Ask YC: Souping up Ubuntu? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Souping up Ubuntu?

22 pointsaneesh25 comments

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?

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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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.

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 :(.

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.

Can you post a link to the theme you use ? If you customized it, do you mind sharing it ?

Icons: http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/black-white?conte...

Window Theme: http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Humanoid+-+OSX+-+...

I think I got the background from DeviantArt, not positive though. And I just messed with the window color settings until the menus were a grey / titanium color.

edit: make sure you install the compizconfig-settings-manager package. That gives you the ability to set your own compiz settings for animations, transparencies, etc.

That's a great list, right now I' trying Avant Window Navigator, I'll just add Exaile! for music, Geany and Bluefish editors for coding and of course The Gimp.

Nice tips! I just configured my UI to the following: http://picasaweb.google.com/dskhatri/Screenshots/photo#51756...

I used:

- avant window navigator (https://launchpad.net/awn)

- Murrina Eternal Blue theme from http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Murrina-Eternal_b... (uses murrine engine)

- Humanoid-OSX Black window border (http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Humanoid-OSX-Blac...)

- Emacs theming: Clarity and Beauty (https://gna.org/projects/color-theme)

- Conky system monitor (yet to create my own config file)

thanks, nice desktop! Avant window navigator is pretty cool.

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).

This is handy for audio/video stuff:

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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

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

speaking of which i hate nautilus.

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

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

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

where are the file trees for instance?

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

Thunar + Conky might work for you.

If you have more than one computer you need synergy.

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