The first stable release of Elementary OS Luna has charmed a lot of Linux users with its sheer beauty. Many people have dubbed it as the Mac OS for Linux. While there are ways you can make Linux look like Mac OS, Elementary OS has the look and charm of its own. In the series of Elementary OS articles, I showed you how to create a live USB of Elementary OS in Ubuntu and how to install Elementary OS Luna in dual boot with Windows. Continuing my experimentation, I’ll show you 10 things to to after installing Elementary OS Luna.
10 Things to do after installing Elementary OS Luna:
After installing any new OS, the common question that ponders any user is, what to do next? Usually a new OS requires a lot of application to install or configuration to tweak. In a similar article, I listed 10 things to do after installing Ubuntu 13.04 and here goes my list of essential things to do after installing Elementary OS Luna:
Check for updates:
The first and foremost thing you should do after installing Elementary OS Luna or in fact any other Linux OS is to check for updates. You can run the Update Manager from the Slingshot application launcher or use the following command in a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
Install another web browser:
Midori is a lightweight, sleek and fast web browser but it is still a kid in front of bigwigs like Firefox and Chrome. Despite of having several interesting positive points [Read: Midori Web Browser Review] Midori has several negatives as well. First thing first, it is not cross platform and is available only on Linux. So you can’t really use it on other operating systems and cannot sync it like Firefox and Chrome. It also has a limited number of plugins or extensions. In any case, you must have a second web browser. And Firefox or Chrome is the ultimate choice here.
You can download and install Firefox and/or Google Chrome either from the Software Center (Chromium instead of Chrome) or from their respective website. If you try to download from website, choose the option of “Ubuntu files .deb” because Elementary OS is based on Ubuntu.
Install an office suite:
Okay! Elementary OS is a beautiful Linux distribution that comes with a very nice text editor Scratch but it is unbelievable to me that it consists of no office product by default. The size of installation disk was more than 700 MB so I do not understand why they decided to skip an office suite. Anyways, you can choose to install any of the best alternative to Microsoft Office for Linux. But my personal favorite is LibreOffice. You can download the LibreOffice suite from their website or from the Software Center.
Install additional drivers:
Running a Linux system out of the box was unthinkable five years back. But with time more and more hardware manufacturer started supporting Linux. But there are still propriety drivers that are not included by default in many Linux OS, Elementary OS being one of them. After installing Elementary OS, you might face some issues like no wireless connection etc. Installing additional drivers comes in handy in this case. You can get these additional propriety drivers for your wireless and graphics card from the systems settings.
Go to System Settings (its there in the dock) and there you should see the Additional Drivers options.
Click on it and if there are any additional drivers to install for your system, you should see it there. If there is one, click on Activate to install the additional driver.
Of course, you have to restart your computer afterwards.
Install additional codecs to run all sorts of media
One of the first trouble you’ll have to run a MP3 file or a You Tube video. You can install additional codecs the same way as you do in Ubuntu Linux and i.e. by installing Ubuntu Restricted Extra. Open a terminal and use the following commands:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras
Install Elementary Tweaks to customize the desktop
If you have used Ubuntu, you must have heard of Unity Tweak tool. In fact there are tweaking tools for all type of desktop environments. Gnome has its own Gnome Tweak tool. And on the same line, Elementary OS has Elementary Tweaks that enables you to customize desktop. You can change themes, tweak animation etc with it. Elementary Tweaks is available in a community PPA by Elementary OS team:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:versable/elementary-update sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install elementary-tweaks
This community PPA also contains of several other third party application which you may want to install. Some of the main applications are:
- audience – Media player
- birdie-granite – Twitter client
- cable – IRC client
- etube – Youtube viewer
- feedler – RSS reader
- foto – Image viewer
- gazette – Clock, news and weather widget for desktop
- nuvolaplayer – cloud music player
Install VLC media player:
VLC media player is simply the best video player out there. An open source video player which is capable of doing a lot of things such as streaming videos to internet, automatically download subtitles and watch any streaming internet video with subtitles. VLC player can play almost all kind of video files. You can install it using the following command:
sudo apt-get install vlc
Install Transmission torrent client:
Usually most of the Ubuntu based Linux distributions come with Transmission as their default torrent client. But for some reason Elementary OS does not have a default torrent client. You can install Linux’s favourite torrent client using the following command:
sudo apt-get install transmission
Install Dropbox and/or Ubuntu One:
Now coming to cloud storage. I presume that you must have an account on Dropbox or Ubuntu One. To install Dropbox, you can download the installer from their website or search it in Software Centre.
Ubuntu One has been discontinued.
To install Ubuntu One in Elementary OS Luna, you can use the following command in the terminal:
sudo apt-get install pantheon-files-plugin-ubuntuone
Install Skype:
Despite that Skpe has continuously neglected its Linux application, Skype still has no worthy opponent in Linux world. Though Viber has come to Linux, but it still cannot be termed as the Skype alternative on Linux, at lest not yet. You can either install Skpe by downloading the installer from their website or just use the following command in terminal:
sudo apt-get install skype
Enable double click:
You might have noticed that files open with single click in Elementary OS. It could be pretty annoying to some. You can change this behavior with help of Elementary Tweaks. Follow this screenshot guide to enable double click in Elementary OS.
Add minimize button:
Elementary OS doesn’t have the minimize option in windows. It’s either closed or maximize. Thanks to Elementary Tweaks, you can have minimize option as well as you can move the orientation of these buttons to left or right. Follow this tutorial to add minimize option in Elementary OS.
Well, this is not the end of what you can do with Elementary OS Luna and this could not be exactly what you will be doing after installing Elementary OS Luna but it is one of the first few things you should be doing. I hope you found this article helpful. Do share what are your list of things to do after installing Elementary OS. Ciao :)
