First go to Ubuntu Software Center, search for and install “unity tweak tool”:

Unity Tweak Tool is a simple configuration software for Unity Desktop Environment. Once installed it, launch and go to Appearance -> Theme. You’ll see the window as below:

At the bottom of each tab, there’s a “Restore Defaults” button, click on theme and you’ll get the original themes.

Enjoy!

Subsonic is a web-based music streamer, jukebox and Podcast receiver, providing access to your music collection wherever you are. Use it to share your music with friends, or to listen to your music while away from home. A Subsonic client for Android phones is also available.

To install Subsonic (4.8) in Ubuntu, hit “Ctrl+Alt+T” to open terminal or login your Ubuntu Server, and run following commands one by one:

1. add the ppa repository by downloading and installing the DEB:

wget http://archive.getdeb.net/install_deb/getdeb-repository_0.1-1~getdeb1_all.deb

sudo dpkg -i getdeb-repository_0.1-1~getdeb1_all.deb

2. update app repository:

sudo apt-get update

3. install Subsonic:

sudo apt-get install subsonic

Once installed. You can confirm this by browsing to http://ubuntu-machine-IP:4040 or http://hostname:4040

By default Subsonic runs as root in Ubuntu, if you’d like to start the service as special user, do following steps:

1. In terminal, get the root:

sudo su

then stop the service:

service subsonic stop

2. Let’s now create the new user that we will use to run our Subsonic service. In this case it’s “subsonic”:

adduser --system --no-create-home subsonic

add the subsonic user to audio group:

adduser subsonic audio

3. Change some permissions to make sure my subsonic service will run without any problems:

chown -R subsonic:nogroup /tmp/subsonic
chown -R subsonic:nogroup /var/subsonic
chown -R root:root /var/subsonic/transcode
chown -R root:root /var/subsonic/jetty/*/webapp
chown subsonic /etc/default/subsonic
chmod 754 /etc/default/subsonic

4. Finally edit subsonic configuration with your favorite editor and change the line “SUBSONIC_USER=root” to “SUBSONIC_USER=subsonic”.

5. Start the service again:

sudo service subsonic restart

Enjoy!

With kenny you can add application launchers, file folder locations, and custom scripts as quicklists of kenny icon in the Unity Launcher, or as menu items of the indicator applet.

The user interface is simple and easy-to-use, also it has a “test” button to preview each script action.

Download and install kenny:

It has a ppa repository with only Ubuntu 12.04 supported, but you can directly download and double click to install the DEB which also works on Ubuntu 12.10 & 13.04.

Enjoy!

Before:

After:

There’re two ways:

1. Hit Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal, copy and paste following 3 commands and run one by one:

• Allow user lightdm to create a connection to the X server:
  sudo xhost +SI:localuser:lightdm
• Switch to user lightdm in terminal:

  sudo su lightdm -s /bin/bash

• Disable draw grid in unity greeter:
  gsettings set com.canonical.unity-greeter draw-grid false

2. The second way is using the popular Ubuntu configuring tool Ubuntu-Tweak: Tweaks -> Login Settings -> unlock -> turn off draw grid.

Ubuntu Tweak is available at launchpad.net/ubuntu-tweak

Enjoy!

First take a look at the result:

It’s not easy to configure the default Unity desktop’s left Launcher, so I used the xfce desktop.

To get started, follow the steps below:

1. Install Xfce Desktop Environment:

Hit Ctrl+Alt+T to open a terminal window, copy and paste following command and hit run to install Xfce:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

Once installed, log out and select “Xubuntu session” to log in again.

2. Customize Xubuntu session

The Xubuntu session has a top-panel and dock like panel at bottom.

1. First get rid of the top-panel by right-click on it -> Panel -> Panel Preferences.

Then click the Red minus button to remove it:

2. In previous window, use the drop-down box in the panel configuration window to select the other panel. Uncheck the ‘Automatically show and hide the panel’ option and check the ‘Automatically increase the length’ option.

Now you should have a single panel across that bottom of your screen. Under Items tab, remove items you don’t want and add items you do want, and reorder them as you see fit. For a Windows 7-style taskbar, try using these items in the following order:

Applications Menu, Separator, Launcher, Window Buttons, Separator (check “Expand” in its Properties), Notification Area, Indicator Plugin, Show Desktop.

3. Hit Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal, copy and paste following 4 commands and run to download and install Windows 7 theme:

wget https://launchpad.net/~upubuntu-com/+archive/gtk3/+files/win2-7_0.1_all.deb

sudo dpkg -i win2-7_0.1_all.deb

sudo apt-get -f install

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences theme 'Win2-7-theme'

4. Apply the theme by going to Applications -> Settings Manager -> Appearance -> Select “Win2-7-theme” in both Style and Icons tab.

