Eye-Candy for your Ubuntu installation

With a little bit of time and effort, you can make your Ubuntu installation look jazzier than any operating system installation. The new look is a refreshing change over the boring brown wallapapers that Ubuntu ships by default.

So lets start with a default Ubuntu installation… Lets call him Insipid Ibex

Insipid Ibex

Step 1… Open a terminal and run

sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-look


Once done, click on System->Preferences->Appearance and select the UbuntuStudio theme. Also change the wallpaper to the UbuntuStudio wallpaper… and here you go… Haikarrramba!

Interesting Ibex!

Much better eh?

Step 2… Now lets get a MAC like dock for it. Open a terminal and run

sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator


Step 3… As if this is not overwhelming enough for such little effort lets add more to the show…
Pick out an icon set for yourself by visiting this link. My personal favorite is “Black White 2 Gloss”

Black White 2 Gloss Iconset

Here’s how Ubuntu will look once you install them.. Killer aye?

Interesting Ibex - New icons

Step 4… Time to spice up the terminal. Open a terminal and goto Edit->Profiles. Edit the Default profile or create a new profile. Change the text and background colors. I prefer the text to be blue to match the Studio look and the background to be black. Now make the background transparent and set the level of transparency to what you wish and watch the terminal turn into a rockstar!

Rockstar terminal

Step 5… Improve usability by installing the Google Gnome Menu File Browser Applet . With this applet you can browser the home folder right from your menubar. This saves a lotta time!

Menu File Browser Applet

If this is not enough go ahead and install compiz fusion and you can do a lot more fun stuff. If you’re a geek, it’ll irritate you in 48 hours… If you’re not you’ll hang on to it for a while. But it doesn’t hurt to try it out!

So here a few simple things we did to give Ubuntu a fresh look! Wow.

Elisa – The Open Media Center

I’m not sure if too many people know about Elisa, quite frankly it is quite amazing that something as wonderful as Elisa is not in the limelight(as yet!). For a quick and brief introduction, Elisa is a sleek next generation media center where you can watch videos, browse pictures, manage music etc.

Read ahead for a quick list of features:

MUSIC:

Elisa finds music and arranges it by artist, by album and by folder. It includes all the album art to give you a very interesting interface to play with. Elisa has been designed in a extensible manner by which adding plugins can enhance features. It currently bundles the shoutcast radio plugin.

VIDEOS:

Elisa arranges videos and allows you to play them. It also has a youtube plugin that can be used to browse youtube videos!

PICTURES:

Elisa finds pictures from the default folders. The picasa extension allows you to browse pictures uploaded to your web album.

All locations that Elisa can look into can be defined in home/~user~/.elisa/elisa.conf. Whats better is that the file locations, network urls, anything!

Elisa works on both Windows and Linux, though on Windows its still an alpha release.

Some tips to install Elisa on Ubuntu:

Elisa is packaged with Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) To install and get it working properly with all plugins do:

$ sudo apt-get install elisa

$ sudo apt-get install elisa-plugins-bad elisa-plugins-ugly

$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-fluendo-*

$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad

$ elisa

Here’s a link to install Elisa on earlier versions of Ubuntu: http://www.uluga.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=766012

Install picasa on hardy (Ubuntu 8.04)

Picasa for Linux is a boon and much more simpler than GIMP for simple image editing… However on hardy, the usual “apt-get install picasa” does not find the deb in the repositories.

So to install Picasa, just get the deb from here and follow the instructions on the same page. Picasa installs nice and clean!

Just a small tip!

Install Skype on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) + configure sound

Here are a  quick set of steps to install skype on Ubuntu 8.04.

• Download skype static from here
• Execute the following commands at the terminal:

$tar -xvf skype_static-2.0.0.68.tar.bz2

$mv /yourpath/skype_static-2.0.0.68 /usr/share/

$ mv skype_static-2.0.0.68/ skype

$ cd skype/

$ cp skype /usr/bin/

$ rm /etc/dbus-1/system.d/skype.conf

$ cp /usr/share/skype/skype.conf /etc/dbus-1/system.d/

$ skype

Sound configuration:

• Execute the command below in a terminal

$ apt-get install alsa-firmware

• Open volume control and click on File -> Change device. Make sure the Alsa mixer is selected.
• Click on Edit -> Preferences and check microphone, mic boost, internal mic boost — whatever applicable
• Try a skype test call!

Windows installers for Linux distributions

Much talk has been happening about Wubi that is going to be a part of Ubuntu 8.04 – Hardy Heron. Wubi is a utility that allows installation of Ubuntu through Windows! What’s more? You can uninstall it using Add/Remove Programs in the Windows control panel.

For the geeks, what Wubi does is:

A small executable that can be included on the CD which does the following:

• If an Ubuntu CD is not present in a CD drive, locates the ISO on your system or downloads it via metadl (which can be taught to perform mirror selection)
• Asks for a user name and password
• Gathers information from Windows for the remaining install settings
• Creates a 5GB image file in a user-defined location, C:\ubuntu by default
• Creates a pre-seed file for the install
• Adds Ubuntu entry to the Windows bootloader
• Reboots to start an install process (non-interactive)
  • if a CD is present in a drive, uses that; otherwise loop-mounts an ISO image from the Windows drive
  • loop-mounts disk image from the Windows drive
• Uses a pre-seed enabled version of ubiquity
• Reboot again to start Ubuntu (or Windows)
• Allows simple removal of Ubuntu if desired, via a Windows-based uninstaller in add/remove programs
• Installer can be launched from the WinFOSS browser

Read the full post here

However not many know that this feature is already available in Mandriva Linux

Mandriva can be installed from another operating system that is rpm based or deb based, not just Windows. It works using UNetbootin which adds an entry in the boot menu to install Mandriva. (Read here…)

Shift Linux (by the Windows guys) has recently released 0.6.5 that is based on Hardy Heron beta. Right now its more of a live cd but there are plans of a full release too. Most probably this would include Wubi too (Isn’t too surprising considering its based on Hardy Heron) (Read here…)

Finally lets talk a bit about UNetbootin. Now this allows you to install any operating system like ubuntu, madriva, fedora etc through Windows. The number of distributions listed here is surprising and slightly spoils the show for Wubi. UNetbootin however works in a different way than Wubi and this very technique makes it so generic. (Read a useful tutorial here…)

Wubi however is still easier for a user who isn’t very technical or does not have the patience and still wants to install and use Linux. Things only become easier by the day!