is a program for logging into a remote machine and for executing commands on a remote machine. It provides secure encrypted communications between two untrusted hosts over an insecure network. X11 connections and arbitrary TCP/IP ports can also be forwarded over the secure channel. It can be used to provide applications with a secure communication channel.

This package provides the ssh, scp and sftp clients, the ssh-agent and ssh-add programs to make public key authentication more convenient, and the ssh-keygen, ssh-keyscan, ssh-copy-id and ssh-argv0 utilities.

In some countries it may be illegal to use any encryption at all without a special permit.

ssh replaces the insecure rsh, rcp and rlogin programs, which are obsolete for most purposes.

This package contains various utilities for inspecting and setting of devices connected to the PCI bus.

This is a transitional dummy package to transition to uniformly named printer-driver-pnm2ppa.

Procinfo-NG is a small program that gathers some system information from diverse files under /proc and /sys and prints it to the screen. Procinfo-NG is a complete rewrite of the old system monitoring app procinfo.

Can be used to create mail-servers, mailing lists, sort your incoming mail into separate folders/files (very convenient when subscribing to one or more mailing lists or for prioritising your mail), preprocess your mail, start any programs upon mail arrival (e.g. to generate different chimes on your workstation for different types of mail) or selectively forward certain incoming mail automatically to someone.

This package contains miscellaneous utilities that use the proc FS:

• fuser: identifies processes that are using files or sockets.
• killall: kills processes by name (e.g. "killall -HUP named").
• peekfd: shows the data traveling over a file descriptor.
• pstree: shows currently running processes as a tree.
• prtstat: print the contents of /proc//stat

This archive contains modules that allow you to use GTK+ in Python programs.

The VTE library provides a terminal emulator widget VteTerminal for applications using the GTK+ toolkit. It also provides the VtePTY object containing functions for starting a new process on a new pseudo-terminal and for manipulating pseudo-terminals.

This package contains the Python bindings to the VTE library for GTK+ 2.x.

"readahead" is the term used to refer to a tool that preloads files in this case used during the boot process to make the system boot faster.

This implementation of the tool provides the following features:

• It can take multiple lists of files to be preloaded, and sort them according to their position on the disk.
• It preloads the inode tables on ext2-based file systems.
• It opens the files without making the system update their access time, therefore avoiding extra disk writes.
• It uses a lightweight monitoring daemon.

reportbug is a tool designed to make the reporting of bugs in Debian and derived distributions relatively painless. Its features include:

• Integration with mutt and mh/nmh mail readers.
• Access to outstanding bug reports to make it easier to identify whether problems have already been reported.
• Automatic checking for newer versions of packages.
• Optional automatic verification of integrity of packages via debsums.
• Support for following-up on outstanding reports.
• Optional PGP/GnuPG integration.

reportbug is designed to be used on systems with an installed mail transport agent, like exim or sendmail; however, you can edit the configuration file and send reports using any available mail server.

This package also includes the "querybts" script for browsing the Debian bug tracking system.

Resolvconf is a framework for keeping up to date the system's information about name servers. It sets itself up as the intermediary between programs that supply this information (such as ifup and ifdown, DHCP clients, the PPP daemon and local name servers) and programs that use this information (such as DNS caches and resolver libraries).

This package may require some manual configuration. Please read the README file for detailed instructions.

rsync is a fast and versatile file-copying tool which can copy locally and to/from a remote host. It offers many options to control its behavior, and its remote-update protocol can minimize network traffic to make transferring updates between machines fast and efficient.

It is widely used for backups and mirroring and as an improved copy command for everyday use.

This package provides both the rsync command line tool and optional daemon functionality.

Rsyslog is a multi-threaded implementation of syslogd (a system utility providing support for message logging), with features that include:

• reliable syslog over TCP, SSL/TLS and RELP
• on-demand disk buffering
• email alerting
• writing to MySQL or PostgreSQL databases (via separate output plugins)
• permitted sender lists
• filtering on any part of the syslog message
• on-the-wire message compression
• fine-grained output format control
• failover to backup destinations
• enterprise-class encrypted syslog relaying

It is the default syslogd on Debian systems.

GNU Screen is a terminal multiplexer that runs several separate "screens" on a single physical character-based terminal. Each virtual terminal emulates a DEC VT100 plus several ANSI X3.64 and ISO 2022 functions. Screen sessions can be detached and resumed later on a different terminal.

Screen also supports a whole slew of other features, including configurable input and output translation, serial port support, configurable logging, and multi-user support.

strace is a system call tracer, i.e. a debugging tool which prints out a trace of all the system calls made by a another process/program. The program to be traced need not be recompiled for this, so you can use it on binaries for which you don't have source.

System calls and signals are events that happen at the user/kernel interface. A close examination of this boundary is very useful for bug isolation, sanity checking and attempting to capture race conditions.

Sysfs is a virtual file system in Linux kernel 2.5+ that provides a tree of system devices. This package provides the program 'systool' to query it: it can list devices by bus, class, and topology.

In addition this package ships a configuration file /etc/sysfs.conf which allows one to conveniently set sysfs attributes at system bootup (in the init script /etc/init.d/sysfsutils).

If you need sysfs queries in own programs, then you may want to use the libsysfs library directly (package libsysfs-dev).

System-config-lvm provides a graphical interface to the LVM tools (and related utilities, including fsck and resize2fs) which is good for non-emergency storage administration. It enables you to manage your logical volume and filesystem configuration with a few mouse clicks, and it prevents potentially- disasterous command-line mistakes such as reducing a logical volume size before reducing the filesystem contained within that volume.

(One word of warning: system-config-lvm does not recognize RAID elements as being in use, and therefore lists them as "Unitnitialized Entities". If you are using a LVM-on-RAID configuration, system-config-lvm will let you wipe out RAID elements by making them into PVs. Be careful!)

This program allows you to dump the traffic on a network. tcpdump is able to examine IPv4, ICMPv4, IPv6, ICMPv6, UDP, TCP, SNMP, AFS BGP, RIP, PIM, DVMRP, IGMP, SMB, OSPF, NFS and many other packet types.

It can be used to print out the headers of packets on a network interface, filter packets that match a certain expression. You can use this tool to track down network problems, to detect attacks or to monitor network activities.

The more traditional traceroute(8) sends out either UDP or ICMP ECHO packets with a TTL of one, and increments the TTL until the destination has been reached. By printing the gateways that generate ICMP time exceeded messages along the way, it is able to determine the path packets are taking to reach the destination.

The problem is that with the widespread use of firewalls on the modern Internet, many of the packets that traceroute(8) sends out end up being filtered, making it impossible to completely trace the path to the destination. However, in many cases, these firewalls will permit inbound TCP packets to specific ports that hosts sitting behind the firewall are listening for connections on. By sending out TCP SYN packets instead of UDP or ICMP ECHO packets, tcptraceroute is able to bypass the most common firewall filters.

The traceroute utility displays the route used by IP packets on their way to a specified network (or Internet) host. Traceroute displays the IP number and host name (if possible) of the machines along the route taken by the packets. Traceroute is used as a network debugging tool. If you're having network connectivity problems, traceroute will show you where the trouble is coming from along the route.

Install traceroute if you need a tool for diagnosing network connectivity problems.