10 Alternatives to Default Applications in Ubuntu 10.10

Music player: Rhythmbox (full review here)
Alternative: Banshee (full review here)
Banshee is a feature-rich collection-oriented player which includes Internet services, cover manager, smart playlists, Last.fm integration, 10-band equalizer, tray icon, ratings, fullscreen mode, track metadata editor, support for radio and podcasts, plugins and play queue, to list only a part of them. The version which comes in Ubuntu Maverick is 1.8.0, but at the time of writing a new development version, 1.9.0, is available on the official website and can be easily installed using the Banshee daily builds PPA at Launchpad.
Runners-up: Exaile, Listen, Audacious, gmusicbrowser, Decibel Audio Player, Quod Libet, Foobnix, DeaDBeeF, Sonata, GMPC

sudo apt-get install banshee


Movie player: Totem
Alternative: GNOME MPlayer
GNOME MPlayer is a GTK frontend to mplayer the popular, cross-platform movie player. GNOME MPlayer is provided by the package gnome-mplayer and can play any file that mplayer supports. It has support for subtitles, playlist, video info, and comes with pretty much enough configuration options.
Runners-up:

sudo apt-get install gnome-mplayer


File manager: Nautilus (full review here)
Alternative: GNOME Commander
It was a tough choice between this and PCManFM, and finally decided to go for the twin-panel one although the latter is a good replacement too. GNOME Commander is a twin-panel file manager with features like search for files/folders, horizontal layout, SMB support, keyboard shortcuts, bookmarks. It doesn't seem to integrate context menus for various file formats, for example adding/extracting to/from an archive.
Runners-up: PCManFM, Thunar, emelFM

sudo apt-get install gnome-commander


Web browser: Firefox
Alternative: Epiphany
Epiphany is a clean and simple GTK web browser that uses the WebKit layout engine. It includes the usual features like privacy management, bookmarks, tabs, history, fullscreen mode.
Runners-up:

sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser


Word processor: OpenOffice.org Writer
Alternative: Abiword
Abiword is for those who need a word processing application, but without the more advanced features the OpenOffice.org Writer includes and also quite lightweight compared to the latter. It provides a simple, easy-to-use interface and has support for the OpenDocument Text format.
Runners-up:

sudo apt-get install abiword


Image viewer: Eye of GNOME
Alternative: gThumb
gThumb supports a wide variety of image formats and comes with decent features for an image viewer, like bookmarks, basic editing tools (rotate, convert to other formats, resize), extensions.
Runners-up: GPicView, GQview, GImageView

sudo apt-get install gthumb


Terminal application: GNOME Terminal
Alternative: Guake
A few days ago I talked about Yakuake, a KDE Quake-style console application. Well, Guake is its counterpart on the Gnome desktop environment. Guake features transparency effects, keyboard shortcuts (F12 to hide/show the terminal), tray icon, tabs (using the Firefox shortcuts to switch - Ctrl+Page Up and Ctrl+Page Down), configuration options.
Runners-up:

sudo apt-get install guake


Text editor: Gedit
Alternative: Geany
Geany is a very powerful text editor which also offers features for programmers. Geany comes with tabbed support, highlighting for various programming languages, indentation support, projects, plugins and a whole range of configuration options. A respectable replacement for Gedit, and also a valid tool among more advanced IDEs like Emacs.
Runners-up: Scribes, SciTE, Leafpad

sudo apt-get install geany


Photo manager: Shotwell
Alternative: F-Spot
What better alternative for Shotwell than the former default photo manager, F-Spot? F-Spot features camera support, importing and exporting images to various services, tags, extensions to name a few.
Runners-up:

sudo apt-get install f-spot


Email client: Evolution
Alternative: Claws Mail
Claws Mail is a highly configurable email client written in GTK with features like address book, support for POP3 or SMTP protocols, external editor, multiple accounts.
Runners-up: Thunderbird (not GTK but integrates well enough)

sudo apt-get install claws-mail


Final notice
All the alternative applications and runners-up were chosen to blend well in the GNOME environment, which means all of them (except for Thunderbird) are GTK-based.Source URL: https://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/maverick
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7 KDE Apps to Get After Installing Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

