

Ask YC: Souping up Ubuntu? - aneesh

I recently put Ubuntu on my Dell, and quickly realized I needed to install lots of packages to "soup it up".  I wanted to ask the hacker community about the best packages to add functionality to Ubuntu.  What's your favorite?<p>Edit: I'm looking mainly for a good development environment, plus general UI tweaks and media stuff (like vlc, mplayer), but not any hardcore graphics stuff.
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manvsmachine
The first thing I usually do is change the look, ubuntu's default UI is too
basic for my tastes. Here's a shot of my desktop:
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/manvsmachine/2319405794/>

a good place to start for appearance is <http://www.gnome-look.org>

as far as apps go, here's what I have running: VLC (multi-format media
player), songbird, deluge (GNOME BitTorrent client), Eclipse, GnomeBaker,
Avant Window Navigator (OS X-like dock), Blender (3D authoring software),
Inkscape(vector imaging), Picasa, some others... of course, all the plugins,
apache, languages / libraries for whatever you plan on running...

There are a lot of different ways you can go with it; it would help if you
gave an idea of what functionality you 're looking for. Is this for strictly
dev, or do you do image / graphics work, etc? The Ubuntu forums are a good
place to start.

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vikas5678
Nice! Also loved the car pics you have put up there! Anyway, What do you do
for messengers? I use yahoo messenger extensively for work(I work remotely)
and I need the voice chat feature and it just doesn't work on ubuntu, I hate
that :(.

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manvsmachine
I use pidgin as my main messenger, also have skype but don't use it much...
The yahoo support for it is decent, not really sure about voice though

edit: Try gyachi for better yahoo chat support. Haven't used it myself, but it
seems to be pretty popular on the forum.

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jamesbritt
First I change some of the default global shortcuts. I'm used to ctrl-esc
popping up the general menu. (A habit I acquired from WinXP). I also remove
any desktop image and setup four desktops, each a primary-ish color. I then
select a fairly minimalist theme to reduce wasted chrome space.

I also give common menu items numeric or unique leading characters so that I
can navigate the main program menu more easily without a mouse.

I have some shortcuts for popping up gvim with my One Big File of notes, and
another for bringing up /tmp/crap.txt for scratch space.

I adjust the icons, systray, etc to use minimal space ( though I don't care
for show/hide task bars; I prefer to always see it). I set it so that I only
see the aps assigned to current desktop.

I think the biggest souping comes from a collection of command line scripts
I've assembled to automate various this. Basically, if I don't have a super-
direct keyboard shortcut for something then I have a Ruby script to make it
happen.

Assorted apps I add in: Mercurial, Gimpshop, gvim, ruby built from source,
VMware server, Firefox with 2-dozen add-ons, Pidgen, kvirc, Picassa, Inkscape,
and the Gnome terminal (though I use Kubuntu).

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davidw
This is handy for audio/video stuff:

deb <http://packages.medibuntu.org/> gutsy free non-free

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ropiku
On <http://getdeb.net/> you'll find a lot of deb packages for almost
everything you need.

What programming language do you use ? I use NetBeans for Ruby and vim for
other things (C, minor python edits).

I have VLC, Totem, Avant Window Navigator, Miro, GIMP, NetBeans, Wine.

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himanshu
I find "Kubuntu" to help me be more productive but then it is a matter of
personal preference also.

"Yakuake" is a Quake style terminal that Smoothly rolls down from the top of
your screen after you press the shortcut key. This thing saves a lot of time
to get quick access to the terminal without having to look for the shortcut
icon in the Desktop or the Taskbar.

If you need a good python editor than I would reccomend "DrPython". Also
"ipython" is a good replacement for the standard python shell.

For text editing in general I like "Cream" which is basically a nicely
configured "gvim" : <http://cream.sourceforge.net/>

Konversation is my favorite irc client.

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manvsmachine
I started out using Kubuntu, but the only thing is that they're switching to
KDE4 for the next release. If your system is just for general use, then that's
not a big deal, but I'm waiting till KDE gets a little more stable before
using it for dev.

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queensnake
That thing chokes my system - it's nice for sure, but I'm going to have to
upgrade just to get useable speed.

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zenlinux
Lots of good suggestions here. I'll just add a quick one - Ubuntu doesn't
enable subpixel smoothing on fonts automatically, and if you're using LCD
displays it's a nice thing to have.

You can find this option in System->Preferences->Appearance, Fonts tab.

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rtf
The only things I really have to do to feel at home in a Gnome desktop:

1\. Fool with the mouse movement and screen resolution settings. 2\. Set
shortcuts for "Show the panel run application dialogue" and "Run a terminal".
I use Shift+Win and Shift+Tab for those, respectively.

Once I've done that, I almost never have to use the mouse for non-browsing
tasks. I could probably improve on that by changing out the window manager for
a keyboard-friendly one, but I'd have to learn something new, and I'd have to
maintain the wm setup instead of riding along with whatever the distro wants
to do (which is far less likely to break)

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breily
Its probably more than just a general UI tweak, but I would definitely
recommend switching window managers/desktop environs from Gnome to Ion3. Its
made to be navigable with only the keyboard(you can use the mouse, but you
don't need it). I find it makes me a lot more productive - makes switching
between lots of windows very easy.

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icky
Open up synaptic and browse through all the Documentation sections. There are
lots of goodies there. :)

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jdavid
ok another question, is there a way to get tiled icons in for ubuntu's
desktop? i don't like it when long filenames wrap around.

(*X indicate image data) example

XXXXXXX Title with extension.ext

XXXXXXX file date

XXXXXXX file size

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jdavid
speaking of which i hate nautilus.

any suggestions for something better. windows explorer sucks too, but its
better than nautilus and finder.

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manvsmachine
Try Kubuntu; KDE has a completely new file manager, Dolphin.

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jdavid
not really what i am looking for. i want something less grandma friendly and
more hardcore friendly.

where are the file trees for instance?

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Tichy
Not sure what you mean, Nautilus seems to have file trees? Switch on the
sidepane and select "tree"?

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martianpenguin
If you have more than one computer you need synergy.

