Its been a little over a week since the latest version of Ubuntu, the “Intrepid Ibex” was released. As you’d have probably heard, Linux is a “Geek thing” (not really nowadays). So, i decided to try it out. I’ve previously tried out the previous release of Ubuntu, the “Hardy Heron“. So, installing was not strange for me.

I decided to install Ubuntu using the Wubi installer, on my laptop. Bad luck.. It didn’t work. My laptop only had 256 MB of memmory. So, instead i installed Xubuntu on it. There’s not much that i can say about it as i didn’t play with it much. What i really wanted was to try the original “Ubuntu”. So, my desktop was my only choice. Again, i resorted to Wubi to install because it was simple and safe. I’ll share my experience with you here.

Installing Ubuntu via Wubi is straight-forward, just like installing any other application in Windows. The Ubuntu desktop is something that i’m familiar with. Unlike Windows, it comes preloaded with a lot of Open Source applications. But, still there are other things that you should add after installing Ubuntu. In this post, I’ll tell what all i did after installing Ubuntu.

Flash Player

Nowadays, who doesn’t visit YouTube. What you need to play videos on YouTube is a Flash Player plugin for Firefox. To install Flash Player, simple visit a page that has a Flash video embedded using Firefox. Firefox will tell you “Additional Plugins Required”. Simply click that yellow bar and install Flash Player.

VLC Media Player

VLC Media Player is a must-have for everyone. It plays almost every format that is avaible out there. To install it, simple run this in the terminal :
sudo apt-get install vlc vlc-plugin-esd mozilla-plugin-vlc

MP3 and MPEG Support

Ubuntu doesn’t come with inbuilt MP3 and MPEG Support. You need to install it manually. You can do it by installing the ubuntu-restricted-extras package. But, that installs a huge 185MB. To simply get MP3 and MPEG support, run this in the terminal :
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3

I am done with this. After these, i did not need anything more in Ubuntu yet, except some FireFox addons. Maybe, i’ll need Java Runtime sometime in future. Lets see…

Have you tried Ubuntu ? If not, do it first, if you are a geek…
If you have it installed, what other applications do you you have installed ?