Spotify can be accessed via a desktop client (available for Windows or Mac OS X), as well as on mobile phones. It offers offline playback as well as playlists, and a huge database of artists and albums, all for a small (or non-existent) fee. One platform not fully supported is Linux. There is a beta version of the desktop client available, but if you use the Clementine music player (a popular music jukebox designed to follow the Amarok 1.4 series), and you are a subscriber to Spotify Premium, then you can use Clementine to search and stream music from Spotify.

Here’s how it works.

First, this assumes you already have Clementine installed and are a Spotify Premium subscriber. If not, you can download Clementine from this page and sign up for your Spotify account here.

Once that’s all taken care of, start up Clementine, then click on the Internet tab. You’ll see Spotify listed at the bottom of the available web-based music sources.

Now, right-click on Spotify and choose the Configure Spotify option.

A new preferences pane will load, where you can enter in your account info, as well as select between other options, such as the bitrate of the music you stream.

One key, as mentioned, is that you must be a subscriber to Spotify Premium. If you are a free user, or even if you subscribe to the Spotify Unlimited plan, you’ll see this notification.

If this is the case, you can always sign up for a free 30-day Premium account trial.

Once this is all taken care of, you can return to Spotify, where you’ll be asked to install the Spotify plugin.

Go ahead and click to install the plugin, which will allow you to search and stream music.

Once the plugin is installed, you can go ahead and search for an artist album or song that interests you. Here we’ve searched for Phish.

You can create playlists with the Clementine plugin, and – if you also use Spotify on a different computer or mobile device – your playlists are synchronized with your account. So if you create a playlist in one place, it will show up everywhere. Playlists aren’t set in stone, of course; simply drag and drop to reorder them.

And thanks to Clementine, you’ll receive a nice notification on track change.

There are a couple things missing from the Clementine plugin. First is all the social integration. So if you’re someone who loves telling your friends what you’re listening to, sharing songs and so forth, then this may not be for you.

Also, the Clementine plugin is missing the ability to download songs for offline playback, which the official clients (even the Linux client in beta), fully support. So again, if you use Clementine on a computer which isn’t always connected to the Internet, the official client might be a better fit for your needs.

Still, it’s nice that even though the Linux client hasn’t made an official appearance – yet – that this is a solid option for Linux users. Clementine was already a nice player, and for Spotify users this only helps to make it better.

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To install it, first navigate in Firefox to the Wiktionary and Google Translate website, part of the Firefox Addons collection.

Once there, click the green Add To Firefox button to begin the installation process.

You’ll need to verify the installation, then restart Firefox. When you’ve done this, the extension is ready to be used.

So, find your favorite foreign-language website. We chose the Mexican Secretary of Tourism website, but whatever you choose should work just fine.

Now, double click a word you don’t understand. A pop-up will appear with both a direct translation of the word (written in blue and underlined), as well as a definition.

What if it’s not just a single word you need translated, but the whole page? That’s simple as well. Right-click anywhere on the page and choose the Translate Page option.

The Google Translate bar will appear at the top of the page, and in just a bit, the entire page should be translated.

What about English words? As mentioned in the beginning, sometimes it’s nice to be able to get a definition of a word. The Wiktionary and Google Translate extension can do just that, using the Wiktionary database. The procedure is just like with foreign language words. Double click the word to highlight, and a pop-up will appear.

Beyond the obvious, the extension offers a few different configuration options, such as the ability to choose your native language, whether hover-to-translate and select-to-translate are active, and more.

Note: You can find this in the Add-ons page (found by selecting the Tools menu then Add-ons), then scrolling down to the extension’s entry.

In the Style tab, shown below, you can also tweak the look of the pop-up. Here we’ve changed the style to have rounded corners, with black text on a yellow background.

And here are those changes in action.

Google Chrome already offers the ability to automatically translate foreign language websites, and while Chrome is a great web browser, it’s not for everyone. Thankfully, this handy extension offers that ability, nicely integrated with your contextual menus, plus a little more.

