Coming from Windows, there has inevitably been some things that I had to ‘tweak’ in Ubuntu to make it work for me. Nothing major — it works great “out of the box” — but I need some little home comforts.
Firstly, I had to set it up for single-click file/folder navigation. I guess I see my computer as an extension of the Internet, where everything is single-click. Switching in Gnome is as simple as opening a Nautilus (standard file manager) window, going to Edit > Preferences > Behaviour tab and choosing “Single click to open items”. It’s an identical process in XFCE.
While in the Nautilus preferences, I also selected “View executable text files when they are opened” because I was getting fed of the “do you want to run ‘thisfile.php’ or display its contents?
” type notices every time I tried to open a .php file. In XFCE this hasn’t been a problem as files open straight up when they’re clicked.
In XFCE, pressing Print Screen gets you nothing, nada, zilch. I like my Print Screen screenshotting things, and I like having it saved to the desktop straight-up even more. To make XFCE save a screenshot to the desktop, I first installed scrot, and then set a custom keyboard shortcut to call scrot in Settings Manager > Keyboard > Shortcuts tab > add keyboard shortcut using the command “scrot /home/jem/Desktop/screenshot.png”.
I’ve also disabled the system beep (XFCE) and installed SciTE to replace Notepad++. However, I’m yet to figure out why Rhythmbox refuses to sync with last.fm. That said, it’s all going quite well, I have to say.
07 Jan at 8:14 pm
One of my favourites is scrot with 15s delay, little extra time to get desktop in order :P
07 Jan at 8:28 pm
Thanks for the tips! Hopefully they will come in handy when I install Ubuntu.
07 Jan at 8:46 pm
Thanks for the tip about the executable text files, I never thought about checking the preferences. *headdesk*
Did you try enabling the last.fm plugin in Rhythmbox? It’s already built it. Edit/Plugins, check the box and configure it. It works for me.
07 Jan at 8:48 pm
The last.fm plugin was already enabled, but yes – filled in my name and password etc, still no luck.
07 Jan at 9:55 pm
As an Ubuntu user for a couple of years now hearing you talk Linux is wonderful!
I’m so pleased you have come to know and Love (?) Linux, as PHP and MySQL are stable mates.
I am hoping you are having good fun with GIMP and we will soon see some great graphics in your sites theme soon, to be honest this one is too bland or me.
I wonder if this site runs on Linux..?
07 Jan at 9:59 pm
Yep yep, jemjabella (& all of my sites) are on Linux boxes.
08 Jan at 12:48 am
Can you maybe pot a screenshot of your desktop or some windows running in Ubuntu?
08 Jan at 1:04 am
How are you able to stand Scite? O.O I’d recommend InType but that would require getting into Wine, and jesus, I was never too patient enough to screw around with some things with Wine. Haven’t read on how hard/easy it is, but I do know that it’s been successful.
PS – Happy Birthday (again)
08 Jan at 7:17 am
Thanks for sharing these tips, Jem. I’m sure they’ll come in handy sometime. :)
08 Jan at 11:40 am
you forgot the wifi fix and NDISWrapper etc…heh..shall I include that in my "this did NOT work out of the box" entry when I do it?
08 Jan at 12:24 pm
I have no idea what you’re talking about since I’m not familiar. Forgive me that this is totally unrelated, but I believe your birthday is on 7th of Jan? I don’t remember where I got that. If it’s true then, happy belated birthday! If it’s not.. Well, I look like a total fool, don’t I? :p
08 Jan at 5:51 pm
I love my printscreen button, and I don’t know what I’d do if it didn’t work. Probably freak out instead of finding a fix for it, haha.
09 Jan at 12:38 am
If you haven’t tried KDE before or in a while, you might give it another shot. There are a lot more customizable things in KDE than Gnome, and I personally prefer Amarok to Rhythmbox as a music player.
Also, since you’ve made the jump to being a Linux user, you might as well make another hardcore-geek jump: try Vim! Then you won’t have to worry about replacing Notepad++ with Scite, because Vim (specifically Gvim, to have GUI features) is bad-ass. :D Watch out for shifty Emacs users, though, they’ll lead you astray. ;)
09 Jan at 12:39 am
A tip for your blog system: when a user is redirected to the post after making a comment, what about having them redirected to an anchor tag in the page where their comment is?