The Daily Ubuntu

Good iPhone Applications for Linux Developers

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:30:00 +0000

I was going through my RSS feeds, and I saw this article about iPhone apps for developers and freelancers. There's some good stuff in here, so check it out.

Create Oscar-Worthy Movie Scripts With Celtx

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:24:00 +0000

Celtx is a media pre-production editor that allows you to easily create screenplays and storyboards for your next movie. You can use it to create a whole assortment of media, including theater, comics, advertising, and video games.

Celtx utilizes a full tagging system for authors to keep track of characters, cameras, and effects. Match that with storyboard scenes and sequences, built-in schedule production, and the detailed reporting features, and it's pretty easy to create a script with Celtx.

This application is not in the official repositories, but it's pretty easy to install regardless. Just click to download the archive, and extract it to a folder. Navigate to the folder using the terminal, and launch the celtx binary with ./celtx. You can append a & like ./celtx & to run it in the background.

Do you know of any applications that deserve to be featured on The Daily Ubuntu? Leave a message at @simplrdesgn on Twitter, and I'll stick it up along with a link to your site or social media profile. As always, you can subscribe to The Daily Ubuntu for free by RSS to get an app every weekday.

khtml2png - Take Command Line Web Screenshots on Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:23:00 +0000

khtml2png is a helpful tool for capturing an image of a webpage with ease. It's nice to use because it will get the entire length of the site, no matter whether it is fully visible in the browser. And, it sure beats shell scripting Firefox to open on a different display and capturing an image with Imagemagick, which is a royal pain in the butt. I embed this application in PHP scripts to create web design roundups over at my other blog. I was able to capture 75 minimal web designs without much hassle.

Example of a khtml2png webshot

This application is a little harder to install because it's not in the Ubuntu repositories. I couldn't find a Deb file, so you'll have to compile it from scratch. Scratch that! I found one at Sourgeforge. Install that, or compile with the directions below. That being said, if someone wants to post a link to a Deb file or a repository, I would love you forever. You need to have a few packages compiled to use khtml2png, including g++, KDE 3.x, kdelibs for KDE 3.x (kdelibs4-dev), zlib (zlib1g-dev), and cmake. This command should work:

sudo apt-get install g++ kdelibs zlib1g-dev cmake

You may need more packages than that. It's hard for me to tell because I have so many already installed ;-) Post in the comments if you need help. After that, compile it!

./configure
make
make install

You can use it to take a screenshot with a command like the following:


/usr/bin/khtml2png2 --display  --width 1024 --height 768 http://thedailyubuntu.blogspot.com/ /home/you/webshot.png

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My First Foray Into Website Design

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:21:00 +0000

So I took some time off from posting here to start my very own web design business, and I just finished with my first project. It's a portfolio site for Jenny Zhang, an Ann Arbor marketer. I created it using PHP on Linux. My IDE was Bluefish and Kate (believe it or not), and I finally conquered Prototype. Tell me what you all think in the comments.

Build Websites Visually with Amaya

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:38:00 +0000

Today I continue the series on web development applications with Amaya, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) development application for Linux created by the W3C. Next, I would like to feature some development frameworks, such as Rails and CakePHP, so if you have any suggestions, please contact me at Digg. And, you should Digg this post while you're there ;-) . You can also check out the first part of this series about Bluefish.

Amaya is a tool to update and create web files both remotely and locally. Development at the W3C began in 1996, and the purpose was to include and demonstrate as many W3C technologies as possible. Therefore, Amaya not only supports HTML and CSS, but can build XML, XHTML, MathML, and SVG. You can work on multiple documents in multiple formats all at the same time. It supports annotations, so you can make external notes, comments, and remarks as you develop.

Amaya obviously supports stylesheets, yet the inclusion is not complete. You can use properties like foreground color, background color, alignment, etc. There's a solid testing framework to check stylesheets, and many developers use Amaya solely to develop CSS. This works great with your pro-social, ecofriendly, green hosting account. so you can easily add and edit CSS and HTML files in your ThinkHost account.

Unfortunately, Amaya is not included in the official repositories, so you should download and install the .deb from the application website.

If you want to get new Ubuntu applications every day by email or RSS, be sure to visit The Daily Ubuntu feed.

