What To Do After Installing Ubuntu Linux OS (Part-2)

Download Manager

Notable Features:
multiple parallel streams for download acceleration, Download Queue, Pause & Resume downloads, Advanced Category Management, Browser Integration, Clipboard Monitoring, Batch Downloads, localized into 23 Languages, and many more features.

You can get it  by executing the following commands in the terminal :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:plushuang-tw/uget-stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install uget

Tweak the Desktop

Next on the must-install list is ‘Unity Tweak Tool‘

Unity Tweak Tool is a settings manager for the Unity desktop. It provides users with a fast, simple and easy-to-use interface with which to access many useful and little known features and settings of the desktop environment that one may want to configure.

Here’s how you can get it from the Terminal :

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:freyja-dev/unity-tweak-tool-daily

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool

Display Internet Speed

Next on the list is ‘Indicator Netspeed‘

Indicator Netspeed is a simple Ubuntu AppIndicator which displays the network speed on the Unity panel.

The indicator displays the total current network traffic on the panel and from its menu, you can check out the current download or upload speed as individual values.

To install it from the terminal, run the following :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install indicator-netspeed

Make your Desktop look cool

And then comes ‘Bing Desktop Wallpaper Changer‘ for you to change your desktop wallpaper everyday, automatically.

Set Bing Image of The Day As Wallpaper on Ubuntu

Bing Wallpaper is a small python script that automatically updates the Ubuntu desktop wallpaper using whatever bing.com has as its image of the day. That’s all it does.

The script also stores the images in an accessible location: ~/Pictures/BingWallpapers/ so that you can re-use it at a later date.

Download The Script

First things first: grab the python script from GitHub by clicking this blue download button:

Download ‘Bing Desktop Wallpaper Changer’ on GitHub

Once it has downloaded, extract the .zip archive and, in the Terminal, run the following commands:

cd ~/Downloads/bing-desktop-wallpaper-changer-master

python main.py

The script automatically does its thing. It fetches the latest Bing (US) background image in high-resolution and sets it as the desktop wallpaper.

If it fails do not panic. You are simply missing a few dependencies. In the Terminal run:

sudo apt install python-lxml python-bs4

Now re-run the script as before. It will complete successfully.

Notes :

Run on Start Up

If you want the Bing Wallpaper script to run automatically on startup you can add it to Start Up Applications, entering the following in the command field:

python /path/to/bing/main/py

All the above steps on how to set up ‘Bing Desktop Wallpaper Changer’ is courtesy of OMG! Ubuntu!

Powerful Video Player

Finally, not to forget VLC Media Player!

VLC is simply the best media player, ever. Also,

VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

Install it via :

% sudo apt-get update
% sudo apt-get install vlc browser-plugin-vlc

Install Python, R and Scala packages

Last but not the least, install and set up ‘Anaconda‘.

Anaconda is the leading open data science platform powered by Python. The open source version of Anaconda is a high performance distribution of Python and R and includes over 100 of the most popular Python, R and Scala packages for data science.

Additionally, you’ll have access to over 720 packages that can easily be installed with conda, their renowned package, dependency and environment manager, that is included in Anaconda.

Download it depending on your system architecture from here.

That’s all folks! 😀