Gnome 3 Shell: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

      Many people have learned to embrace Unity after Canonical has forced it upon them without pre-installing the usual gnome shell. But lets face the truth that Unity is a failure, at least in the desktop world. Gnome 3 looks and feels very much the same as Unity and is still a headache to many new comers to the Linux world.  But there are many themes out there that can enhance the look and feel of the Gnome3 look, you can head to http://www.webupd8.org for some of the latest themes available on gnome3 as well as news on the ubuntu world.
       For some reason the people from webupd8.org, who in my opinion provide some of the best tips and tricks for linux users forgot to add instructions on how to set the themes in their post. Anyway here is my tutorial on how to set themes on your Gnome3 shell.

1)  The first tool that you need is the Gnome Tweak Tool available on the Software Center or through sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool on your terminal.

2)  Now you can do a google search for gnome3 themes ( most of them will lead you to a deviantart page where the files are stored) or you can install them via the terminal.  First type or paste sudo add-apt-repository ppa:satyajit-happy/themes
sudo apt-get update on the terminal.
    You can them install themes using the command line from the link. All you need to do is to type sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-theme- and the name of the theme.


3) Now to set the them search for the gnome tweak tool from activities.( which will either show up as Advanced settings) and open the shell extensions tab and select "on" for User Theme Extension.

4) Now you can select the theme that you installed from the Shell Theme option on the 'Theme' tab.

                 

Must have apps and tools on Ubuntu 11.10

               Its been a few weeks since Ubuntu 11.10 has been presented to the world and the reception has been quite mixed. I for one am liking it and this distro has so far been my most favourite ( the only distro i have not crashed so far).
       The standard install came with Unity; the worst desktop environment in my opinion and Libre Office which was not at all required by me since I love Google docs. It took me about 4 -5 hours of messing around here and there for me to finally be happy with my installation. Here are a few things that I feel every new user to Ubuntu or any other distribution needs.

1. Fuse exFat : This is one thing you should not be missing if you have an exFat partition from your old windows system. It took me many many long hours to find the drivers ( I don't know why Microsoft never wanted to release the drivers) but I finally found an easy tutorial here.
  If you still have trouble with it, just leave a comment and I will get back to you as soon as possible.



2. Avidemux : Everyone who is into video encoding on the Linux platform would argue that Ffmpeg is the best video encoder around but for the migrating windows user Avidemux is the best conversion tool that you can find. You can just install it using the Ubuntu software center. Just search for avidemux and install it from the options.

3. XchatIRC : One of the most handiest tool that you will find when you need help regarding anything related to the operating system ( I learned a lot of commands by asking around from the community). The irc chatroom for ubuntu is open 24/7 and there will always be some one from somewhere to help out anyone in need. This is the ultimate support tool guys, Microsoft can never compete with Linux when it comes to help and support.

4. Vuze: If you are a fan of utorrent on windows , then Vuze is the closest that you will get to windows on Linux since utorrent doesnt really run the way it runs on windows with all the nifty features that you are so used to and other clients can't compare to Vuze at all. It has the best GUI among all the torrent clients on Linux.

Welcome to my World

I have been a big fan of the open source community for a while and particularly Linux and am pretty much a n00b when it comes to everyday Linux but am attracted to it by the fact that it is customisable in every sense.  So this is my diary of the things I learn daily in my Ubuntu life ( Ubuntu being my fav distro and the most user friendly). So keep reading, you never know what help you may find here.