Detect Wireless Networks with Kismet

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Kismet is a 802.11x wireless network detector and sniffer. It can detect any wireless network in range, assuming that you have a card that supports raw monitoring and that the network is broadcasting in 802.11b, g or a. I use this a lot when I have interference with my wireless connection, and I need to figure out what channels are open. Many people use this to discover and map wireless networks in their area.

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Develop Websites with Bluefish

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 03:52:00 +0000

Linux is at the forefront of web development, and Ubuntu is a great distribution to use to build and design a website for the first time. Recently, I've been developing web applications using frameworks, and Linux in general makes these things quite a bit easier. Therefore, I figured I should present some of the basic tools you can use to create, develop, and host a website. This may abstract a bit away from the idea of "applications" in and of themselves, but I thought you may all be interested anyway.

The most logical first step for most users is selecting a development environment. Today, I'll highlight Bluefish. Later on, I'll focus on a WYSIWYG editor. (Which, by the way, is kind of difficult to find. Please, if you have any ideas, leave a message in the comments.)

Of course, to put your webpage on the Internet, you'll probably want to use a reliable web hosting. There's about a million out there, and it's hard to figure out the differences between them. I used to have a site on Bluehost, but I eventually cancelled because I thought their support was poor, and I didn't want to fax in a copy of my driver's license just to have SSH access so I could use Rails. I switched to ThinkHost a few months ago, and I've been really happy thus far. They offer reliable Linux hosting with unlimited bandwidth, space, and domains. Better yet, the servers are powered with wind and solar energy, and they plant a tree on your behalf.

Bluefish is a code editor, so users should have a basic understanding of XHTML and CSS, along with any other development languages. I learned HTML rather painstakingly from an outdated code reference, and I don't recommend you do it that way. Instead, try HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide published by O'Reilly, which can help even the most talented developer learn new tricks. In fact, it taught me all about the <label> tag, and I felt kind of dumb for previously embedding form labels in only a paragraph tag and wrestling with CSS, but alas...

One of the nicest things about Bluefish is that it uses 30 to 45 percent less memory than other editors. This makes quick edits less of a hassle. Sometimes, other editors can be too clunky, and I found myself reverting to a console-based text editor to make a minor change, but Bluefish should stop this from happening. It has built-in project support, so you can easily open multiple files and keep them organized in the right path. It has all the standard stuff, like line-numbers, search and replace, and code highlighting for languages like HTML, Ruby (go Rails!), Python, and PHP. Best of all, the menu bar allows you to instantly drop in code that developers use often.

Bluefish allows you to connect to a remote server and edit files, so here's a quick guide to using Bluefish with ThinkHost. This tutorial assumes you are using GNOME, though I'm sure you can do the same thing with KDE.

Click on the "Places" menu, and select "Connect to Server...".

In the dialog box, type in your FTP address in the "Server" box. You should be prompted for a username and password.

Now, open up the mounted server in Bluefish, and now you can easily edit and save all of your files on Thinkhost.

If you want to get the latest Ubuntu Applications by email or RSS, be sure to go to The Daily Ubuntu feed.

Cook Tasty Meals with Krecipes

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:27:00 +0000

Krecipes is an Ubuntu linux recipe manager that has slowly saved me from starvation. Now that I'm in my first year of graduate school, I decided that I better learn how to cook so I can save time in between class. Because of Krecipes, it's been a long time since I've eaten Ramen.

So here's the skinny: yes, pun intended. Krecipes allows you to manage a complete recipe database, and lets you track calories and carbohydrates, which is important for pretty nerds. You can also generate a shopping list, so you don't wonder around the grocery store aimlessly like I do. It's based on MySQL, so it's flexible and you could easily extend it in the future.

Krecipes is installable from the official repositories. Search for "krecipes" in Synaptic, or click here, or type in the Terminal:

sudo apt-get install krecipes

You can get the latest Ubuntu applications by email or RSS at The Daily Ubuntu feed.

Save Your Amazing Ideas With Basket

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:14:00 +0000

Basket allows you to organize and take notes through a clean, accessible interface. This program is a must-have for any Ubuntu user in college, and definitely beats shoving all of your notes into a text editor or word processor.

