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Main » 2010 » June » 19 » Ubuntu Tweak Overview
11:00 AM Ubuntu Tweak Overview |
Ubuntu can
undoubtedly be considered one of the most newbie-friendly Linux
distributions out there. Yet, there still are some hidden functions and
settings that will improve your experience. Though you don't need a
third-party program to unlock them, it will save you a lot of time to
have an application that centralizes most of them.
And what is
that application? Ubuntu Tweak 0.4.6, of course. The easiest way to get
it is by downloading the small, 1 MB .deb package and installing it with
a double click. Once that's out of the way, you will find the Ubuntu
Tweak entry in the Applications --> System Tools menu.
When
you first open Ubuntu Tweak, a welcome screen will offer you a quick
preview of the program's capabilities. At the bottom there are four
buttons: About, Donate, Quit and Preferences. The first three are
self-explanatory, while Preferences will let you customize some aspects
of Ubuntu Tweak's interface, like its default size, colors, and the
function window that should be shown when opening the application. An
Enable Check Update checkbox will notify you when a new version is
released.
But let's shift our focus on the functionalities of
this nifty little program. A sidebar sitting on the left contains all
the main categories: Welcome, Computer, Applications, Startup, Desktop,
Personal and System. A click on one of these will expand it into several
subcategories.
The first entry one after the Welcome screen,
dubbed Computer, displays very useful information about
your system and the current user: hostname, distribution, desktop
environment, kernel, platform, CPU, RAM, your home directory path, shell
and Language.
The second menu is Applications with
four subcategories: Add/Remove, Source Editor, Third-Party Sources and
Package Cleaner. And though you'll think that you already have an easily
accessible Add/Remove function in Ubuntu, this one is a bit different
as it only displays the most popular packages that don't come installed
with a fresh system and are required to fully enjoy multimedia and Web
browsing. To name just a few: VLC Player, Banshee, Ubuntu restricted
extras, Opera, MPlayer, Miro Internet TV, Kino, gtk-recordMyDesktop,
Filezilla, Compizconfig-Settings-Manager. VirtualBox OSE, Wine, GNOME
Partition Editor and GNOME Do are other programs that you will find to
be quite useful. I personally see this as a great recommendation portal
for newcomers who are lost within the hundreds of packages in Ubuntu's
repositories.
The Source Editor will let you manually add or
remove software sources and also submit your favorite ones to a public
server for everyone to see. The Third-Party Sources will allow many
applications to be updated to their latest versions as Ubuntu will only
offer bugfixing and security updates by default. I was delighted to see
software like Chromium Browser (the future Google Chrome for Linux),
Firefox, Skype, Compiz Fusion, Medibuntu or Skype. After enabling any of
these they will also show in the Add/Remove section if they weren't
there before. The last subcategory in Applications is Package Cleaner
with three options: Clean Package, Clean Cache and Clean Config. While
Ubuntu Tweak couldn't find anything to clean for the first and third
options, the Clean Cache removed approximately 500 MB of unnecessary
junk from my system. Nice!
Moving on, the Startup main
entry hosts the Session Control and Autostart subcategories allowing
some more nifty customizations. Leaving aside the features found in
Ubuntu's own Startup Applications (session saving and autostart
applications), Ubuntu Tweak lets you choose a splash screen to display
on your desktop, show or hide the logout prompt, and Allow TCP
Connections for remotely connecting to your desktop.
The Desktop menu
will let you customize a lot of interface elements. Through the first
"Icons" entry you can choose what icons to be displayed on your desktop:
Computer, Home Folder, Trash, Network and mounted volumes. A neat
option that will probably be useful to many is using the Home folder as
the desktop so you will have quick access to your files. There is also a
checkbox to hide the desktop icons, but, unfortunately, when I tried
that (on top of our Ubuntu 9.04 test machine), Nautilus crashed and
entered into a continuous loop, trying to restart. It's very possible
this is a Jaunty-only problem, so previous releases shouldn't be
affected.
The Windows setting allows you to change transparency
levels and assign titlebar actions for each of your mouse buttons, like
using the wheel to roll windows up/down or maximizing them with a double
click. The Compiz Fusion subcategory provides quick access to some of
the most popular 3D effects and lets you install the Screenlets widget
framework. The last entry in the Desktop category addresses the GNOME
environment and lets you lock all your panels to prevent accidental
removals. Another neat feature is the ability to remove the "Input
Methods" and "Insert Unicode Control Character" entries that appear when
right-clicking a text-input field. Most of you probably never used them
so you'll be happy about this.
If you got tired of the default
Ubuntu menu logo, Tweak will let you easily change it through the same
GNOME subcategory. Create a 24x24 image file, click the button, go to
your file and that's it. You will be asked if you want to apply the
changes immediately (this restarts the window manager) or at the next
login. Another option will keep your computer activity hidden by
disabling the Recent Documents menu. Finally, you can change the
position of the system notification popups. Be aware though that this
doesn't have any effect on Jaunty's new notification framework.
The Personal category
is another great resource for further improving your desktop: you can
change the paths to the default Ubuntu folders (Public, Download, Music,
etc.), you can add useful Templates for the "Create Document" option,
like HTML document, OpenOffice document, shell script and others. A big
list of scripts for Nautilus will create new context-menu entries
allowing you to manipulate files and folders much easier and faster:
Copy to desktop, Link to..., Move to Home, Open with gedit, Convert
image to JPG, browse a folder with administrator privileges and many
more. The keyboard shortcut editor didn't work for me; I could set the
command and the shortcut, but when pressing the assigned keys, the
corresponding program wouldn't launch.
Last but not least, you
will find a lot of interesting tweaks in the System category.
Its first entry is File Type Manager, which, as its name suggests,
allows you to change file type associations. From the second one,
Nautilus, you can install three extensions, out of which the first two
are must-have for any user: Nautilus with Open Terminal, Nautilus with
Root Privileges and Nautilus with Wallpaper. From here you can also
clean up the thumbnail cache, change thumbnail size and decide for how
long you want to keep the thumbnails in your cache memory (also
customizable).
There are some CD burner tweaks too that enable
BurnProof and OverBurn so you can use every bit of space from a CD.
Advanced file permissions can also be shown in the properties window by
checking a box. Power Management allows you to enable/disable suspend or
hibernation and lets you choose to disable the network when the
computer goes to sleep. The last subcategory deals with security
options, allowing you to restrict access to a lot of functions: the
ALT+F2 Run Application, Lock Screen, printing, print setup, saving to
disk and fast user switching.
The Good
The
intuitive interface, ease of use and, of course, the plethora of
customization options available make Ubuntu Tweak an awesome tool for
any Ubuntu user.
The Bad
There
are some functions that don't seem to work as they should. Also, a
better support for the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 is expected.
The
Truth
Ubuntu Tweak is the number one application
to get after installing a fresh Ubuntu operating system and also a great
way to help newbies with their first Linux steps.
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Views: 666 |
Added by: Cristi
| Rating: 0.0/0 |
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