Firefox addons to make life easy

Most linux distros have Firefox installed as their default browser. So FF was definitely one thing I missed when I switched to elementary. Although Midori is good, fast and aligns well with the Elementary theme, it certainly looses out on the good stuff like add-ons, which FF has a range to pick and choose from.

No sooner had I installed firefox, I looked up the add-ons page and started installing the ones that I would most likely use daily and be productive with them.

1) Adblock Plus – The first on the list and a must have to keep those nasty ad windows from popping up when you are browsing. I had disabled this for some reason a while back and boy those ads are such a pain. Be glad that adblock does its job fantastically.

2) Clean Video – A simple add on to keep those annoying youtube video annotations off. The videos start clean and have no unnecesary links to distract you.

3) Smart Video for YouTube – Helps set preferences like not starting the video immediately on page load, default video quality, buffer settings etc. Real handy if you are on youtube a lot.

4) Complete YouTube Saver – For someone using YouTube very often, this one is god sent. Has several options to save the video in different formats and quiality. No redirect to third party sites for conversion and download. Its quick and does the job well.

5) Flashgot – This add on along with uGet download manager make downloads a breeze. Things are manageable and downloads on a slow unreliable connection are also smooth.

6) Fastest Facebook – You’ll never have to leave the page you are browsing to check you fb wall and reply to friends. This add on brings a fully functional facebook widget into Firefox.

7) Fastest Notifier for Gmail – Ditto as facebook. This add on lets you browse your gmail account, read mails, reply quickly without leaving the current window. Notification icon shows number of unread emails. So if there is something urgent that has to be responded to, just work it out with few mouse clicks.

8) Fastest Notifier for Yahoo – Whats for Gmail is for Yahoo as well. So manage your yahoo account with same conviniece from this add on. Though for these to work, firefox needs to remember passwords, store some cookies else you will be greeted with a login screen everytime, which kind of defeats the purpose of “fastest” add ons 🙂

Its a world of convinience with these add ons installed. For mails and social media, I don’t think I’ll have to start a new tab ever again. Watching YouTube without annoying ads and pop ups is also such a relief and all that with option to download stuff at the click of a button! Firefox add ons rock!!

Elementary tweaks in a jiffy

A quick list of things that you can tweak asa ElementaryOS is installed.

1) Choose a new wallpaper ( from existing list or put up your own )

2) Enable hot corners. I have aimed for them to be quick and productive. Top left for Application Menu. Bottom left to switch workspaces. Bottom right to show all windows. Top right has the system tray icon and others, so best to leave it unused.

3) The mouse and touchpad settings in elementary offer a mac like experience with two-finger scrolling as default. I prefer edge scrolling for my laptop. A quick change to setting will allow to change vertical edge scrolling and also enable horizontal scrolling.

4) Install restricted extras from software center. This will bring in codecs for mp3, avi, mp4, flash etc. Although Elementary is smart enough to detect missing codecs ( say while trying to play mp3 via Noise ) and offere to install them before proceeding.

5) Midori is good as a default web browser. But I installed firefox to make best use of my add-ons.

6) By default, windows in Elementary has Close button on left, maxmimize on right. But this may not be comfortable to use as is. For the familiar buttons on the right, we need a few tweaks described below.

Install ‘Dconf Editor’ for this using command sudo apt-get install dconf-tools

Open the dconf editor and browse to org > pantheon > desktop > gala > appearance

Check value for ‘button-layout’. Its set to ‘close:maximize’ by default. Changing it to ‘:minimize,maximize,close’ will move the buttons to right.

7) If you like launcher apps like synapse. install it, assign a hot key to it and let Elementary start it at log on. Add an entry for synapse in the System Settings > Startup Applications.

I have other apps like Pidgin and Dropbox also enabled to start at logon. You could add more to this list.

That’s a jiffy tweak for a fresh Elementary OS installation.

Tried Kingsoft yet?