It allows you to just click and type text. Further, you can paste links, images, files, addresses, and colors, which is useful for people in web or application development. Organization follows a hierarchy status, using baskets sorted by topic or project. All ideas support tagging, making it really easy to come back to where you were before and reconstruct previous notes. It allows password protection, and notes are automatically saved as you type them, so a power outage at the university will only bring glee at getting out of class early. This application is meant for KDE, so you may have to install some dependencies if you are a GNOME user. Install by searching for "basket" in Synaptic, by clicking this link, or by typing "sudo apt get install basket" in the Terminal.

If you want to get the latest Ubuntu Applications, be sure to subscribe to The Daily Ubuntu feed.

Create Killer Tracks with Hydrogen

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:15:00 +0000

Hydrogen is a really cool drum machine for linux. This Ubuntu application allows you to create professional tracks by programming drum patterns. It is multitrack enabled, meaning that you can add up to 64 tracks worth of music data to your beat. You can use 32 instrument tracks, and they are multilayered (meaning that there can be up to 16 samples for each instrument).

Generally, drum machines sound a little cold and really different from the way a real person would play the drums. Hyrdogen gets around that by adding in unique human velocity, human time, pitch, and swing settings, giving the song and drum track a much warmer feel. With that, you can make the perfect song to export to Audacious or Amarok.

Hydrogen is included in the official repos, so you can install it from Synaptic, by clicking this link in Firefox, or by entering the following command:


sudo apt-get install hydrogen

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Author DVDs with DeVeDe

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:18:00 +0000

DeVeDe is a really simple Ubuntu app you can use to author DVDs. It supports a huge variety of video formats, including all of the formats supported by Mplayer. It has very few dependencies, and runs off of Python and PyGTK.

This application is really basic, so you won't be able to make fancy menus, but this is great for the times where you just want to pop in a DVD and have it play without much hassle. DeVeDe will create the disc image for you in both NTSC or PAL format as an ISO file, and you can just burn it to any media you would like with GNOME, K3b, Brasero, or any other burning application.

Installing DeVeDe is a breeze because it's included in the official application repository. Fire up Synaptic and search for devede, or run the following in your terminal of choice:

sudo apt-get install devede

Or, if you are using Firefox in Ubuntu with the AptURL package installed, you can install by clicking this link.

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Gmount ISO - Easily Mount ISO Images with a Well-Designed API

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:12:00 +0000

GMount ISO is a virtual drive for Linux written using PyGTK and Glade. It is a frontend to the mount command that allows you to convert CDs and unencrypted DVDs into virtual drives that run directly on your hard drive, getting rid of the need for physical discs and your CD-ROM drive. The access rate for the virtual disc is about 200 times faster than that of a physical CD.

GMount ISO is available from the repositories. You can search for "gmountiso" in Synaptic, or you can run the following command:

sudo apt-get install gmountiso

Discover New Packages with goplay

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 22:03:00 +0000

goplay is an interesting browser application that allows you to locate nifty packages for Debian-based distributions. It uses DebTags, the built-in descriptive categories used in the repositories, to locate new packages. There's a whole slew of pre-made package browsers at your disposal, such as:

goplay games
goadmin admin packages
golearn educational packages
gonet networking packages
gooffice office- and word-processing packages
gosafe security packages
goweb internet and web-related packages

You can install the application by searching for "goplay" in Synaptic or by using apt-get. Give me a shout in the comments and let me know what kind of cool, new applications you found.

Htop - Manage Your System Processes in Seconds

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 02:25:00 +0000

Htop is a process manager that builds on the functionality of top. It allows you to view available memory and CPU usage as well as kill and manage running processes. It integrates quite well into the system manager Conky.

You can see it in action with this video via YouTube (credit: owburg):

Htop has a few features not found in top. First of all, the interface is more appealing, and it is easier to see what's going on. It opens a little faster, and you can kill processes by highlighting the name and pressing F9 instead of remembering the pid. You can scroll through the process list to see more than the first slew of items. Htop supports mouse operation as well.

