Confessions of a Windows user

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Permalink Reply by Bully Soares on May 17, 2011 at 9:01pm

Aloha Doug,

You've come to the right place.

First let me ask if you've still got Ubuntu on your laptop? If so, stay right there and take a deep breath.

I use Ubuntu 11.04 Studio... IT ROCKS! I actually use quite a few different distros. Fedora is one of them. CentOS is another. Debian (which is my favorite but, I'm lazy so I use Ubuntu since it's built on Debian and is better supported) :) And several different versions of Ubuntu for different purposes.(Mainly server builds, web, cms, ecm, developer, mail, fileshare, smb, webdav, you get the gist)

 

Anyway back to your "challenges and needs".  In Ubuntu Terminal is located in Accessories directly under the Ubuntu icon (Start Menu for you Windows folks out there) VOILA! There it is.  As long as you have your apt repositories set up properly you should be able to load the programs you need for your purposes. _Now, you may not be able to find in the apt repositories but NEVER FEAR it's out there if you google it. Here's a link I found that may help you out http://jordilin.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/python2-4-python2-5-and-ub...

It's a good article and it'll take some work (aka compiling) on your part but I'm sure you'll have fun digging into it.

 

Give this site a try as well https://launchpad.net/~fkrull/+archive/deadsnakes/+packages

Just use synaptic package manager to help guide you through the process. Even a Windows user can handle this! :)

Good luck and if you have anymore questions feel free to contact me bully@hawaiitechhui.com

 

a hui hou!!!

Permalink Reply by Paul on May 17, 2011 at 9:33pm

Doug, in Ubuntu 11.04:

• Right-click on the "Applications Lens" at the bottom of Unity launcher, you'll get a categorized list of your programs
• A sub-menu of the Power Off icon (far right of the top panel) is all the system settings & preferences
• CTRL+ALT+T will open a terminal for you, worth learning this shortcut
• For additional software, adding a PPA (a repository you choose to trust) find the name of the PPA, then:  From command line do "sudo add-apt-repository ppa:name_of_ppa/ppa"

• (should also do "sudo apt-get update" afterward).  The software from that PPA should now show up in Software Center just like the rest

• You can also install software from any .deb file, but you won't get the updates like you will via PPA

Permalink Reply by Doug Wood on May 17, 2011 at 10:00pm

AWESOME! thanks for the help guys I got it.

Permalink Reply by Jason Axelson on May 17, 2011 at 11:40pm

Wow great Unity tips Paul. I wish those were recorded on the unity shortcuts wallpaper I've been using. Particularly right-clicking the application lens to drill down into the menu and the location of the system configuration under the power down menu.

Permalink Reply by Paul on May 18, 2011 at 8:56am

If you want to do some customization to make Unity a little nicer, here are my favorites so far:

• Add a quicklist to the Home Folder icon.  (I examined the format of this hack and added a link to my Dropbox folder too)
• Add a quicklist to LibreOffice icon, afterward you can dispense with the unity launchers for individual LibreOffice applications
• Install a Web Search lens
• Remove the "global application menu" feature - I hate it as much here as I hate it in OSX.  The command to do so is: "sudo mv usr/lib/indicators/5/libappmenu.so usr/lib/indicators/5/libappmenu.so.old".  (You can always repeat with the last two terms reversed if you want it back.)  Log out and back in afterward.

Permalink Reply by David Chung on May 18, 2011 at 10:03am

Oh wow, thanks for the Unity tips. I may give it another try after reading all that. After my perceived inefficiency with it, I went ahead and installed GNOME3 on my Ubuntu system but GNOME3 feels incomplete -- I may try to return to Unity.

 

Ditto to the global application menu feature -- it's completely useless when you focus-follows-mouse turned on.

Permalink Reply by Paul on May 18, 2011 at 10:07am

Yeah, I expected to hate Unity, but have found that I actually like it.  I'm betting it will be even better by 11.11

David Chung said:

Oh wow, thanks for the Unity tips. I may give it another try after reading all that. After my perceived inefficiency with it, I went ahead and installed GNOME3 on my Ubuntu system but GNOME3 feels incomplete -- I may try to return to Unity.

 

Ditto to the global application menu feature -- it's completely useless when you focus-follows-mouse turned on.

Permalink Reply by Paul on May 19, 2011 at 2:54pm

And here, someone has now created a GUI for some of the tweaks I mentioned above:

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/05/confity-lets-you-configure-unity...

Permalink Reply by David Chung on February 28, 2014 at 9:04am

Revisiting this (it's been a while...) since I recently tried out GNOME3 in its current state. This time, it definitely feels more complete and I'm actually impressed with what's been done with it so far.

In particular, I think they addressed the global-menu + focus-follows-mouse issue. What happens in GNOME3 is that focus doesn't switch until the mouse rests. Thus, you can travel to the global-menu across multiple windows without switching focus.

Of course, one has to use the tweak tool to enable this behavior.

But overall, GNOME3 works really great with my Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro!