The 5 Essential Programs for uBuntu

1. VLC 

The Daddy of all media players. Plays almost every media type with a wide variety of options and a minimal UI.

2. GIMP 

A popular free alternative to Adobe's popular Photoshop image editing software. Not quite on par with Photoshop and the UI is a little difficult but still a brilliant alternative.

3. Banshee 
 
Personally I've found the range of audio players available on uBuntu to be disappointing with difficult, unfamiliar interfaces to someone so familiar with iTunes. There seems to be an obsession with stuffing as many different windows into one interface - coupled with the inability to remove them (I'm looking at you Rhythmbox)

The exception has been Banshee. Although it arrives with a multitude of different windows, these can be easily turned off (View > Show Browser) and the result is a wonderfully simple, sleek and dependable music player.

4. LibreOffice 

The popular free alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. Writer for Word, Calc for Excel, Impress for PowerPoint. I've found just about everything I can do in Microsoft Office I can do in Libre.

5. Truecrypt

Lock your important files, encrypt your drives (although this can take a while depending on size) or create hidden drives within drives for extra security.

How To Permenantly Delete a File or Folder

I'd been having this problem with external hard-drives and memory sticks recently whereby deleted files just keep reappearing in a .trash folder.

This could be understandably annoying, particularly for someone who's new to uBuntu and doesn't know about hidden folders that thinks they're clearing space on their memory sticks... when all they're doing is putting it into a hidden folder.

Luckily there's a simple solution to this.

To delete an item permanently use the Shift + Delete and the item should stop reappearing in the hidden folder.

Earn A Little Extra Money Online - With Virtually No Effort

That sounds a little too good to be true but I promise you that for once, it isn't. Qmee is a search add-on that'll pay you just for searching the web. No strings attached. All communications are encrypted and Qmee doesn't change the actual results you see: it just presents a sidebar with other relevant results (like above) and you'll get paid a couple of pennies if you click one of them.

It's not megabucks and it won't be enough to feed a family of four but it's an extra one or two pounds a week for doing I already do for free. I've been using it for months now and I'd recommend it to anyone.

You can download Qmee here.

Flash Won't Work in Firefox - "Flash Player 11.3.300 Required"

So I was messing about on Betfair, hoping to net a tidy profit on some of the World Cup matches (not likely!) when I noticed they'd given me some free spins on their Live Casino service. Not likely to pass up the chance to win some risk-free money, I promptly headed on over there only to find my version of Flash was not up to their high expectations.

After doing a bit of forum browsing, I'd read that Adobe had stop putting out usable updates for Firefox in uBuntu a while back. Thankfully there is a solution. I suspect there is a better way but what is most certainly the quickest and easiest way is to download and install Google Chrome (Note: not Chromium that is installed via the Software centre).

This shouldn't take more than five or ten minutes and when running, Chrome comes with the latest version of Flash installed so every Flash application should run smoothly.

How to Extract/Unrar a File from an Incomplete Rar File

So you've a rar file which is about 99% complete but you can't find the 1% and aren't bothered about missing it - however you can't extract the file. What you need is to extract the archive while keeping the broken file. This can be done with a simple command line prompt:

unrar x -kb (path to file)

The broken file should then appear in your home directory.

Create a Custom Keyboard Shortcut

Very quick and simple bit of advice on how to create custom keyboard shortcuts.

1. Menu -> Keyboard

2. Go to the Shortcuts tab.

Then you can create custom shortcuts for more or less every aspect of uBuntu.

My personal favourite is to set shortcuts for each workspace to allow me to flick back and forth between different tasks quickly. As you can see below they're set so CTRL+1 takes me to workspace 1, CTRL+2 takes me to 2 and so forth.

Make Icon Sizes Specific to Folders

Recently I've found that I've wanted to change the default icon size in one specific folder purely for aesthetic reasons (I have custom icons that I want to see full size every time).

Unfortunately I've not been able to do it in Nautilus as when you change the default size... it changes it universally, not just for the one folder which is what I want.

The good news is it does work in Nemo, an alternative file browser which is available from the software centre.

Or in terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nemo

Even if you're not interested in folder specific icon sizes, I've always found its helpful to have a secondary browser just in case.

Block Website Using Hosts in uBuntu

If you’ve ever wanted to block a website more comprehensively than a Firefox add on then this might be for you.

1. Hit Alt + F2 to bring up Run.

2. Type the command:

gksu gedit /etc/hosts

3. To block the website add 127.0.0.1 then the website. Tab to create the space, if you were wondering.

127.0.0.1 facebook.com

127.0.0.1 http://www.facebook.com

4. Save and you’re done. Obviously, you can always go back and remove those lines if you want to use those sites again.