5. You can also change the applications menu’s icon and make it use a Windows 7-style start orb. First, find a Windows 7 start orb image on Google Images, but make sure you get a transparent PNG image. Once you’ve found a good image, right-click the Applications menu button, select Properties, and use the Icon button to select your start orb.

6. To make your panel look more like Windows 7’s panel, right-click it, point to Panel, and select Panel Preferences. On the Appearance tab, select Background image and browse to the \usr\share\themes\Win2-7-theme\gtk-2.0\Panel\ directory on your computer. Select a background image like Panel_Win2-7Basic800.png. The theme pack we installed includes a variety of panel backgrounds, so feel free to experiment.

If you’re using Chromium web browser instead of Google Chrome, this simple tutorial will show you how to install the Pepper Flash Player using a PPA repository.

This repository provides the pepflashplugin-installer package, which will download and install the newer “Pepper” (PPAPI) version of the Adobe Flash Player plugin for use with the Chromium Web browser on Ubuntu GNU/Linux. The package is similar to Ubuntu’s official flashplugin-installer in that it does not include the plugin itself, but instead downloads the plugin and installs it automatically. (Specifically, it downloads the latest Google Chrome package, extracts the Pepper Flash files, and installs only those. Google Chrome itself is not installed nor otherwise used in any way.)

Hit “Ctrl+Alt+T” to open a terminal, copy and paste following commands and run one by one to add the ppa and install Pepper Flash from Google Chrome. It supports Ubuntu 13.04 Raring, 12.10 Quantal, and 12.04 Precise.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:skunk/pepper-flash
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pepflashplugin-installer

Once installed, you will need to configure Chromium to use the Pepper Flash plugin by running this command to edit the configuration file:

sudo gedit /etc/chromium-browser/default

Add the following line, after the CHROMIUM_FLAGS= assignment:

. /usr/lib/pepflashplugin-installer/pepflashplayer.sh

(a dot at beginning, a space, and the file path)

Restart Chromium, and load the chrome://plugins page to verify that the plugin is active. (Note that if you see a Flash plugin with a version of 11.2 or lower, then that is an old, non-PPAPI version of Flash. A current version of Pepper Flash will be 11.5 or higher.)

This simple and brief tutorial is going to show you how to install Picapy in Ubuntu using the ppa repository. So far, the ppa provides the latest packages for Ubuntu 13.04 and 12.10.

To get started:

Hit Ctrl+Alt+T to open a terminal window for running commands.

Copy and paste this command and hit enter to add the ppa repository:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao

Then update the cache by this command:

sudo apt-get update

Install Picapy:

sudo apt-get install picapy

Once installed, search for and launch it from the Unity Dash.

Enjoy!

The Nautilus has upgraded to 3.6.x in Ubuntu 13.04, so that it’s a little different. Now the Nautilus scripts should be placed under “/home/$USER/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/”

To get started:

1. Copy the script and paste it into a new file named Open As Root. Put the file under “/home/$USER/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/” folder. Press “Ctrl+H” to show the hidden file folder .local.

2. Right click on the script and go to ‘Properties’, check “Allow executing file as program” at ‘Permissions’ tab.

3. Restart Nautilus by running this command in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):

nautilus -q

After that, you can see the ‘Open As Root’ option in Nautilus context menu:

It’ll prompt you to input root account password which is not enabled by default. To enable and set root password, run this command (Ctrl+Alt+T):

sudo passwd root

Then use this password to get pass the authentication window.

To get started, press “Ctrl+Alt+T” to open up a terminal window for running commands.

1. Run this command to install SSH server:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

That’s it!

2. Use SSH clients to connect to the machine using the default port is 22. You can change the port and other settings by editing its configuration file “/etc/ssh/sshd_config” by the command:

sudo gedit /etc/ssh/sshd_config

3. Restart this ssh server to apply the changes by this command:

sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

TIP: For a simple ssh client download Putty at this page.

With the new plugin in Ubuntu 13.04 Compiz, you don’t need to disable the desktop. So that the desktop icons (Computer, Home Folder, Network, etc.) and desktop right-click menu are still available after enabled different wallpapers. I’ve tested in Ubuntu 13.04 Beta2, the only bug is that the desktop icons will be covered by the wallpapers you set.

To get started:

First hit Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal for running commands. Install the required packages by:

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-plugins-extra

Then launch CCSM from the Unity Dash:

Search “Wallpaper” plugin, enable it and click to go into its configuration page.

Under Backgrounds, click “New” button to add 4 wallpapers one by one. You’ll be prompt to enable “JPEG” plugin while doing this. Just enable it.

After that, click the “Workspace Switcher” icon (System Settings-> Appearances-> Behavior-> Enable Workspaces) on Unity Launcher to see the effect: