Friday, July 15, 2011

Installing Ubuntu and some initial things to do

One of the first things I do when installing a fresh copy of Ubuntu on a machine is to install my favorite and most used programs.

Kopete - a pretty good IM KDE software; I have Google, Windows Messenger, and Skype linked to it; it can also do Yahoo, AOL, and many more messenger services

Foxit PDF Reader - a good, lightweight PDF reader that is free, I like Foxit over Okular because the text selection tool automatically copies when you release the mouse button; since this post though I really have liked using Okular and the installed pdf document viewer that comes with Ubuntu, the GNOME evince software

Mendeley Desktop - free bibliography editor; I prefer this over Zotero; not much of a hassle exporting to LaTeX either as a simple .bib file

Kile - my favorite LaTeX editor for Ubuntu/Linux

Okular - I install this with Kile since it is the default PDF reader and isn't too bad function-wise either; I basically didn't want to mess with setting up Foxit since Okular does a fair job; Okular also is able to view .djvu/.djv files but I've found it has issues sometimes with displaying the material (blank pages) so I use the GNOME based evince document viewer

Texmaker - my second favorite LaTeX editor; I keep it around in case Kile acts up or I need a cross-platform LaTeX editor

Skype - nice IM and video calling software

Teamviewer - free program that works amazingly when wanting to share your desktop with another; it is also cross-platform

Inkscape - a great vector based drawing program

pdf Shuffler - a good, basic pdf tool which allows you to cut/add/rotate pages

Shutter - a nice snapshot program to take screen shots and such of your desktop; I also use and like the default snapshot software that comes with Ubuntu, I think it is simply called Take Screenshot

Thunderbird - a great email client for the desktop, heard it is replacing Empathy as the standard Ubuntu email desktop client in the 11.10 version; it should be. I don't really use clients that much, but with Thunderbird I can see myself using it a lot more for contacts and such.

Remmina Remote Desktop Client - a pretty good remote desktop viewer; I use Teamviewer as much as I can now though, so this is a good backup

KCharSelect - this is the KDE version of CharSelect; I like this one better because you can search and I haven't found a way to do it with the standard Ubuntu character select

Chromium - the un-Googled version of Chrome; only like a %1 difference; I just like to be different and as open sourced as possible, :)

Octave - a great MATLAB replacement

OtOctave - a great GUI for Octave

QtiPlot - a great Origin replacement

GNOME's evince document viewer - This is actually a really powerful viewer I have found out; It displays many document formats flawlessly and is incredibly fast and light weight feeling - http://www.gnome.org/projects/evince

I'll add more, so come back periodically.

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