In the same way it is very important for system administrators to have the right tools to to work smart. Linux is a great desktop OS for developers as well as system administrators. Let us take a look at some of the utilities which makes this a great environment for system administrators and developers. Most of the content below is taken from the home pages of these apps and the I make no claims on the originality. My aim is to introduce the reader to the wonderful tools that are available in a Linux/BSD desktop environment.

Konsole

Let's start from what most people think Linux is all about - a text based shell. Konsole is what is known as an X terminal emulator, often referred to as a terminal or a shell. It gives you the equivalent of an old-fashioned text screen on your desktop, but one which can easily share the screen with your graphical applications. What makes Konsole special? Konsole's advanced features include simple configuration and the ability to use multiple terminal shells in a single window, making for a less cluttered desktop. Konsole is also available as kpart and can thus be easily embedded in other applications, like practiced by Kate and Konqueror.

As most system administrators need log into servers on a regular basis the konsole gives them a benefit over the Windoze command prompt. In windows one needs to use a program like putty to log in using SSH. Also as linux is the desktop OS the techs can use the man pages on the local system.

One can also try out the various commands locally. Consider a simple example.

Is it

$ ln sourcefile destinationfile

or is it

$ ln destinationfile sourcefile

Such things can be easily found out locally without carrying out experiments on the server. Many techs believe that servers are places where they can experiment. However, such experiments can lead to major losses to the customers due to one small error. A system administrator must understand that people have immense faith in them when they give their entire data to them and they cannot risk carrying out simple experiments on servers.

Some screenshots of the konsole can be seen at the konsole site

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