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Recent iterations of GNOME and Ubuntu, however – with their GNOME Shell and Unity environments – has led to a bit of that flexibility being taken back by developers. You can still change themes, but not without first installing some extra software. This is partially a factor of how new GNOME Shell and Unity are, and partially a desire to provide a very unified interface.

If you’ve read any of the articles about Linux Mint, you know that instead of providing a standard GNOME Shell or Unity interface (although both can be used), you are instead given something else. GNOME Shell with extensions to make it appear like the standard GNOME desktop environment was used for one release, while new releases use the forked Cinnamon project. Fortunately for Ubuntu users wanting the same flexibility, there is nothing about Cinnamon that requires any Linux Mint specific programs or libraries, and it’s simple to get up and running. Here’s how.

First, open up your Terminal.

We’ll be adding a personal package archive (PPA for short), which will give us automatic updates. If we didn’t want to go this route, we could also install the .deb files manually, but then we wouldn’t get bug fixes or new features. Hence, the PPA. To add the PPA to our software sources list, type sudo add-apt-repository ppa:merlwiz79/cinnamon-ppa as shown below.

Now, type sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade which will update your software lists (making the new software available), and then upgrade the software installed on your system, ensuring up-to-date versions are used.

Once this is done, simply typing sudo apt-get install cinnamon will install the environment.

Installing Cinnamon will also bring in a few extras, such as required libraries, a menu editor and some panel applets, all of which are necessary for Cinnamon to run correctly.

This PPA, however, also includes some extensions, such as a dock, a drive menu (for external hard drive, flash drives, etc.), a clipboard, trash and weather applet. To see a full list of these, type sudo apt-get install cinnamon and then hit the TAB key (you may need to hit TAB twice), to see a full list of anything starting with “cinnamon” (which is the actual environment, plus one theme and close to a dozen different extensions.

These can be installed by typing sudo apt-get install cinnamon-extensions-<name-of-extension> as shown below, where we installed the trash extension.

Once all the installations are complete, it’s time to start using Cinnamon. To do so, first logout of your current session.

Now, log back into your account, only this time choose the Cinnamon session from the login window.

When you see the new desktop, you’ll notice it very reminiscent of the traditional GNOME desktop. You have a bottom panel, with an application menu, applets for clock, calendar, system volume and more (bluetooth, wireless and laptop battery if appropriate), and a list of all open windows.

If you want to configure it to be more like the traditional Ubuntu desktop, with panels on top and bottom, you can adjust this in the Cinnamon Settings application (installed along with the Cinnamon desktop), as well as many other settings, including desktop effects, themes, fonts, extensions and applets.

Here is Cinnamon configured with the standard two-pane desktop.

All in all, Cinnamon is a fantastic idea for those who want the newer technologies that underly the new GNOME 3, but want the comfort and familiarity of the traditional GNOME 2 desktop. And while Cinnamon was written by Linux Mint developers, it can be – as shown – easily installed and run on other distributions. And while this tutorial ran through setting up the PPA and installing Cinnamon on Ubuntu, check out this page for a full list of available packages for a variety of distributions.

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But what if a user wants something a bit different? Maybe their own image as the login screen background? Happily, this is easily acomplished, and can be done a couple different ways. You can edit a simple text file – replacing the standard background image with your own – or install a separate program, which allows you to change the background by pointing and clicking. In reality, all you are doing is having the program edit the text files for you, but for many people this will be simpler, and a bit less scary. However, for this article, we’ll cover how to switch the standard background to something you choose, all by editing a single configuration text file.

To do this, first open up the Terminal.

Now open up the configuration file. We’ll actually be editing a configuration file for the Unity Greeter – which is used by default. This file contains a great deal of configuration options. In addition to editing the background image, you can tweak the GTK theme, the icon theme, the font (and size), and even the resolution of the login screen. Most of these changes are pretty self-explanatory, but for this tutorial we’ll just change the background image.

