Linux: How i satisfied a windows user with Ubuntu
A few days ago, a friend of mine had a hard disk failure. Luckily, i had a old disk i could offer for replacement. But instead of installing Windows XP or Windows 7, my friend wanted to try Ubuntu Linux.
In the following post, i will mention some programs and tips to satisfy a windows user with Ubuntu Linux.
I used Ubuntu Linux 10.04. My friend wanted to be abled to do the following things:
Programs
Surfing
No problem with the already installed Mozilla Firefox. Optionally, i installed Opera for Ubuntu
Emails
Because my friend used Thunderbird on windows before, i uninstalled Evolution and installed Thunderbird.
Youtube Videos
For watching Youtube Videos, i needed to install the Adobe Flash plugin. Dont forget it! :)
Downloading and converting Youtube Videos
After a quick search, i found ClipGrab. Installing needs to add the PPA Launchpad:
sudo apt-get install clipgrab
Burning CDs
Luckily, Ubuntu is shipped with Basero, so only a simple introduction was needed.
Office: Word and Excel
By the time my friend saw OpenOffice, all questions were gone.
Chatting
Instead of Empathy, i installed Pidgin because i had better experiences with it.
Music
My friend was a little bit overwhelmed by Rythmbox, so i installed Audacious, which has also a very simple and fast GT Gui.
Optic and useabilty changes
I needed to turn of the start sound and the login sound. This can be done with:
System -> Administration -> Login Screen
System -> Preferences -> Sound
Optical stuff i did was:
Combining the panel to the lower one.
Changing the System -> Preferences -> Appearance to a theme that had controls:Redmond, windowborder:Metabox, icons:Humanity.
Also enabling the visual effects was very impressing for the ex-windows user.
Also the empty screen needed the known folders like "Images" and "Music".
I did this with Ubuntu Tweak. You just install the .deb packages and the program will add its apt-sources on first start.