As Debian Admin points out, top does have one advantage over htop:

[...] top is older, hence, more used and tested

You can install htop automagically by clicking here, searching for it in Synaptic, or by running the following command:

sudo apt-get install htop

This is by far my favorite CLI process manager. In fact, I haven't used the GUI included in GNOME ever since I found this. If you need help with usage, don't hesitate to leave a comment or a link to your question on ubuntuforums.org.

Frozen-Bubble - A Ridiculously Addictive Puzzle Game

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 23:42:00 +0000

Frozen-Bubble has blissfully stolen hours and hours of my life with its addictive gameplay and flippin' awesome soundtrack. It's an easy game with a simple premise: shoot colors bubbles onto the game board in an attempt to match up three or more similarly colored bubbles. Doing so will cause them to fall from the board, taking connected bubbles with them. If you clear all of the bubbles, you move on to the next level. If the bubbles pile up and cover the entire screen, you lose the game and restart the entire level.

Because my description is probably dense and hard to grasp, here's a video. By the way, no one gets to make fun of my mad Frozen-Bubble skillz.

The developer website lists the features well:

Colorful 3D rendered penguin animations, 100 levels of 1p game, hours and hours of 2p game, nights and nights of 2p/3p/4p/5p game over LAN or Internet, a level-editor, 3 professional quality digital soundtracks, 15 stereo sound effects, 8 unique graphical transition effects, 8 unique logo eye-candies.

Let me emphasize again: the soundtrack is amazing. It sounds really, really good. And the multiplayer is a lot of fun, especially over the LAN.

Install frozen-bubble using Synaptic, the Add/Remove... dialog, or by typing the following into the Terminal:

sudo apt-get install frozen-bubble

Conky - A Desktop System Monitor

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:50:00 +0000

Conky is a system monitor. It handles a bunch of different system variables, including CPU, disk space, running processes, RAM, temperature, network transfer, and log data. Conky is a fork of torsmo. You can customize the layout, colors, and fonts. It can be a bit of a bear to configure --- it requires significant work with the .conkyrc file in order to get it up and running. Fortunately, you can find a variety of good configuration templates and files all over the internet. (Hat Tip to lyrae for the weather script I currently use)

Installing the package takes the normal route. Fire up a Terminal, and type the following:

sudo apt-get install conky

From there, you can launch the application by typing 'conky' into the Alt+F2 dialog, creating a menu launcher, or by adding it to startup.

Speaking of Terminals though, I've been thinking of doing a roundup of my favorite terminal emulators. Currently, I'm a fan of rxvt. What do you use, and why do you prefer it?

Agave - Intuitive Color Palette Management

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:41:00 +0000

Hello dear readers! I'm glad to be back from my vacation feeling refreshed and ready to bring you some nice Ubuntu applications. Thanks again for all of the wonderful suggestions thus far. The best way to keep up to date with all of the new programs featured here at The Daily Ubuntu is to subscribe to the site feed.

Agave is a color palette selection tool used to pick design layouts for desktop themes, web site designs, icon creation, and much more. It simplifies the process of choosing colors by generating a palette based on an initial color selection according to the selected rule and color set. Supported color sets include GNOME Icon, Tango Icon, Web-Safe, and Visibone.

Picking the initial color requires no knowledge of complex codes: all you need to do is pick a color from the grid, and Agave generates the rest. From there, it will spit out the color information in hexadecimal, RGB, and HSV form for use in The GIMP, CSS, or other implementations. You can even generate a random palette for creative assistance. As soon as you find a color combination you like, you can easily adjust it by making it lighter, darker, or changing the level of saturation. Add it to your favorites, and export it to a file for easy reference.

You can install Agave via the Add/Remove... dialog found in the Applications menu or with Synaptic (further directions found here), or by typing the following into the Terminal:

sudo apt-get install agave

OR you can click on this link, and apt will do it for you! Thank you to adn for explaining that bit of ninja magic.

Week Off!

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:15:00 +0000

The Daily Ubuntu is taking some time to rest and recuperate far far away from internet access. Therefore, there won't be any new posts until Wednesday, February 20th.

Have a good week everybody!

APTonCD - Back Up Your Packages Easily

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 01:30:00 +0000

Thanks again to three-time recommender phynix a.k.a. Kyle for this superb suggestion. I think this is his best work yet!

