Utilities & Co

Here you find an assorted mix of projects for which I assume there's enoungh public interest to justify a release. It changes from time to time. Some of them have found their way into GNU/Linux distributions, so check there first if a prepackaged version is already available.

• gas-mode.el

  If you sometimes program in assembly language and use Emacs and asm-mode.el, you're invited to try gas-mode.el. It is a completely different approach at editing asm source code, (internally parsing lines according to the syntax rules of assembly language), which fixes drawbacks of asm-mode and offers additional features intended to ease entering assembly code. gas-mode is the designated successor of asm-mode. It is meant replace it in the near future. All testing is welcome.

• netcount

  If you want to have an overview of PPP network usage, you might want to have a look at netcount. It collects data about uptimes, traffic and network speed. Using this data, it outputs textual statistics on network usage thus giving you the basic figures on your PPP/PPPoE account. It doesn't need network filtering to be installed and works for ppp0 (modem, dsl, cable) lines only.

• nstat

  Linux pppd is a nice piece of software. nstat is meant to ease the task of controlling it. It does nothing complicated, but it allows you to see at a glance what state pppd is in (off, ready, or on line) and to switch between states. It also can do things like reanimating pppd if it dies unexpectedly.
  netcount and nstat are packaged together since they share a common logging program and their size doesn't justify a third package which the two would be sharing. As is true for netcount, nstat only works if you have only one single PPP connection which is through ppp0 (and pppoe, if needed).

• nwload

  nwload is a graphical traffic monitor that is similar to gkrellm(1) or xisdnload(1) but offers additional operation parameters and display formatting options. It works with any networking device and supports a wide range of speed and sample rates (200 ms or above).

• settevion

  This program doesn't fit into this line of programs except that it uses Python too. It is only of interest to you if you happen to own a Skymaster DXL 9400 digital satellite receiver, which is sold as Tevion FTA 203 by Aldi in Germany and other countries. You can use it to edit your channel settings. It is available both for Linux and Windows.

All these utilities are published under the terms of version 2 of the GPL, except for settevion, which is free for personal use only. They generally don't suffer from 2 or 4 GByte overflow in network traffic measurement. To run the Linux utilities, you need Python, which is available with any Linux distribution and most probably already is installed on your system.