Just can’t stop fiddling? If you’ve installed something that’s stopping gnome-panel from loading check out this much appreciated advice here:

http://linuxfud.wordpress.com/2007/02/14/how-to-reset-ubuntugnome-settings-to-defaults-without-re-installing/

I recently setup  a server at work to run virtual machines. I decided to go with Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10, for some reason I thought that process would be complicated! How wrong was I! The install was seamless it autodetected all of the drivers and it worked out of the box! I then installed VirtualBox 2.1 64bit edition which worked with absolutely no problems what so ever… Has Linux really got this easy!

Switch off the Menu Bar in Firefox similar to Internet Explorer 7 / 8.

Download: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3895

O.K I have been using Ubuntu Intrepid now for a little while and I have come to the verdict that its really not the desktop for me. I love the idea that its free, I don’t have trouble installing it or with setting up drivers, I like Compiz, I like the fact that I can customise practically everything! I even like the application line up.

So whats wrong with it?

Well for one I think it feels sluggish. When I click on something it always seems to take a moment to respond also when I type stuff I’m always getting double caps at the start of words (whats that about)? Anyway all OS’s have their failings Ubuntu has many!

I have now switched back to Windows XP for the moment and its spurred me on to write this article about free software for Microsoft Windows which I would imagine most people would want all bar a few specialist applications.

Before people say why not just Linux if you want free software… well most people will already have an Operating System with their computer / laptop so why not use it? Its most likely going to be Vista if its a recent purchase. Vista isn’t all that bad and neither is XP!

Firefox

Probably the best web browser out there, made even better by contributing addons such as Foxmarks and Firebug!

Download: www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/

iTunes

Love it or hate it. Personally I love it and its free although I think 80MB+ download is a little excessive.

Download: www.itunes.com

Dropbox

This is a great web service that will backup and synchronize your files between multiple computers. I like the fact thats its cross platform (thats generally a trait of free software).

Download: www.getdropbox.com

Geany

An IDE for programming (I use it for PHP).

Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/geany

Thunderbird

A great email client with some fantastic addons.

Download: http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/products/thunderbird/

OpenOffice.org 3.0

I don’t care what anybody says about this for 95% of people at home this is the perfect Office suite you really don’t need to buy Microsoft Office

Download: http://www.openoffice.org/

AVG Anti Virus

Free anti virus software. Thats right you don’t have to spend £30 on that copy of Norton that you’ve been told that you need.

Download: http://free.avg.com/download-avg-anti-virus-free-edition

Gimp 2

Edit your images with relative ease… If you don’t like the Gimp try… paint.net

Download: http://www.gimp.org/windows/ or http://www.getpaint.net/

Editplus (its kind of free)

Ok this is a 30 trail but it carries on working! I will buy a license one day I promise!

Download: http://www.editplus.com

FFDShow

Install this to deal with most of your multimedia needs.

Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow

Haali Spliter

Want to play MKV’s then you will need this

Download: http://haali.cs.msu.ru/mkv/

Media Player Classic / VLC

An alternative to MS Mediaplayer both are as good as each other in my opion.

Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/

Putty

An ssh client for windows it works… arguably I think it works better than native linux clients mainly due to the fact it has a profile manager.

Download: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

WinSCP

A way of connecting to SSH filesystems using Windows

Download: http://winscp.net/eng/download.php

uTorrent

torrents? What are they you ask. Well they are generally associated with illegal music and video downloads. However some organizations actually use it to distribute legit software.

Download: http://www.utorrent.com/download.php

Skype

A great bit of free software to make calls and chat to family and friends.

Download: http://www.skype.com

Pidgin

An alternative to MSN Live Messenger.

Download: http://www.pidgin.im/download/windows/

Does using a viewer like VNC mean you are working remotely or just rather lazily using your PC at home from another computer because you couldn’t be bothered to setup a real remote setup from the start?

This is just me dumping my brain in a blog so feel free to comment!