Before we do this, however, let’s make a backup of the configuration file, just in case something should go wrong. This way, we’ll still have an unedited copy that we can use to replace the edited copy. Typing sudo cp /etc/lightdm/unity-greeter.conf /etc/lightdm/unity-greeter.conf.bak will make a copy in the same folder, but with .bak added to the end.

Once we’ve done this, it’s time to open up the file and begin editing. You’ll need to open the configuration file as root, since only someone with administrator privileges can edit this particular file. We’ll use the nano text editor, so type sudo nano /etc/lightdm/unity-greeter.conf to open the file.

You’ll see something like this.

A few lines down is the option we’ll edit. It should read as follows by default.

As you can see, this simply points LightDM to a particular file, in this case an image named warty-final-ubuntu.png which is located in the standard backgrounds folder. So, let’s say we have a favorite image that we want to use instead. The name of the image is Reborn.png and it’s located in the Pictures folder inside our Home directory. We would just replace the path of the original image with the path to our own. It will now look something like this (depending, of course, on the path to your image as well as the image name).

Note: the image you select needs to be in an unencrypted part of your hard drive. So if – when you installed Ubuntu – you chose to encrypt your Home folder, then the image can’t reside there, as it isn’t unlocked until you login to your account.

Once you’ve made the change, go ahead and save the configuration file and logout.

You should now see the LightDM login manager, but with your own image as the background.

Assuming everything worked as expected, you’re finished. Enjoy your new look! If something horrible happened, you can always replace the edited unity-greeter.conf file with the copy you renamed. To do this, simply delete the edited copy and rename the copy with .bak at the end back to its original, and all should be well.

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You’ll see this window, asking you to select your default search engine.

Once you’ve selected a search engine, from now on when you type a search query into the URL bar, it is that engine which will be used. But what if you don’t want Google, Yahoo or Bing to be your default? What if you’ve gotten used to searching as Ask.com, or want to try out DuckDuckGo or Dogpile or… any other search engine? You can! Simply click the Gears menu, then choose the Preferences option.

Now, from the Basics tab (check along the left sidebar; it should be one highlighted by default when you open the Preferences interface), choose the Manage Search Engines option.

When this pop-up appears, you’ll see the three default search engines in the top box, with room to add other engines in the bottom box.

To add a search engine, we need to give it a name, a keyword, and a search URL. You can see the three spots in the above image. Below, you can see that we’ve added two search engines.

The three bits of info you need are pretty explanatory. The only one which could cause much trouble is the search URL. This is a bit of text (a web address with a spot open for your search query) that Chrome sends to the search engine to produce your search results. How do we find this URL? Simply go to the search engine you wish to add, search for something simple (we searched for “hello” in our examples), and then copy the URL of the results page.

Here is what the results page looks like at duckduckgo.com:

Here is what you’ll see when Ask is your search engine.

To add that URL to Google Chrome, simply copy it down. The only thing to remember is that went entering the URL, replace what you searched for (in order to find the URL in the first place), with “%s” (without the quotes). You can see that we did this in our examples earlier.

Once you’ve added a search engine or two, how do you set one as the default? Simply hover over it, then click the blue Make Default button that appears.

When you’ve done that, your newly-added search engines will now appear in the Default Search Options list.

One last note of explanation: keywords. Keywords are great. If you have a few search engines entered (as we do), you may find yourself wanting to search another. Maybe you have a Wikipedia search engine installed. To use it, assuming “wiki” is your keyword, you would just type wiki then hit space and the URL bar will change slightly so that whatever you type next will be searched for at Wikipedia. Here’s what it looks like when using our Ask.com keyword, even though DuckDuckGo is our default search engine.

Keywords are a great way to refine your search using the search engine of your choice, without making it the new default. So use this tutorial to add all the specialty search engines you want (how about adding an Amazon or eBay search engine to find your favorite products, new and used?). You’ll find yourself searching faster, and better, than ever before.

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