If you’ve got dual monitors (which you should) you might have noticed the annoying duplicate launcher situation. Basically instead of having just the one launcher you’ve got one on the left side of both of your screens. Anyways, it’s an easy fix, but not one that I could figure out without the internet.

Just head over to Display (search in unity and it pops up) and select which desktop you’d like it to be on. Easy!

I love things that are beautiful and easy to use. With that said, unfortunately most open source developers don’t have the time or the energy to make gorgeous products for the 2% of their population that aren’t running Windows/Android/iOS/OSX so that’s kind of a bummer. However, more and more developers are noticing that they can just make a “Google Chrome” application and have it treated like a real stand-alone application in most operating systems. This has become kind of a fun workaround for having more applications that look awesome in your Linux setup.

Without further ado, here’s a few Google Chrome applications that I swear by and make the conversion from a traditional operating system to Linux easier. Obviously the prerequisite for these is that you have Chrome installed but it’s my favorite browser so I’m going to go ahead and assume you already do.

Sunrise

I really like...

I’m kind of a data-obsessed nerd which translates to me having a few different ways that I track things like my workouts (I’m a triathlete so these are swims, bikes, runs, and whatever cross training I’m into at the moment). One of my favorite tools is my Garmin GPS watch for running. It’s the base model which will run you about $120 but it’s pretty neat and has a lot of cool features. The catch is that there’s no way to get the information off the watch on Linux. Until now.

sudo apt-get install garmin-forerunner-tools

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:andreas-diesner/garminplugin
sudo apt-get update
sudp apt-get install garminplugin

What you’ve done is install the forerunner tools that will allow your computer to see the forerunner and then the plugin is for Firefox. So yeah, that’s the catch, you have to do this in Firefox (and possibly not using the new modern look of Garmin Connect...

Unfortunately, my products need to work in Internet Explorer. This is normally pretty bad news for web developers but it’s something that we have to deal with. And, unfortunate again (or fortunate, depending on how you look at it), you can’t install Internet Explorer in Ubuntu. But you can install Virtual Machines, and Microsoft has provided some for the specific case of testing your sites for compatibility issues in different versions of IE.

1. sudo apt-get install virtualbox (Note: this installs everything related to virtualbox, I think you could get away with just doing sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.3 but I usually take the “go big or go home” attitude)
2. Look at modern.ie for the .txt file that corresponds to the Windows/IE version combination that you need and then run wget -i...

This is just good practice from a security standpoint but on top of that, I like the look of the log on window better when there’s only the one account in there. It’s also, as everything seems to be, pretty easy. All you have to do is run sudo gedit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf from the command line, edit that file to contain allow-guest=false, save it (if you get a permissions error it means that you didn’t have sudo in the first command, try again), and then restart your computer and you’ll have the guest account gone.

As you might have noticed, there’s a lot of cool stuff you can customize in Ubuntu. I took some of the cooler things and highlighted them here.

Unity Tweak Tool

To get started you’re going to want to install the unity tweak tool via the command line. Once you’ve installed it you can run it from the unity application search.
sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool

Conky

You can install this with sudo apt-get install conky and from there build all sorts of cool widgets for your dashboard. The basic way this works is you’ll have a .conkyrc file in your home directory and it’ll look there for the specifications for the widgets. I’m using a version of this but I encourage you to look around and see if anything else strikes your fancy. Once you have a .conkyrc file you can just run conky from your terminal.

Couple of things:

1. If you need to shut off all your conky instances use killall...

There’s a lot of debate on which is the best chat client but at the end of the day I tend to keep coming back to pidgin. It’s espcially nice in Ubuntu because it integrates with the existing chat functionality in the toolbar. It’s also a pretty simple download process and takes practically no time at all to configure. My company uses XMPP chat servers so I can hook those in as well.

1. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pidgin-developers/ppa
2. sudo apt-get update
3. sudo apt-get install pidgin
4. Using the unity menu, open pidgin.
5. It’s either going to prompt you to add an account or you can go to the Accounts > Manage Accounts > Add… button and configure it there. You can also just press Ctrl+A and get to this screen.
6. Add your accounts and you’re almost done, just to configure the plugin that manages alerts unless you’re happy with the alert on buddy sign in.
7. You can skip this step if you don’t mind...

One of my favorite parts of getting my work environment set up is looking for the perfect wallpaper. I have a few go-to places that I normally check out and see what speaks to me.

Lifehacker’s Wallpaper Wednesday

Every week blog powerhouse Lifehacker does a Wallpaper Wednesday post where they feature wallpapers from around the web in a particular theme. Personal favorites are video game characters, sci-fi, or abstract. I highly suggest subscribing to their RSS feed in general but Wallpaper Wednesday is a good reason too.

Unsplash

Goregous, high-resolution, free images that are perfect to use as wallpapers. I found someone who downloaded 1.6G of them and was offering it as a .zip but I’d rather just check the website.

Simple Desktops

Super minimalist wallpapers.

Adobe flash is one of the weird things that doesn’t quite work out of the box in Ubuntu, luckily there’s a one-liner that installs it for you so it’s pretty straight forward.

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer