Ubuntu 8.10 on an EeePC 701 - Installing Applications

We left off yesterday with a brand-spanking-new Ubuntu 8.10 EeePC installation. Today I'll go over the applications that I installed to meet my needs. It's not a comprehensive list as some utilities I've installed out of necessity, but these are the ones that I chose because I like them and they help me to be productive and to just look frickin' cool. When all is said and done, it looks like this:
From left to right, panel 1 is my browser window, panel 2 is embedded iftop, panel 3 is embedded terminal and conky.

sudo apt-get install wicd vlc trayer conky firefox gnome-do

• Wicd
• Wicd is my network manager of choice. In my opinion, it's a great improvement over the standard NetworkManager utility that comes bundeled with Ubuntu. The customizability and ease of use that Wicd offers is amazing. The only customization that I truly made here was to modify the PEAP-TKIP settings so that I don't have to provide a certificate file in order to connect to my network at work. This was a really simple fix that I explained in a previous post.
  
• VLC
• VLC is the only media player I use. Everything else gets dumped whether it's on my WinXP boxes or my lappy. VLC is also incredibly versatile and serves many functions besides just playing my MP3's and DVDs. I also use it to stream my EeePC's webcam back to my desktop. Should my lappy ever be 'misplaced' I can always plug back into it and watch/listen to whomever stole it. Setting this up was a bit more complicated, but I also posted an article on how to do that.
  
• Trayer
• Screen space on my lappy is at a premium. A seven-inch screen doesn't allow one to spend pixels frivolously so I decided to take a bold step with this install and completely forgo the gnome-panel start menu and task bar in favor of the Gnome-Do launcher (more on that later). That means, however, that the system tray goes bye-bye also and a great many applications make regular use of the tray. Trayer is a wonderfully small and low-resource application to replace the standard system tray.
• Conky
• In the spirit of simple-and-useful, Conky is a small desktop app that can provide a dashboard view of your system and is amazingly customizable. I use it to track the status of my battery, cpu, top processes, ram, drive space left, wifi and LAN statistics. I'll publish my .conkyrc file in the next post.
  
• Firefox
• I've said it before many times, I l.o.v.e Firefox. Google Chrome is a close second, but it sadly doesn't run natively in Linux *sniff*. The details of my customization of Firefox on my lappy could, and probably should, be it's own post, so I'll just give a quick list of my add-ons: AutoAuth, Autohide, Better GCal, Better Gmail2, Better GReader, Ctrl-Tab, CustomizeGoogle, FaviconizeTab, FireGPG, Foxmarks, FoxyProxy, Greasemonky, Stylish, Ubiquity.
• Gnome-Do
• A newcomer to my standard lineup of applications, Gnome-Do was recently featured on Lifehacker and I was excited when I realized that now that I'm running 8.10 I can make use of the new Docky interface. My hope is to be able to totally replace the user-interface functions of Gnome with Docky and so far I've met with a decent amount of success. My biggest complaint is that for some applications that I remember where they were in the start menu tree but forgotten their name, I sometimes have to do quick Google searches to track down the application name. This is a rare occurance though, and the time that I save by being able to navigate and launch apps from the keyboard is a great time-saver.
• Other Apps
• sshfs, zenmap, wire shark, gimp, hamachi, skype, truecrypt, iftop
  

As I wrote this post, I started to think that maybe I'll have to break down some of the explanations into their own post to fully do them justice. Some applications took days (literally) to tweak to perfection, while others "just worked". I'm still toying with the thought, but you can count on more customized goodness in the near future.