Installing Ubuntu
I’ve just installed Ubuntu again on an old tower Luke and I brought back from Melbourne that his Aunty Carol, and Uncle Greg use to own.
I thought I would document what I’ve had to do to it after installation to get it looking and doing what I want.
1. Changing Firefox’s icons.
I don’t know if it’s just because I installed using an older Ubuntu disc, or if that’s just the way it is, but I like the regular Firefox icons. This forum helped me heaps. I used the information AFTER the red writing.
My terminal looked like this:
talia@Talia:~$ sudo gedit /usr/local/bin/restore_mozilla_icons
Password:
talia@Talia:~$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/restore_mozilla_icons
talia@Talia:~$ sudo restore_mozilla_icons
Replace the Mozilla Firefox program icon (y/n)? [y] y
Replace the Mozilla Firefox document icon (y/n)? [y] y
Do you want to divert the original packaged files to alternate locations
(make the changes permanent) (y/n)? [y] y
Downloading and replacing icons. Please wait….. done !
Shall I reload the panel to apply the changes (y/n)? [y] y
talia@Talia:~$
2. Thunderbird.
I also had to install Thunderbird, as it didn’t come with Ubuntu. I just downloaded it off the mozilla website, then opened it with archive manager and extracted the contents into my home folder.Then I clicked on ‘thunderbird’, one of the last things in the folder. I clicked run, and it ran for me. Sweet. I then dragged it into the panel at the top, and wolah, it was there, easy to use!
Unfortunately there aren’t the right icons for it, and I am still figuring that one out…
I’m a little disappointed with how Thunderbird is working for me at the moment, and so I am trying something a bit different. I’m just going to access me gmail (which lets me access all my gmail accounts from the one main one, and all my RSS is google reader. I’ll write another post about that one soon.
3. Shared Folders in Ubuntu.
This is something that I’ve only just discovered this time round with Ubuntu, and just wondered why it didn’t work on my old computer.
System-> Administration -> Shared Folders
A box comes up and I chose to share it with Linux/ Windows systems, because the other computers in the house are windows. It downloads the packages and installs it by itself. 
I selected add, and then chose the file that I wanted to share, named it, and wolah, it’s shared. I made a point of adding my desktop as a shared folder as well because often I just quickly put things on there to access easily and imediately.
4. Keyboard Shortcuts.
System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts. I changed the shortcut for closing a window to a simple Alt+q. I know that I really should have changed it to Ctrl+q, but on Luke’s apple the apple button is where the alt key is on my keyboard, and it’s easier for me to keep them both the same.
Again, this is something that frustrated me on my old computer, but with a bit of digging around, I’ve managed to change that this time round!
5. One Click Select.
Luke introduced me to the one click select, and I quite like it. Once I tried it it really just made sense to only click once instead of twice. To get this happening I opened a window, just one with some files or whatever in it. Folder -> Edit -> Behaviour -> Single Click to Activate Items.
It’s that easy.
If I can suggest a tip for those who are trying this out for the first time, HIGHLIGHTING is the option if you just want to select something, but you don’t want to open it. 
6. Changing Open Office.
At the moment I’m trying to print out my assignment, but as you may have figured, I haven’t set up the printer yet. So I’m having to save my documents onto a USB (still got yours Luke!) and take them out to another computer and print there. I did this just now, and none of my files would open- they were all saved as Open Office files!
It’s really easy to change this so that every time you save, it saves as .doc .
Open Open Office -> Tools -> Options -> Load/Save (you will need to press the little + button to open it) -> General
Now go down to ‘default file format’ and where it says, ‘always save as’ select the most recent Microsoft Word option. Done.
To change the file extension of what documents you’ve already worked on, just right click and select rename, then arrow over to the file extension, delete . odt, and replace it with .doc .
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
May 29 2007 08:31 am | HowTo and Tech
