After a fresh Ubuntu Desktop install you’ll have, by default, all necessary programs to write documents, spread sheets and presentations (open office), burn cd/dvd (brasero), edit and manage your Photos (fspot, GIMP), send instant messages with most of the instant messaging services (Empathy), manage your email accounts (Evolution mail), Organize and listen to your music collection (Rhythmbox), Play your movies (Totem movie player), and, of course, browse the internet (Firefox).
But there’s a catch, you can’t listen to MP3 just yet, you can’t play encrypted DVD’s either, ms core fonts (arial for instance) are not there and therefore many internet pages do not look as intended… and the look and feel could be improved. Let’s fix all that in a few simple steps.

Everybody likes a screenshot:

Here we go:

1. Enable the Multiverse repositorie in the software center. This repository includes some important programs and codecs. Its not enabled by default due to some restrictions by copyright or legal issues in some countries.
Open Applications -> Ubuntu Software Center.

go to Edit -> Software Sources

Check “Community maintained Opens Source Software (universe)” and “Software restricted by copyright and legal issues (multiverse)”

2. Go to software center and Install Ubuntu restricted extras. Installing this package will pull in support for MP3 playback and decoding, support for various other audio formats (GStreamer plugins), Microsoft fonts, Java runtime environment, Flash plugin, LAME (to create compressed audio files), and DVD playback.

in the software center, search for “restricted” at the top right corner, select “Ubuntu restricted extras” and click on the arrow at the right.

Now click “install”, it will prompt you for your session’s password

3. Install the CompizFusion Settings Manager. This application will allow you to easily configure 3D desktop visual effects to improve usability of your system… and to pimp it up.
Again, in the software center search for “compiz” and install “Advanced Desktop Effects Settings” from the list

4. Enable extra visual effects. With this you’ll enable compizFusion and the default visual effects such as wobbly windows.

go to system -> preferences -> appearance

select the “extra” in the visual effects tab

5. Configure compiz desktop effects. The settings suggested here are just that, a suggestion. Feel free to experiment and change them to your personal taste.

Update for Lucid Lynx (10.04): In order to get all the animation effects shown in this step, you might need to install compiz-fusion extra animation effects by entering the following line in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install compiz-fusion-plugins-extra

go to system → preferences → CompizConfig

In the “General” section, click “General Settings”.

In the “Desktop size” tab change “Horizontal Virtual Size” to 4. This way we will have 4 virtual desktops .

In the “Desktop” section check Desktop Cube, and Rotate Cube. Accept the warnings.

In the Effects Section click on “Cube Reflection And Deformation”, Enable Reflection, disable deformation by selecting none (sphere and cylinder don’t look as cool as the cube and they are heavy on resources, just my humble opinion)

This is what you’ll get after the last 3 steps

Back in the Compiz manager window, go to the “Effects” section, check “Animations Add-On”. This will enable an extra set of cool animations.

Now click on “Animations”. In the “Close Animation” tab edit the first line, set the close effect to “Burn”, and set the duration to 200.

With this setting, when you close a window, you will see something like this:

In the “Minimize Animation” tab, edit the animation to be “Magic Lamp”, it will look something like this:

note: the number of waves by default cannot be set to less than 3. So to make the animation look like in the pic follow this guide. I suggest you to leave that for later …leaving things for lather is always cool, oh yeah.

In the “Accesibility” Section check “Enhanced Zoom”. Super key (windows key) + scroll will zoom your screen, VERY useful for small screen laptops!

In the Extras check “Anotate”. Now you can draw with your mouse anywhere in your screen by pressing super key + alt. This is cool for presentations, forget about the laser pointers.

In the “Window Management” section Click “Move Window”, in the configuration screen UNcheck  “Snapoff Maximized Windows”, this will make your windows stick to the corners when you drag them with the mouse, like this:

Finally, in the “Effects” sections, click “Wobbly Windows” and check “Shiver”. The window will shiver in the situations when you’d normally hear a bell (reach the end/beggining of a doc/line with keyboard arrows, enter an invalid key, etc)

5. Install cairo dock. This is a dock “a la Mac”, with a lot of features and configuration options.

Go to Applications → Software Center, search for “GLX-Dock” and install it. Once installed go to Applications → Accessories → Cairo Dock to launch it.

6. Install VLC media player, “A highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework  capable of reading most audio and video formats”… Search VLC in the software center and install it.

7. Install libdvdread4 to watch encrypted DVD’s. Most new users (it happened to me at least) think that everything that has something to do with the infamous “terminal”, or anything “command line” is terribly hard, this is not true at all, let’s install the libdvd so we can watch encrypted DVD’s:

Applications → accessories → terminal
type this:

sudo apt-get install libdvdread4

press enter, it will prompt you to enter your password
now type this:

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

press enter… done!

8. Change theme and background. A lot of people don’t like the orange/brown colors of the human theme. Well, you can change the theme by right clicking anywhere in the desktop. Themes are in the… Themes tab duh!, you can select a different one (the new wave one is a popular choice). You can also customize colors/icons of the current theme or even install a new one.

Changing the wallpaper has a great effect to match your theme. This is a link with really cool wallpapers: www.vladstudio.com

Welcome to Ubuntu!