Yakuake - Quake-like terminal application - full review
This is a great replacement console for the default Konsole which ships with KDE and implicitly with Kubuntu. The great thing about Yakuake is that is uses a Quake-style show/hide function, which can be accessed by default using the F12 keyboard shortcut. Press F12 to show the terminal, do you work, then hide it again when you don't need it anymore. Yakuake supports profiles (which can be configured the same way like a Konsole profile), global shortcuts, allows to change default size and animation speed, it supports skins, transparency, start-up options (like start with window shown or hidden), transparency. Supported are also multiple tabs, which can be switched by pressing Shift+Right/Left Arrow.
Homepage

sudo apt-get install yakuake


Yakuake 2.9.7


BasKet - powerful notes taking application - full review
BasKet Note Pads is one of the applications that I fell in love with immediately after trying it, ever since it was available only for KDE3. For those who didn't try it yet, BasKet is feature-rich and powerful notes-taking application, but not only. It's not your ordinary notes application, it has much more to it. The workspace can organise your notes in one or more columns, or in custom (free) positions, it supports tags, inserting of images, links, launchers to applications or other disk locations, backup or restore BasKet archives, importing to various notes formats (included here are plain text files, KNotes, Sticky Notes, Tomboy), exporting to HTML file. The configuration window allows to enable/disable the system tray, configure global actions, animate changes in baskets, change the appearance of notes. All in all, if simple is not enough for you and a minimalist application like KNotes doesn't suffice, BasKet is definitely the KDE4 application for it, allowing to build complex projects rather than only text notes.
Homepage

sudo apt-get install basket


BasKet 2.0 Beta


Kdenlive - powerful video editor
Kdenlive is a very powerful video editor for KDE4 which bundles a big number of video editing features. It comes with a wide range video and audio effects, support for camcorders and cameras, multitrack support, exporting to formats like PAL, NTSC, h264.
Homepage

sudo apt-get install kdenlive


Kdenlive 0.7.8


Krusader - full-featured file manager - full review
Ever since the KDE3 days Krusader was usually the first choice when someone would ask for a replacement for Konqueror. Krusader uses by default a twin-panel interface, and ships with all the whistles and bells one would expect from a complete file manager. It includes support for user actions, including creating archives, calculate checksums, split or combine files, mass rename of files, show previews, sort files by various properties, synchronise directories, search, locate, profiles, tabs, shortcuts, sessions, bookmarks. Krusader is also highly configurable.
Homepage

sudo apt-get install krusader


Krusader 2.2.0 Beta


VLC - complete video player
In my opinion there are three major players for KDE: Kaffeine, SMPlayer and VLC, and all three are very good, and this time I chose VLC, one of the most popular movie players out there, and not only on the Linux platform. VLC offers anything you would expect from a media player, support for DVDs and HD formats, ISO DVD images, audio and video settings, bookmarks, subtitles, effects, plugins, playlists, minimal view mode. The preferences window allows to configure and change the way VLC looks and feels, OSD, volume normalization, hotkeys.
Homepage

sudo apt-get install vlc


VLC 1.1.4


digiKam - photo management application
digiKam is the ultimate photo management application for KDE, with support for a wide range of cameras, importing from PicasaWeb, Facebook, SmugMug or a remote computer, and exporting to a variety of services. It organises photos in albums, itoffers image processing tools and effects, and it's highly configurable.
Homepage

sudo apt-get install digikam


DigiKam 1.4.0


Clementine - KDE4 port of Amarok 1.4 - full review
Kubuntu comes with Amarok 2.2.0, but if you're happier with the look and feel of the older Amarok 1.4, Clementine is the perfect replacement. It offers an interface similar to the one of the KDE3 version of Amarok, and currently it integrates a pretty fair amount of features. Clementine comes with a file browser, radio support, Last.fm song submission, sortable playlists, cover manager, equalizer, cross-fading, tray icon integration, OSD, music library. Considering it isn't included in the Ubuntu Maverick repositories, here is a tutorial I've put up a while ago to install it.
Homepage
Tutorial - Install Clementine in Kubuntu 10.10


Clementine 0.3

Source URL: https://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/maverick
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Goggles Music Manager - Overview and Installation in Ubuntu Maverick

Goggles Music Manager (or GMM for short) is a music player written using the FOX toolkit, with support for Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, MP4, ASF and Musepack. FOX is a fast toolkit for creating graphical interfaces (another application which I reviewed in the past which uses FOX is Xfe - review here - a file manager for Linux).

Note: If you don't want to read the review you can skip directly to the installation instructions below, which show how to compile and install GMM in the latest Ubuntu release, Maverick Meerkat.

Among the features Goggles comes with are:
- support for AlbumArt - embedded in file or separate image on disk
- tag editing - including support for multiple file editing
- smart sorting
- playlists support - including importing/exporting from/to XSPF, M3U, PLS, CSV
- drag and drop support - KDE and GNOME
- uses xine engine
- configurable user interface, including changing default icons
- Last.fm and Libre.fm support
- Replay gain support

Goggles uses SQLite database for the music collection, and it seems to be very fast when it comes to scanning a music collection, at least compared to most of the other existing players with support for music collection.