The things that I think need to be remote are…

• Important User Files
• Email
• Calender

This article doesn’t cover keeping your pictures, music or videos stored. I have approximately 1.5 TB of pictures, music and videos … yikes! I am just trying to cover basics i.e. word processed documents and personal management.

There are now quite a lot of services out there to get you going a working (in my view) truly remotely.

One service that has been out for a while now MESH its a utility that syncs files from you local computer to a file store on the internet and then has the ability to sync those with another computer e.g. your laptop or work computer. Its a good system but at the moment it only works on MS Operating systems! Which for some is fine however for me thats just not acceptable due to the fact I switch OS’s all the time! It also has the facility to start VNC sessions so you can actually use a computer from another computer.

Homepage: www.mesh.com

A service that is very similar to MESH is Dropbox. It has the ability to synchronise from one computer to another by relaying it via a web service and it has clients that will run on Mac, Windows and Linux. In my view that’s just awesome. I am already running it on Ubuntu and Windows XP and its working brilliantly for me. At the moment as a free service you only get 2GB of space to store your files but for $10 a month you can have 50GB of storage which I am seriously considering at the moment. In comparison to MESH I do believe that Dropbox is not as intrusive a MESH and it feels as though it knows what its doing with its folders. MESH wants you to pick the location of every folder Dropbox just gives you a folder by default called ‘Dropbox’ so everything past that point gets synced… perfect! Dropbox works great as a backup solution to.

Homepage: www.getdropbox.com

Email and Calendering is another interesting aspect of working remotely. The best solution for storing my email and calender remotely is to use Google Apps. Google offer an IMAP service with Google Mail which means you can point your favourite email client at it and browse your email without having to use the web client. The email clients that I use depend on the OS that I am using when using Ubuntu I use Evolution because I like the integration that it offers with the desktop environment, although you have to manually configure Evolution to use Google Mail via its IMAP service it has an auto setup tool to add your Google Calender. When I use Windows XP / Vista I use Thunderbird and then add the following addons… Lightning and Provider for Google Calender.

Useful links: Evolution, Thunderbird, Lightning and Provider for Google Calender.

If you want to change the default minium word size in a MySQL FULLTEXT search.

Find / add the following to ‘my.cnf‘.

ft_min_word_len = 3

Then restart mysql.

Then do a repair on the tables which have FULLTEXT indexes.

A really useful application that I found whilst having a browse around Launchpad was Terminator. Its an application that allows you to divide the application window up into individual terminals handy if you need to watch logs, run batch processes whilst doing doing something else. To install just pop the following into a terminal…

sudo apt-get install terminator

Homepage: http://www.tenshu.net/terminator/

If you want to change the size of the icons just change the bar height in ‘awn-manager > Bar Appearance’. Trivial but if you are looking for an option that reads ‘Icon Height’ this may be of use to you.

• List of commands for launchers

If you want to change the application fonts in programs like Skype and Virtual Box. You may need to pop the following into a terminal…

sudo apt-get install qt3-qtconfig

or maybe…

sudo apt-get install qt4-qtconfig

I’m not sure which version you will need but I know that on Intrepid you need qt4… which i think gets installed when you install skype for example.

Anyway look under ‘System > Preferences’ select ‘QT4 Settings’ you will then be able to set the font to the same size as your application font that you have set in Ubuntu. Odd font sizes bother me so I had to find out how to sort this out! I hope this helps someone else to…

This is a really handy to know if you work across multiple computers and want to use file systems over ssh this is handy when you don’t have vpdn at your disposal…

Firstly install sshfs by popping the following into a terminal…

sudo apt-get install sshfs

Once that is installed you will be able to mount file systems via SSH.  A sensible way to mount them is to create a mount point in ‘/media’.

cd /media
sudo mkdir sharename
sudo chown username sharename
sshfs username@hostname:/path /media/sharename

Obviously you will need to replace username and sharename with the right criteria but I hope you get the idea!