- Skype (download the package from the site)
- VLC
- Gimp
- OpenOffice
- Pidgin (or any IM client)
- Audio Player
- Opera (apt-get install libqt3-mt & download it from the website)
- Flash Player (download it from the website)
- Abode Acrobat Reader (download it from the website)
- Filezilla – download it from the official website – you don’t need installation
- frozen-bubble
If you are a Web Developer:
- A good text editor (Kate)
- Yakuake (to autostart on GNOME: System->Preferences->Startup applications)
- LAMP stack (possibly)
If you are very organized
- you will mount a data partition automatically. To do that
- create the directory /mnt/data writeable by anyone
- with fdisk -l check the partition that is likely to be the data partition (it will be large and possibly FAT32), i.e. /dev/sda3
- search in /etc/passwd, the uid of your user, i.e.: 1000
- append to your /etc/fstab a line like this (use the values you found before):
/dev/sda6 /mnt/data auto utf8,uid=1000,rw 0 0
- you will create a script (based on rsync) to automatically backup your important data (see related post and penny/progetti/rsync_data.sh)
Nice Extras
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Playing Restricted Formats (mp3, Quicktime, WMV, Flash, etc)
Ubuntu can play the most popular non-free media formats, including DVD, MP3, Quicktime, Windows Media, and more by installing the ubuntu-restricted-extras package:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras
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Adding the Medibuntu Repository
Medibuntu (Multimedia, Entertainment & Distractions In Ubuntu) is a repository of packages that cannot be included into the Ubuntu distribution for legal reasons (copyright, license, patent, etc). Below are the instructions to add the Medibuntu repository to your system’s list of APT repositories. These instructions and additional information about Medibuntu can also be found here here.
Add Medibuntu to your sources.list, as well as its GPG key to your keyring.sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
Then, add the GPG Key:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update
You may be asked to accept this package even though it cannot be authenticated. This is normal; typing “Yes” means you trust Medibuntu.
Once you have added the Medibuntu repository, you can easily install a number of useful packages. To play encrypted DVDs, for instance, the libdvdcss2 package is essential. libdvdcss is a simple library designed for accessing DVDs like a block device without having to bother about the decryption. To install:sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2
There are a few formats such as certain Windows formats, Real, and Apple Quicktime which do not have native codecs under Linux. To work around this issue, external binary codecs are used instead to play these formats. To install:
sudo apt-get install w32codecs
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Installing Microsoft Core Fonts
Note: If you followed the Medibuntu instructions above, this package is already installed.
If you want Arial, Georgia, Times New Roman, Verdona, etc., you can install the following package that will run a script to download and unpack these font packages and install them on your system.
Note: Microsoft used to distribute their core fonts in a package — the MS core web fonts. They withdrew them a couple of years ago, but it’s still legal to redistribute them in their original (.CAB — windows installer) packaging and licensing.
To install the Microsoft Core Fonts package, use:sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