Regarding the interface, it's plain and simple:


Goggles Music Manager in Ubuntu 10.10


It also supports a so-called Mini Player, which takes up very little desktop space:


System tray support is included too, and Goggles can be configured to show/hide the tray icon and close the application or just minimize it to tray when the main window close button is clicked.

Drag and drop from Nautilus will also work, and the user will be presented with an importing window for the new files to be added to the playlist.

Goggles successfully fetched all the local album covers, however showing them is disabled by default, so you have to set it in Preferences and restart the application.

The playlist can be sorted using various criteria, and the columns can be shown/hidden and rearranged in a different order.

The Preferences window allows to configure the Last.fm and Libre.fm accounts, although when switching from one another in the drop down list the account username and password seem to be lost so you will have to enter them again. Here you can also customise the tray icon, control buttons location (top or bottom), appearance and audio driver to use.


Installation in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

Follow these steps:

1. Download the source
Get the source code from the official Google Code page, here (direct link here). At the time of writing the version is 0.11.5, for which this tutorial was made.

2. Uncompress the package
Open up the Terminal and make sure the current working directory is the one where you saved the archive (use pwd and cd to view the current directory and to navigate to your downloads directory e.g. cd; cd Downloads) and uncompress the source tarball using the following command:

tar -xjf gogglesmm-0.11.5.tar.bz2

3. Install the needed dependencies
Type the following two commands:

sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install libfox-1.6-dev libsqlite3-dev libghc6-curl-dev libtag1-dev libxine-dev libdbus-1-dev

The first command will install the tools needed to compile the application, while the second fetches and installs the development packages of various libraries needed by GMM.

4. Install GMM
Type the following commands:

./configure
make
sudo make install

This should be all. To run Goggles, just type gogglesmm in a terminal or press Alt+F2 and type gogglesmm in the run box that appears.

Alternate installation prefix
Alternately, you can specify an installation prefix and install as normal user:

./configure --prefix=/home/USER/usr
make
make install

In which case you will need to include /home/USER/usr (or the prefix of your choice and replacing USER with your username) in your $PATH, by editing the file ~/.bashrc and adding a line like this:

export PATH=/home/USER/usr:$PATH

Then issue:

. ~/.bashrcSource URL: https://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/maverick
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How-To: Install Dillo Web Browser in Ubuntu Maverick Beta

Dillo is a simplistic, minimal web browser built using the FLTK2 (Fast Light Toolkit) library, designed especially for a minimal load on resources. It is used successfully by various distributions out there that aim to stay small and fast (the last time I checked it was included in Damn Small Linux for example).


Dillo 2.2 - the minimalist and fast web browser for Linux


I decided to make a review of Dillo (in the past I reviewed version 2.0 here) but realized that currently Dillo is not included in the Ubuntu Maverick repositories. So this is why I set out to make first a short how-to on how to install it in Maverick. Considering you will also need to compile and install FLTK2 in order to compile Dillo (because the repositories include FLTK 1.1, but not FLTK 2.0), we will use a DEB package to install it. Just follow the steps below.

Download the DEB package from the Dillo PPA archive (direct link) and save it somewhere on your hard disk. Now open a terminal, make sure the currently working directory is the one where you saved it (use the pwd command to print the working directory) and type:

sudo dpkg -i dillo_2.2-0+dillo1~karmic1_i386.deb

That's it! To start Dillo, press Alt+F2 and type dillo in the run box that appears.


Note: This tutorial probably applies for older Ubuntu releases too.Source URL: https://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/maverick
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Tutorial: Install Clementine Music Player in Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Beta

Clementine is a KDE4 port of the beloved music player Amarok 1.4. Although Clementine still needs work done in order to reach Amarok's functionality - like support for scripts, or for example I couldn't get it to add a whole music directory to the playlist - is there a way to do it? - it comes with pretty decent features up to now:

- equalizer
- Last.fm song submission, love/ban buttons
- music library
- file browser
- radio support
- cover manager


Installing Clementine in Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Beta
We will use the packages in the Clementine PPA in order to install it on Maverick. Fire up a terminal and type:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:riccetn/clementine

This command will add the Clementine PPA repository inside your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ directory.


Notice that the current version in the PPA is 0.3. If you already have an older version of Clementine installed on your system, it is best to remove it first:

sudo apt-get remove --purge clementine

Now update the packages list:

sudo apt-get update

And finally, install Clementine by typing:

sudo apt-get install clementine

And you're done! To start it up, press Alt+F2 and type clementine followed by Enter.


Cover manager


Clementine Homepage
Clementine at Google Code
Clementine PPA at Launchpad.netSource URL: https://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/maverick
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