A while ago I coded a small patch which I submitted to the Banshee music player project. It has a plugin which supports sharing of your music library via the DAAP protocol, but it was only sharing individual tracks and not playlists which made browsing a large collection a little tedious. So I cooked up a little code to solve the problem and attached it to a new bug in Banshee’s bug tracker.
I was happy to find my patch was accepted and was eventually released in version 0.13. I’m even happier to find that with the upcoming release of Ubuntu 7.10 my patch has found it’s way downstream to my favourite distro too.
It’s interesting to chart the progress of an open-source contribution: I submitted my patch upstream (i.e. directly to the Banshee) on 13th Feb 2007, it made it into a stable release six months later on the 5th August 2007, and now in October it’s beginning to make it downstream into the distributions. In total around eight months have passed. At first this appears to be a long time but it’s better new features don’t float downstream too quickly so they have more time to mature.
Here’s a list of some of my favourite or most relied-upon applications on Ubuntu. It’s not exhaustive but it’s a start. It doesn’t include extras like multi-media codecs or any of the sort of things you can get easily with something like EasyUbuntu. The lists arranged by purpose and are ordered alphabetically not by preference. Some things are not available in the Ubuntu repositories and are marked as such.
Desktop
- deskbar-applet
- gnome-keyring-manager
- kde-style-polymer (from external source - makes QT apps look ok on gnome, see my post here)
- MSTCoreFonts
- nautilus-open-terminal
- nautilus-scripts:
- nautilus-script-collection-svn (subversion shortcuts)
- nautilus-script-manager
- skype (only beta 1.3 works, needs kde-style-polymer or looks ugly, get it from www.skype.com)
- Tomboy (desktop notes tool)
- xnest (for nested X logins)
Development
- apache2
- emacs-snapshot-gtk (emacs for the gnome desktop)
- JEdit (from external jedit repo http://dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/jedit)
- java:
- meld (visual/graphical diff tool)
- mysql:
- mysql-server
- mysql-client
- mysql-admin (note a wrapper script is needed as a bug workaround on this, can’t remember the bug link just now)
- mysql-query
- .Net (just listing the basic dev packages here)
- mono-devel
- monodoc-manual
- php5:
- php5 (basic setup for use with apache)
- php5-* (choose whatever extra modules you need)
- php5-cli (command line version)
- python
- ruby
- ruby
- irb
- lib*-ruby (pickup any of the extra packages you need)
- ri
- rdoc
- rails
- subversion
- vim-gnome (gvim)
- vmware-server
Networking
- Avahi (zeroconf/bonjour)
- avahi-daemon
- avahi-utils
- libapache2-mod-dnssd (to auto-advertise apache2 sites available on your machine)
- service-discovery-applet
- libnss-mdns
- ethereal
- firestarter (basic firewall manager)
- gftp (sftp and ftp client)
- NetworkManager
- rdesktop (Remote Desktop and Terminal Services Client)
Sound & Multimedia
- banshee music player
- f-spot photomanager
- gnomebaker (cd-burner)
- gxine (media player)
