Update 2009-11-18, using Ubuntu 9.10 now
- Wine has finally font anti-aliasing, to enable do this in regedit:
============ REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop] "FontSmoothing"="2" "FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000002 "FontSmoothingGamma"=dword:00000578 "FontSmoothingOrientation"=dword:00000001 ============
Mainly notes to myself, but maybe some random Googlers will find some of them useful. I may add more in time.
- If many of texts in your system, including Firefox are not in your native language, make sure you have installed appropriate language-pack-XX package (language-pack-pl for Polish). It should be downloaded by Ubuntu installer but it never fully worked for me since 5.04.
- Pidgin has a plugin for Tlen protocol. Just download the newest .tar.gz, unpack and make. You should have pidgin-dev package installed for it to succeed. I didn’t try make install, just copied over resulting libtlen.so to /usr/lib/purple-2 and .png files to /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/protocols, one file – renamed to just tlen.png – to each folder.
- Nice Pidgin smiley pack which has original emotikons for protocols I use. Just go to Pidgin settings, smiley sets tab and click add.
- Firetray contrary to what its name suggests, also works in Thunderbird, allowing it to minimize itself to system tray. Just open Thunderbird’s Add-ons window and drag install link there from Firefox to install this extension.
- Polish set of Adblock filters I’ve been using for some time now.
- Installing Aurora GTK Theme engine (most good themes seem to use it):
aptitude install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev # download from # http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Aurora+Gtk+Engine?content=56438 # unpack and cd to source directory ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-animation make sudo make install
- Download Myriad Pro font. Here’s Myriad in TTF version (thanks Misiek) which looks better in Java programs (think OpenOffice).
- Fresh Dark – a very nice dark theme for Gnome. Also see matching icons. If Metacity/Emerald (window borders) theme doesn’t work, just check file and directory permissions of the unpacked theme. If windows run as root look ugly, make sure you copy the theme to /usr/share/themes instead of just ~/.themes.
- Wine repository which usually has newer version than default Ubuntu repos.
- A nice way to integrate MS Office (I have a license so I use it through Wine instead of OpenOffice, same goes to Photoshop which I prefer over Gimp in spite of all those holy wars about it) is to create /opt/wine-start.sh script with following contents
#!/bin/bash wine start "z:$1"
- There is Java Plugin for Firefox on AMD64 at last (just install sun-java6-plugin package).
- Wammu (nice mobile phone manager with a great feature of copying your SMSes to your e-mail inbox) just works in Jaunty with my Nokia 6021 over bluetooth which was never a case before.
- SSH Menu is a nice little gnome applet to build a fast-access menu of SSH servers you connect to. Ubuntu repository is also there.
- I always forget that Eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools) all-in-one download is for 32bits only. To install it on AMD64 architecture, download 64-bit version of Eclipse for JavaEE and do the following:
tar xzvf eclipse-jee-ganymede-SR1-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz sudo mv eclipse /opt # you probably should think twice about chown and chmod, # but I myself make my PC physically secure so don't care sudo chown -R user.group /opt/eclipse sudo chmod -R 770 /opt/eclipse sudo nano /etc/environment # put path to JDK by adding a # line something like JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun" /opt/eclipse/eclipse # choose your workspace location and start Eclipse
When in Eclipse, just use their instructions on installing PDT:Help > Software Updates... > Available Software > Manage Sites... Add... > add the DLTK 1.0 interim site: http://download.eclipse.org/technology/dltk/updates-dev/1.0/ Add... > add the PDT 2.0 interim site: http://download.eclipse.org/tools/pdt/updates/2.0/ Enable the Ganymede Update site (if not already enabled): http://download.eclipse.org/releases/ganymede/ Expand the DLTK site and select the Dynamic Languages Toolkit - Core Frameworks or Dynamic Languages Toolkit - Core Frameworks SDK Feature Select the PDT or PDT SDK Feature Install...
- To make Subclipse plugin work in Eclipse (to be able to use Subversion repositories), aptitude install libsvn-javahl and then nano /opt/eclipse/eclipse.ini and add a line that says (sans quotes) „-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni” just under „-vmargs” line.
- I’ve finally found a way to change Gnome’s clock appearance, fire up gconf-editor, go to /apps/panel/applets/clock_screen0/prefs, change „format” to „custom”, „custom_format” to something like „<span color=”#99ccff”><sup><b>%A, %d %B %Y</b></sup></span> <big><b><big>%H</big><sup>%M</sup></b></big>” and voila!
- Even though dailystrips (a script that download comic strips for you) at sourceforge seems to be abandoned, they have updated dailystrips and strips.def at MisterHouse project.