Htop - Manage Your System Processes in Seconds

Htop is a process manager that builds on the functionality of top. It allows you to view available memory and CPU usage as well as kill and manage running processes. It integrates quite well into the system manager Conky.


You can see it in action with this video via YouTube (credit: owburg):



Htop has a few features not found in top. First of all, the interface is more appealing, and it is easier to see what's going on. It opens a little faster, and you can kill processes by highlighting the name and pressing F9 instead of remembering the pid. You can scroll through the process list to see more than the first slew of items. Htop supports mouse operation as well.

As Debian Admin points out, top does have one advantage over htop:

[...] top is older, hence, more used and tested

You can install htop automagically by clicking here, searching for it in Synaptic, or by running the following command:

sudo apt-get install htop

This is by far my favorite CLI process manager. In fact, I haven't used the GUI included in GNOME ever since I found this. If you need help with usage, don't hesitate to leave a comment or a link to your question on ubuntuforums.org.

Frozen-Bubble - A Ridiculously Addictive Puzzle Game

Frozen-Bubble has blissfully stolen hours and hours of my life with its addictive gameplay and flippin' awesome soundtrack. It's an easy game with a simple premise: shoot colors bubbles onto the game board in an attempt to match up three or more similarly colored bubbles. Doing so will cause them to fall from the board, taking connected bubbles with them. If you clear all of the bubbles, you move on to the next level. If the bubbles pile up and cover the entire screen, you lose the game and restart the entire level.

Because my description is probably dense and hard to grasp, here's a video. By the way, no one gets to make fun of my mad Frozen-Bubble skillz.



The developer website lists the features well:

Colorful 3D rendered penguin animations, 100 levels of 1p game, hours and hours of 2p game, nights and nights of 2p/3p/4p/5p game over LAN or Internet, a level-editor, 3 professional quality digital soundtracks, 15 stereo sound effects, 8 unique graphical transition effects, 8 unique logo eye-candies.

Let me emphasize again: the soundtrack is amazing. It sounds really, really good. And the multiplayer is a lot of fun, especially over the LAN.

Install frozen-bubble using Synaptic, the Add/Remove... dialog, or by typing the following into the Terminal:

sudo apt-get install frozen-bubble

Conky - A Desktop System Monitor

Conky is a system monitor. It handles a bunch of different system variables, including CPU, disk space, running processes, RAM, temperature, network transfer, and log data. Conky is a fork of torsmo. You can customize the layout, colors, and fonts. It can be a bit of a bear to configure --- it requires significant work with the .conkyrc file in order to get it up and running. Fortunately, you can find a variety of good configuration templates and files all over the internet. (Hat Tip to lyrae for the weather script I currently use)


Installing the package takes the normal route. Fire up a Terminal, and type the following:

sudo apt-get install conky

From there, you can launch the application by typing 'conky' into the Alt+F2 dialog, creating a menu launcher, or by adding it to startup.

Speaking of Terminals though, I've been thinking of doing a roundup of my favorite terminal emulators. Currently, I'm a fan of rxvt. What do you use, and why do you prefer it?

Agave - Intuitive Color Palette Management

Hello dear readers! I'm glad to be back from my vacation feeling refreshed and ready to bring you some nice Ubuntu applications. Thanks again for all of the wonderful suggestions thus far. The best way to keep up to date with all of the new programs featured here at The Daily Ubuntu is to subscribe to the site feed.


Agave is a color palette selection tool used to pick design layouts for desktop themes, web site designs, icon creation, and much more. It simplifies the process of choosing colors by generating a palette based on an initial color selection according to the selected rule and color set. Supported color sets include GNOME Icon, Tango Icon, Web-Safe, and Visibone.


Picking the initial color requires no knowledge of complex codes: all you need to do is pick a color from the grid, and Agave generates the rest. From there, it will spit out the color information in hexadecimal, RGB, and HSV form for use in The GIMP, CSS, or other implementations. You can even generate a random palette for creative assistance. As soon as you find a color combination you like, you can easily adjust it by making it lighter, darker, or changing the level of saturation. Add it to your favorites, and export it to a file for easy reference.

You can install Agave via the Add/Remove... dialog found in the Applications menu or with Synaptic (further directions found here), or by typing the following into the Terminal:

sudo apt-get install agave

OR you can click on this link, and apt will do it for you! Thank you to adn for explaining that bit of ninja magic.