Kingsoft. I had heard of this Chinese software maker when I was looking around for a full featured office suite that I could install and use on my android. The software that they have come up with is very functional and suites needs of document editing on a phone. But that was about it. I wasn’t aware that they were into making office suites for desktop as well. So it was a pleasant surprise to see something other than Libre that offered things for free!

I decided to try Kingsoft office suite for linux anyway. The assumption was, if this didnt meet my expectations, I could always trade in for LibreOffice which is what I have been using for quite some time.

Kingsoft has a community edition – http://wps-community.org/. They recently released an Alpha12 version for linux. So yea, they are still in alpha development, which wouldn’t inspire much confidence, but for this suite, you have to see it to believe it.

The download file is a .deb of about 150MB which is much less than the 198MB installaler for Libre. Install the deb like so

sudo dpkg -i filename.deb

and get started with office Kingsoft style!

They have three programs – Writer, Spreadsheets and Presentation. The interface will be very familiar to people using MS Office, with its ribbon style menus and familiar placing of icons and widgets. Kingsoft has added a very interesting feature which is the skin manager, which lets the user choose from three different UI styles. The dark theme, light theme and classic ( which will take you to the world of MS office indeed ).

The icons are pretty good and show up very well on applications menu.

The interface is familiar and you could get to work right away. Tabbed documents are a boon. Wonder why no other suite ever thought of it before.

Simple skin manager to change the look and feel of the suite.

It is compatible with MS file formats doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt and pptx. It can export to pdf. It is currently able to save only as doc/xls/ppt but that shouldn’t be a deal breaker. Future releases may be fully compatible. The one downside I saw was that it isn’t compatible with Libre file formats (odt/ods) but it makes sense. They offer their propritory formats wps/et/wpt as well which aren’t useful with Libre either.

Using the software is easy and intuitive. I haven’t played with it much to encounter any serious drawbacks. But for casual user this is good enough. And mind you, this is just alpha! Wonder what Kingsoft can come up with when they have developed this suite to its maximum potential. They do have a Windows version as well which I think I should try as well.

All in all this is a great piece of software and can contend seriously with Libre for the top spot of the best linux office suite. Go ahead, try it out!

Elementary OS is here to stay!

SPOILER ALERT : I did the unthinkable and chucked CrunchBang on my laptop for the Elementary OS Luna.

I know I wanted to wait until Isis was out, but had been trying Elementary live cd for a while and was wondering if I could install this now and upgrade to Isis later.

Also another compelling reason to give this a try was a friend of mine wanted linux installed on his dell. His laptop is quite old and the installed Windows XP was too frustrating to handle. Missing dlls, incompatible drivers and a whole lot of tiny problems which made daily use unthinkable.

He wanted to put the old machine to some good use, maybe some simple web browsing, read pdf files, basic document editing and so on. Even music or videos was not on his priority. But the thing which was going to take most precedence was his complete unfamiliarity with linux. His distro of choice had to be dead simple, easy to use, light on resources. There were many distros that we could explore and finally settle on. I had recently downloaded a few which I decided to run by him and let him choose what suited him best.

So we booted up his machine with these live cds that I had. OpenSuse with its gnome3 and dark wallpapers and themes didn’t really infuse much enthusiasm in him. Semplice was too barebones I’d say since my friend wanted some eye candy, colored themes etc. SolydX got him interested for a while for it resembled menus and desktop which a windows user like him was familiar with. But the competition was blown off when we booted into elementary live.

His first impressions were peculiar. Struck by the awesome look and feel of this OS, he was finding it hard to believe something so user friendly existed. It was functional, beautiful and although the default list of programs on Elementary wasn’t much, a quick search through the software center will get you all the programs that you want to work with.

Another question that kept pestering him was, how can something like this be given away for free? Well that’s the power of open source. People who truly believe in the open source cause, would like to see more and more software being developed by the community and made available to all. Elementary team like many others is already doing a great job at it.

