[ubuntu-in] Guide for installing useful apps on Ubuntu Gutsy

[Nilesh Trivedi]

On Nov 10, 2007 10:34 PM, Onkar Shinde <onkarshinde at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 10, 2007 9:08 PM, Nilesh Trivedi <nilesh.tr at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I wrote a short and simple guide for those who are trying out Ubuntu for the first time. This will also save time for us who have to do handholding for them while we make their Ubuntu installation usable.
> >
> > http://ubuntu-in.org/wiki/Fixing_Gutsy
> >
> > Please contribute to it and make it a definitive place to point people to.
>
>
> I have few comments and I need inputs from other page before fixing the page.
>
> 1. I have objection to the title 'Fixing Gutsy'. There is nothing wrong with Gutsy. 'Customizing Gutsy' is more appropriate title.


Agreed. "Fixing Gutsy" is not appropriate. But things like the
virtualbox fix can be difficult to find for newbies.


> 2. I really fail to understand what functionality Adobe Acrobat Reader provides that home users require which is not by provided by Evince (the default PDF reader in Ubuntu). Apart from that it is non-Free software.


Haven't looked into details but evince screws up a lot of brochures
etc. on printing and we get a good number of them.


> 3. If you install all gstreamer plugins and w32codecs you can play almost every media file except .rm. Also you can play those files in Firefox since totem-gstreamer-firefox-plugin is installed by default. So I don't know what are you trying to achieve by recommending mozilla-plugin-vlc.

Again. VLC often plays a number of files and stream that totem can't.
It's good to have an option, especially in case of a media player to
be used on a college campus. It can also run as a streaming server.
That's how we saw the India-Pakistan T20 final in our dorms. ;-)

Additionally, I prefer using applications that are available on
multiple platforms. That is why Thunderbird takes priority over
Evolution. It reduces the switching pains.

> 4. I haven't yet felt the need to run a Windows application. So at least I don't see a need to recommend wine. It defeats the purpose of using a Free operating system.

SPSS, Download Accelerator, Guitar Pro and FL Studio are on my wine menu.

> 5. Now the most important. Your page is IMHO just a variation of http://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats targeting a specific version of Ubuntu. We already have loads of guides about how to play restricted formats. What we need are the guides to achieve some other specific tasks. I hope you will take this as constructive criticism.

We need guides on a lot of topics. I just recorded what I was doing
for a lot of new Ubuntu joinees and now I can just point them to this
short page. Ubuntuguide has most of this information but it is
scattered around in various sections. For some newbies, a longer
apt-get command that "fixes" most of their issue may be less scary.
This page solves a real problem for them.

Thank for your inputs. Feel free to make changes if appropriate.

cheers
nilesh