My 10 basic Ubuntu applications
My 10 basic Ubuntu applications not available by default in the original Ubuntu installation but available and with an easy install from the Ubuntu repositories using the Synaptic Package Manager.
This is just a simple list of really useful, maybe basic applications available from the Ubuntu repositories. Again this is just my list and in time it might grow to more then 10. If you like to download and install them just go to the Synaptic Package Manager and search their names.
Let's start:
1. Compiz Manager
"Compiz Fusion is the result of a merge between the well-known Beryl composite window manager and Compiz Extras, a community set of improvements to the Compiz composite window manager. Compiz Fusion aims to provide an easy and fun-to-use windowed environment, allowing use of the graphics hardware to render each individual window and the entire screen, to provide some impressive effects, speed and usefulness."
comment: By default, Compiz is actually installed in the Ubuntu installation but it as no GUI to manage "activate / deactivate" effects. Downloading the compiz manager will solve that.
2. gparted
"The GParted application is the GNOME partition editor for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions.
A disk device can be subdivided into one or more partitions. The GParted application enables you to change the partition organization on a disk device while preserving the contents of the partitions.
With GParted you can accomplish the following tasks:
- Create a partition table on a disk device.
- Enable and disable partition flags such as boot and hidden.
-
Perform actions with partitions such as:
- create or delete
- resize or move
- check
- label
- copy and paste"
comment: Although it comes include in the Ubuntu LIVECD, it does not get installed by default in Ubuntu installation.
3.Emerald Theme Manager
"The Emerald Theme Manager allows you to install, edit and switch between Emerald themes. In order for it to work, select Emerald as your window decorator. As a window decorator, Emerald controls the appearance of your window borders; please see your desktop environment's own theme settings if you wish to change the appearance of things inside windows, such as buttons, menus and scrollbars."
4. Marble
"Marble is a Virtual Globe and World Atlas that you can use to learn more about Earth: You can pan and zoom around and you can look up places and roads. A mouse click on a place label will provide the respective Wikipedia article.
Of course it's also possible to measure distances between locations or watch the current cloud cover. Marble offers different thematic maps: A classroom-style topographic map, a satellite view, street map, earth at night and temperature and precipitation maps. All maps include a custom map key, so it can also be used as an educational tool for use in class-rooms. For educational purposes you can also change date and time and watch how the starry sky and the twilight zone on the map change. In opposite to other virtual globes Marble also features multiple projections: Choose between a Flat Map ("Plate carré"), Mercator or the Globe."
5. VLC Media Player
"The cross-platform open-source multimedia framework, player and server. VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, MPEG-1, mp3, ogg, aac ...) as well as DVDs, Audio CDs VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a media converter or a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on networks."
6. Likewise
"Likewise Open is a free, open source application that joins Linux, Unix, and Mac machines to Microsoft Active Directory and securely authenticates users with their domain credentials."
7. FSlint
"FSlint is a utility to find and clean various forms of lint on a filesystem. I.E. unwanted or problematic cruft in your files or file names. For example, one form of lint it finds is duplicate files. It has both GUI and command line modes."
comment: If you want your system clean and always booting fast like it was a fresh installation, then this is what you need.
8. Thunderbird
" Thunderbird 2 Flexible, powerful, and lightweight. Mozilla’s Thunderbird 2 email application is more powerful than ever. Thunderbird 2 includes many new features to help you manage your inbox. With Thunderbird 2, it’s easier to prioritize and find your important email with tags and the new find bar helps you find content within your email faster."
comment: The default Ubuntu email client is evolution. I have chosen thunderbird mainly because of shared contacts, tasks and calendars (ical). To get these features running you need to install a thunderbird plug-in called lightning. In any case, thunderbird & plugin do not work as publicized, if you have a network or http shared calendar you wil get an error saying MODIFICATION_FAILED when you try to make changes to them. Just sucks and it's a known bug for at least 2 years and affects all installations.
Another thing I don't understand is the Thunderbird version in the repositories, it's just old (V.2) while windows operating systems are running V.3. I think the support of Mozilla in Ubuntu lacks a lot of things, specially updates for newer versions, i.e. I just updated Firefox from the repositories this week to V.3.013 while everybody else is running V.3.5... Ubuntu delayed the launch or update of Firefox 3.5 until their next distro release 9.10 Karmic Koala in September... I just have one comment for this... ridiculous.
9. Mail Notification
"When new mail arrives, Mail Notification alerts you by displaying an icon in the notification area. Moreover, a mail summary can be displayed in the icon tooltip, a sound can be played, and notifications containing useful action buttons can be popped up. Mail Notification can monitor multiple mailboxes concurrently, and supports Evolution, Gmail, IMAP, Maildir, mbox, MH, Mozilla products (Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, …), POP3, Sylpheed, Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail mailboxes. Moreover, since Mail Notification uses GnomeVFS, it transparently supports remote (SSH, HTTP, …) and compressed mailboxes. Mail Notification supports advanced POP3 and IMAP features such as SSL/TLS connections (in-band or on separate port), SASL and APOP authentication, and the IMAP IDLE extension."
comment: The ssl/tls feature although being publicized does not work. The application will not authenticate in your email servers using IMAPS. You will need to use pop or imap.
10. VirtualBox
"VirtualBox is a powerful x86 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction. Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD. VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while Sun ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria."
comment: VirtualBox is overall an excellent solution to run Virtual Machines, unlike VMware is totally free GPL. I installed virtualbox this week to test windows 7 and noticed that some of the publicized features do not work.
1. shared folder between host and virtual machine does not work
2. usb of virtual machine does not work
3. some drivers in virtual machine do not work, i.e. sound drivers (sound Card)
One of the basic features not present in virtualbox but available in vmware is the drag and drop function. In vmware you can drag and drop files & folders between the desktops of the host and the virtual machine.
More coming soon 
Ok 10 was easy, so here's the first above that number. Just as basic and useful as the ten before.
11. Shrew Soft VPN Client
"The Shrew Soft VPN Client is a free IPsec Remote Access VPN Client ( x86 and amd64 versions ). It was originally developed to provide secure communications between mobile Windows hosts and open source VPN gateways that utilize standards compliant software such as ipsec-tools, OpenSWAN, FreeSWAN, StrongSWAN, isakmpd. It now offers many of the advanced features only found in expensive commercial software solutions and provides compatibility for VPN appliances produced by vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, Checkpoint, Fortinet, Netgear, Linksys, Zywall and many others."
comment: A really nice vpn client with GUI and a lot of security options that enables it to connect to almost all gateways. The ubuntu version in the repositories is 2.1.4 while the windows version is 2.1.5 (some features missing in the Ubuntu version). The project looks a little bit abandoned let's hope the author continues with this excellent project. Still the best VPN client with GUI available.
12. Zenamp
Zenmap is a security scanner "Network Mapper", used to discover computers and services on a computer network, thus creating a "map" of the network. Just like many simple port scanners, Zenmap is capable of discovering passive services on a network despite the fact that such services aren't advertising themselves with a service discovery protocol. In addition Zenmap may be able to determine various details about the remote computers. These include operating system, device type, uptime, software product used to run a service, exact version number of that product, presence of some firewall techniques and, on a local area network, even vendor of the remote network card.
comment: A must have for full network or individual scans (ports / protocols / services / etc. / etc.). After you scan a full network it creates a great network map. Again, a must have.