The fact that Elementary just works had my friend sold. Sure you have to work around a bit to get your flash videos working and mp3 files playing, but that’s acceptable. After some tinkering, what you have is an OS that’s beautiful and an absolute pleasure to work with. Its performance on that dell with a meager 1GB ram was impressive. Wifi worked without hassles, basic list of softwares was good enough to begin with. The eye candy was just mind blowing. While playing mp3 files, it offered to download and install the proper codecs. Elementary had just breathed life into an aging machine. The time we spent on installing Elementary on to my friends laptop was well worth it.

I was happy to get one more person aboard the Linux bandwagon. Elementary was a perfect choice for his maiden journey.

That also got me thinking, if I hopped to elementary now, would I miss geekiness of crunchbang or crib about not being able to configure things my way or would I miss out on not using leading edge versions of my favorite software since Luna was clearly based on older version of Ubuntu. But I took that leap of faith and it surprises me how simple things can be. I cant complain anything about Luna. Its perfect the way it is. But I will definitely make an upgrade to Isis.After all, it will be the latest and the greatest Elementary would have to offer. Just have to wait till its ready.

Crunchbang had a good run, but Elementary is here to stay!

The distro hopping continues…

Crunchbang has been my linux installation for quite some time now. In fact it was after Crunchbang installation that I decided to come up with this blog to keep track of things and help others learn about Linux.

I thought my nomadic life as a distro hopper had come to a brief halt with Crunchbang. It gave me opportunity to tweak it and play with it and learn more about the internals. But something instigated me to look further.

Crunchbang is great no doubt. But as I looked around there are several other Linux systems which are worth checking out. As it turned out I had a spare laptop to do all kinds of experiments that I wanted to do. And so had some more isos to download and dvds to burn for a while.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I have pretty much installed and used every major distro that is out there. But still few interesting ones caught my eye and I decided to give them a go.

Among the new ones, Semplice is something which I liked. Its simple, lightweight, uses openbox, has a good set of applications that come preinstalled. But while looking around that thing, I could not help but think how is it any different from Crunchbang. After some tinkering I had to admit that if its openbox that you want, its Crunchbang that you should have. Anything else will just not give you that experience.

Second thing that I tried was SolydX. This is a very promising stable distro using xfce. Its sibling SolydK uses KDE. I have never been fan of KDE and most of my installed distros have been either gnome or xfce or openbox. I came to SolydX for its rolling release model. It promises updates regularly so that you do not upgrade the entire distro, like we would do otherwise for OSes that have a 6 month release cycle. Also once installed, everything is ready to use out of the box. No need to bother about codecs to play your mp3 or flash to check out youtube. Maybe I could give it more time for it sincerely deserves it.

But what I had to try next got me very excited and off was SolydX from my laptop test bed. The one distro that is certainly making waves recently is the Elementary OS. Although it’s not very cutting edge, the latest version 0.2 is built on Ubuntu 12.04 which is kind of neanderthal by now. But you will love the way this baby feels on your laptop. The developers have made several efforts to get the look and feel just right. It’s pretty to work with and has several apps which have been developed specifically for it. Its desktop environment is brand new, its application have been built ground up and all fit a simple and elegant design philosophy. Get to know elementary and you will know what I mean. In fact, I am using elementary right now. This blog is being typed from a live cd session of elementary. Check the screen shots.

Elementary team was definitely done a fabulous job. They made an elegant OS that’s easy for newbies and experienced people alike. Its themes and look and feel is good enough. No need to tamper the icons and windows. The defaults will blow your mind.

Elementary 0.2 Luna, which came out based on 12.04 will soon have its successor 0.3 Isis based on 14.04 which will be an LTS and hence it makes sense for me to wait around for Isis to be released. When that happens I might drop Crunchbang in favor of Elementary.

And thus the nomadic affair with Linux distros will continue. I guess the search for that perfect OS will always be on.