Gadget7

With major hardware vendors shipping systems preinstalled with Ubuntu, and the extremely hassle free Ubuntu installer, more users have, if not started mainstream usage, atleast experimenting with this flavor of Linux. Here are some open source (read: free) stuff that will get you started with Ubuntu 7.04.

1. Amarok
Amarok is a unix/linux music player with a nice interface, playlist manager, 10 band equalizer and also automatically fetches your album cover art.

sudo apt-get install amarok

2. VLC
With your music needs sorted out with the above, now to your videos. You needn’t look any further than VLC, by far the best cross platform media player. You could also install the VLC plugins and use it as a streaming server.

sudo apt-get install vlc vlc-plugin-*

Rarely would one not be satisfied with VLC, in which case you could read about the restricted file formats here

3. Automatix2
You could install all your favorite software like picasa, google earth, skype and many more by visiting their respective sites. Alternatively Automatix2 has a collection of top rated software that can be installed almost instantaneously as you please. Read more about installing automatix2 <a href=”http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Feisty#Automatix2″>here</a>

4. If you have dual booted Ubuntu with Windows you probably would want your windows NTFS filesystem mounted with read/write functionality.

- Take a backup of your existing fstab
sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak

- Install the ntfs-3g driver
sudo apt-get install ntfs-config

- Now launch ntfs-config under the system tools menu and enter a name for your mount point.
Read more here

5. Remove the annoying system beep.

- From the terminal execute the following command to disable the system beep for the session
sudo modprobe -r pcspkr

- If you want to take this into effect every time your system boots, Add the following at the bottom of /etc/rc.local file.
— /etc/rc.local —
modprobe -r pcspkr
exit 0
— X —

6. If you are running Ubuntu on you laptop, you probably would like to have your LCD turned off when the lid is closed. Ubuntu only blanks the screen with the backlight staying ON and contributing to unwanted heat generation. Read this guide and edit the /etc/acpi/actions/lm_lid.sh script.

7. Beagle
If you are a fan of google desktop, you might want to consider Beagle, a powerful data indexing tool

sudo apt-get install beagle

8. Beryl
For some out of the world eye candy, apart from Ubuntu desktop effects install Beryl. Beryl is an OpenGL accelerated desktop with underlying Compiz libraries that bring out some fantastic desktop effects like workspaces on a cube, window decorations and actions and many more screen effects. Read this guide to get Beryl setup on your computer.

9. This point is added just for kicks
But seriously, what this point would really signify is that, your journey in discovering the true potential of open source has just started and it is up to you to take it forward.

Related Post:
some OS please!!

[ Source: Hyperlinks at appropriate places ]