APTonCD is an application that backs up all of your packages downloaded from apt-get or aptitude onto a CD or a DVD. This is perfect if you ever lose an internet connection or if you want to quickly install new operating systems without having to remember a long list of packages you needed to install.

You can get rid of the need for an internet connection entirely by downloading and burning an entire repository to a CD if you wish (well, probably a few DVDs :-D). YOu can also add .deb packages manually with the add package feature, or by dragging them in from Nautilus.

My favorite feature is the ability to create a meta-package with all of the packages you have installed. This makes it easy to trick out a new Ubuntu installation with a single command. This might be a good way to replace Automatix with your own custom solution.

You can install APTonCD through the command line with the following:

sudo apt-get install aptoncd

For those of you who are planning on trying this out, I have a question for you:

What packages would be essential for your APTonCD disc? What couldn't you live without?

Desktop Drapes - A Crazy Wallpaper Randomizer

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 01:10:00 +0000

Thank you to Milosz for recommending Desktop Drapes. He's the developer, so if you like it you should let him know over at his site. It's a good opportunity to learn more about the open source community in the wonderful oasis of Ann Arbor in the desert of Michigan.

Desktop Drapes is a nifty utility used to randomize your desktop wallpaper. You add a couple pictures to the list, tell it how long to set them for, and you'll get some instant freshness to your desktop.

Drapes makes it even easier by automatically adding wallpapers you add to the directory. All you get to do is put the picture in the right place, and Drapes will figure it out for you.

Open up a Terminal (or do it the Synaptic way) and type the following:

sudo apt-get install drapes

If you want to get a new Ubuntu application delievered to you every day, you should subscribe to the site feed. If you can't wait that long, you can hold yourself over by checking out Cairo-Dock.

SSHMenu - Conveniently Connect to Remote Machines From the Panel

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 00:41:00 +0000

Thank you to Tim for suggesting today's application.

SSHMenu is a panel applet for GNOME that allows users to connect to remote computers over SSH with a single click.

As Tim explained in his suggestion e-mail:

[SSHMenu] is useful if you do a lot of work on servers or remote machines.

I definitely agree with that. Remembering the syntax for ssh is normally enough to foil me, but I'm sure it's even worse if you have a few different IP addresses and hostnames to remember.

The menu looks incredibly similar to the GNOME Applications menu, and it is fully customizable. The interface allows you to add seperators, submenus, and new entries really easy.

When you click on an entry, it opens up a new Terminal window connected to the specified SSH server. But, it isn't any old command line. From the SSHMenu site:

Here's a killer feature: imagine if every time you connected to a production server the terminal window had a red-tinted background, to remind you to tread carefully. Using terminal profiles, SSHMenu allows you to specify colours, fonts, transparency and a variety of other settings on a per-connection basis. You can even set window size and position.

Well, "killer" sums it up quite well. So how do you install this puppy? You can install it using Synaptic like I explain here, or you can paste the following into your favorite command line interface:

sudo apt-get install sshmenu sshmenu-gnome

Alright, now that you have it installed, you need to put SSHmenu on the panel. Right-click on an empty spot of the GNOME Panel, and select "Add to Panel...". Pick SSHmenu from the list, and it will run a wizard to generate a configuration file for you. To add more hosts, just click on SSHMenu and select "Preferences". More help for setting up this application can be found here.

You can see more daily Ubuntu apps by subscribing to the site feed.

GnuCash - Keep Your Cash (or lack thereof) in Order

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 19:45:00 +0000

Thank you to John J. for suggesting this application. Be sure to subscribe to the site feed to keep up with the bombast of new applications.

GnuCash is a personal finance and accounting application created to keep you crazy organized. It can do simple things like recording expenses and take care of register transactions, but it can also handle tracking bank accounts, income, and a slew of financial instruments and derivatives.

John J. summed it up quite well in his suggestion e-mail:

...GnuCash is a great piece of financial software. I just use it to keep my home financials in order, but it has so many other functions that I would never even need to use.

It uses professional standards like double-entry accounting, which my professors babble on and on about being important. They generally mention words like 'Enron' and 'lawsuit' in context. The register has an easy interface that can handle checking and credit transactions, as well as currency and stock asset trades. Different currencies are taken care of easily.

