Tech Juice

Introduction

If you are a Windows poweruser, the switch to a Linux desktop environment can be quite a shock. Many of your favorite shortcuts and tricks become useless, and it can be quite challenging to get back up to speed. There are many tweaks that you do to make Ubuntu’s Gnome 2 desktop environment easier to use and more powerful. This article presents a list of things to do after a fresh install that may help both Ubuntu newbies and adept users.

Note that the 11.04 release of Ubuntu introduced a new desktop environment called Unity. It is a trainwreck of an UI at this point (2011), and power-users will most likely be much more productive in the ‘classic’ Gnome 2 UI. The tips in this article apply to Gnome 2 for Ubuntu, but some things might work for other distros and UIs.

Programs to Install

There are several invaluable programs that everyone should get after a fresh install.

Ubuntu Tweak

Ubuntu Tweak is a tool for Ubuntu that makes it easy to configure your system and desktop settings. If you are a Windows user you might know Windows Powertoys, which is very similar. You can configure login settings, package related jobs, default folder locations, which items to display…

Say you want to open a PDF file (myDocument.pdf) through the terminal of the Ubuntu desktop environment. On Windows you would just type the name of file, and Windows finds the program assigned to the PDF extension. On Ubuntu you can type

evince myDocument.pdf

Where evince is the name of the PDF document viewer on Ubuntu. However, it is easier to use the program that Ubuntu’s desktop environment has assigned to the extension:

xdg-open myDocument.pdf

This way you don’t have to find the name of the appropriate binary.…