SGLNX

Since Canonical created Ubuntu for the masses, it has encouraged many users to try linux and eventually switch over to linux completely.

The ease of trying out with its Live CD and GUI installation with support of most common hardware makes it more popular for linux beginners.

According to DistroWatch, Ubuntu is still the top of the preferred list of linux distribution. The Ubuntu packs in all the necessary tools and drivers for a fresh installation on any PC so that it can boot up into a working desktop/laptop without the user having to have any terminal or sudo knowledge at all. This is one of the main key advantage of Ubuntu when compared to other linux distributions. So successful such that some recent linux distributions try to emulate them and even use Ubuntu’s software repositories to update their own distributions. eg Linux Mint, GoS, etc.

Although Ubuntu tries to provide the user with an operating system that has hassle free installation and ready to be used, there are some common applications left out during the default installation process. SGLNX believes a few more packages is needed to complete the Ubuntu installation to make it a complete and working OS. Fortunately, these packages/applications can be installed fairly easily and are present in Ubuntu’s software repositories.

The following packages are not pre-installed during the standard Ubuntu’s installation.
They are highly recommended from SGLNX for any Ubuntu’s installation (use Synaptic Package Manager to install them):

Sun Java 6 Plugin for Mozilla and other browsers (sun-java6-plugin)
This enable web applications written in Java to be processed and viewed correctly by browser such as Mozilla Firefox. eg E-banking

Flash plugin for Mozilla and other browsers (flashplugin-installer)
This will flash-enable the pre-installed Firefox within Ubuntu and allow sites like Youtube to be viewed

Gnome Partition Editor (gparted)
The partition editor allows management of partitions via an easy-to-understand user interface.

Medibuntu non-free codecs (Instructions here for installations)
Installing the non-free codecs will allow the system to playback media files such as the asf, wmv, avi, etc

Mplayer (mplayer)
This media player is one of the popular skinnable media player out there.
Its control buttons are not integrated in the same window as the playing media, this prevents the video playing in Mplayer from compressing the vertical height of the video into a different aspect ratio.

VirtualBox (Download this from Sun’s VirtualBox website)
For those whom just migrated to linux and still want to run Windows occasionally, VirtualBox allows an image of Windows to be booted within linux. This virtualization application is much easier to use than other virtualization applications.

Sensors Applet for Gnome Panel (sensors-applet)
Installing sensors applet will allow the system to report sensors’ values such as CPU temperature amd HDD temperatue.

Buildessentials (build-essential)
Build Essentials will allow users with root access to be able to compile application’s binaries from source.
Without this, end users will only be able to install .deb files and not able to build from any tarball source..

Once these additional applications, tools and drivers are installed, the Ubuntu linux experience can then be considered complete.

Tags: applet, canonical, gparted, medibuntu, mplayer, ubuntu, virtualbox

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 05:03 and is filed under Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.