The last thing I ever want to do is enter information by hand, so it's great that GnuCash can take care of that for me, as OSAlt reports:

With support for OFX DirectConnect and HBCI - GnuCash can even communicate with you bank, etc. if they support these standards ...

A variety of different graphs and reports are included in the program via the integrated reporting and graphing module, such as Profit & Loss and Portfolio Valuation reports. GnuCash will play nice with other financial applications, allowing the proprietary data formats to be imported in. You can also schedule recurring payments, search for transactions, and print checks.

Installation can be done graphically by opening the Add/Remove... dialog and checking the box next to GnuCash (as described here), or by typing the following code into the Terminal:

sudo apt-get install gnucash

I'm a bit of a finance-junkie, and I'm interested in hearing what you think of GnuCash. How does it compare against the proprietary competition?

Ubuntu Tweak - Get Under the Hood With This Configuration Tool

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 23:22:00 +0000

Thank you to Daniel for today's suggestion.

Ubuntu Tweak is a utility created to make it easier for users to configure and change a variety of system settings. You can use it to quickly adjust settings for GNOME Panel, Compiz, and Nautilus, along with some more advanced security settings.

Unfortunately for readers who use a different distribution, Ubuntu Tweak will only work for the latest version of Ubuntu with the GNOME Desktop Environment installed.

Installation is most easily done on the command line for this one. Type the following in the Terminal:

wget http://ubuntu-tweak.googlecode.com/files/ubuntu-tweak_0.2.6-1~ppa1_all.deb

Install the .deb file with:

sudo dpkg -i ubuntu-tweak_0.2.6-1~ppa1_all.deb

If you wish, you can install it graphically by pasting the above URL into a browser like Firefox and then clicking on the .deb file in Nautilus. If you wish to do so, you can add the Ubuntu Tweak repository following these directions.

VLC - The Universial Media Player

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 16:06:00 +0000

Thank you to Kyle (phynix) for this recommendation.

VLC (VideoLan) is a cross-platform universial media player. It supports a variety of different inputs, including DVD, VCD, MPEG, AVI, WMV, MP4, and MOV. It has full subtitle support, as well as built-in video filters. There are skins for VLC available at the developer website.

One of the most useful features of VLC is playing incomplete video downloads before they finish. I can start watching a movie as the rest of the data trikles in. VLC plugins are available for Firefox and Mozilla.

You can install VLC through the command-line with the following command:

sudo apt-get install vlc

Or, you can select VLC in the Applications -> Add/Remove... dialog. More information about that process is outlined here.

If you like learning about a new Ubuntu application every day, you should subscribe to the site feed.

Also, I'm currently accepting recommendations. Include your name, website if you have one, and a few reasons why you like the app.

What do you use for video playback? How does VLC compare to MPlayer or Totem?

Bonus: Installing Applications Graphically

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:37:00 +0000

For me, the easiest way to install and update applications is through apt-get on the command line. But, I've used Ubuntu for a few years now, and I realize that not everyone is comfortable with the CLI. Today, I want to highlight a few graphical alternatives to apt-get. These directions will work in place of the Terminal directions for any application in the Ubuntu repositories.

I don't use the graphical installers, so I don't know all of the tips and tricks available. Ubuntu experts: what are some of the best features of Synaptic and Add/Remove? What else should I add to this description?

1. The Add/Remove Dialog:

This is the most simple graphical way to install a new program. Go to Applications -> Add/Remove..., check the program you want to install from the list, and click 'Apply Changes'. You can use the search box at the top and the categories on the left to narrow down the list.

Not every program in Ubuntu is available through this dialog. If you don't find what you're looking for, you should switch over to Synaptic or apt-get.

2. Synaptic Package Manager:

To use Synaptic, go to System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager. Clicking on the search button on the top will allow you to search for the package you are looking for. Normally, that's the part that comes after 'sudo apt-get install ' in my directions. Check the package you wish to install, pick 'Mark for Installation', and confirm your changes. Once you are satisfied, select the apply button at the top and Synaptic will do the rest.

Thank you to Motin for the idea to feature this information.