Open Terminal by navigating to Applications->Accessories->Terminal
Use the following command to edit HOSTS file
sudo gedit /etc/hosts
Suppose you want to block YouTube and Facebook on Ubuntu. Just add the following two lines in file as shown in the screenshot and click save.
127.0.0.1 www.youtube.com
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
Restart your computer. Now you won't be able to access these websites, no matter whatever web browser you use 
gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
Ubuntu includes a top panel and a bottom panel by default. If you prefer to keep only one panel at the bottom just like the Windows Taskbar, then these are the steps to follow:
Delete the bottom panel: right-click over it and click "Delete This Panel".These are basic changes. The panels are much more flexible than the Windows Taskbar in that many items in the panels can be easily added, removed or configured.
Note: If you need to restore the panels to the original state, enter the following commands into the Terminal and re-start the system:
When you set the panel to be transparent in the default Ambiance theme in Ubuntu 10.04, you will find that some panel items' backgrounds are not transparent, but you can make them transparent and consistent with others, following these steps:
Go to Applications (or Main Menu) > Accessories > Terminal.
Comment out the line by placing a # at the beginning of the line, like this: # bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = "panel_bg.png"Note: If you'd like to change to the Radiance theme, replace Ambiance with Radiance in the above command lines, but you'd like to change to the New Wave theme, then enter cp -R /usr/share/themes/"New Wave" ~/.themes/ in step 2, enter gedit ~/.themes/"New Wave"/gtk-2.0/gtkrc in step 3, search for and comment out this line bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = "Images/Panel/PanelBarLong.png" in steps 4 and 5 respectively.
Themes in Ubuntu can be customized to match the applications or suit your needs. I once tried the "New Wave" theme and the menu (File, Edit, View, etc) was hardly visible on the dark background in OpenOffice. These are easy steps to customize a theme, for example, "New Wave" so that the menu can be more visible in OpenOffice.
Go To System > Preferences > Appearance.The menu should now be clearly visible in OpenOffice in this new theme (See the lower section in the screenshot).
In Ubuntu you can set nearly the same aero glass effect to window borders with alpha transparency as available in Windows 7.
Press Alt-F2 to bring up "Run Application" window.
Frequently used programs can be easily pinned to the panel.
See also "Enable Windows 7 Superbar".
Ubuntu adds an icon to the desktop for every removable drive that you attach to your system. The icons can be hidden by these steps:
The drive icons would then disappear from the desktop. Remember that you can always access the drives from "Places".
Ubuntu 10.04 sets the Minimize, Maximize and Close buttons to the left in a window. If you prefer to change them to the right, follow these simple steps:
Press Alt-F2 to bring up "Run Application" window.
Windows Explorer allows for users to set a default view to all folders. In almost the same way, Ubuntu's Nautilus File Browser allows for these settings:
Go to "Places" and open a folder.Other various settings, such as single or double click to open items, icon captions, list columns, preview files and media handling can be done in the same window as well.
When running an application without maximized, Ubuntu always puts it in the left-top corner of the desktop by default, but you are allowed to set a program window to open up in the center of the desktop area.
Go to System > Preferences > CompizConfig Settings ManagerIdeally, the window manager in Ubuntu should restore the last known position of an application window, but it does not do that unless an application remembers its own window position. (See reported bugs)
Ubuntu enables "Desktop Wall" by default. By holding Ctrl-Alt keys and pressing the left-arrow or right-arrow key each time, it slides through desktop workspaces horizontally for you to choose one to work on. Alternatively, you can change this to a "rotate cube" effect.
Go To System > Preferences > CompizConfig Settings ManagerImmediately you can rotate your desktop workspaces in this way— holding down Ctrl-Alt keys, EITHER press the left-arrow or right-arrow key OR left-click the mouse and drag it to left or right.
In Windows 7, frequently used programs can be pinned to the taskbar (hence called Superbar). Likewise, DockBarX, a Gnome panel plugin, can be added to Ubuntu to achieve almost the same effect to pin and unpin or launch the applications from the panel.
Go to Applications (or Main Menu) > Accessories > Terminal.Note: A thumbnail preview of a running program is a beta feature in DockBarX 0.30. To enable this feature, right-click the DockBarX item on the panel, select Properties, choose Advanced tab and tick "Show Previews".
In Windows 7, you can click and drag a window to the left or right edge of the desktop and it will fill half of the screen, or snap a window to the top edge of the desktop and it will be maximized.
In Ubuntu 10.04, you can click and drag a window to the left, right or top edge of the desktop to achieve the same result.
Ubuntu is capable of reading and writing files stored on Windows formatted partitions, but partitions must be 'mounted' before they can be accessed each time you start up the system. With these steps, you can auto mount the drives without the need to manually mount them for access.
Install Storage Device Manager if it has not been added.If you wish to remove the auto-mount of a certain drive, you can similarly use Storage Device Manager to do the setting.
A USB storage device plugged into the system usually mounts automatically, but if for some reasons it doesn't automount, it's possible to manually mount it with these steps.
To unmount it, just enter sudo umount /media/usb in the Terminal.
Ubuntu only includes completely free software by default and does not configure proprietary media formats such as mp3 and mp4 'out of the box'. The required codecs however can be easily installed for the default player to playback these files following a few simple steps below.
You might need to do the same for other restricted media formats such as mp4 too.
When I first installed Ubuntu onto a PC with an integrated audio device and tried to play a media file on a player, it had no sound. I tried these simple steps in setting Sound Preferences and then it had sound. It works for me for the audio device I have.
As the items available from the drop-down menus might differ depending on the hardware devices detected by the system, you might want to try other items in the menus to see if they work for your devices. It might also help to check out the steps in Sound Troubleshooting from the Ubuntu Documentation.
Playing a media file in a proprietary format on a player might also have no sound if the required codecs are not installed. In this case, see Enable Media Playback in this article.
Xkill is part of the X11 utilities pre-installed in Ubuntu and a tool for terminating misbehaving X clients or unresponsive programs. You can easily add a shortcut key to launch xkill with the steps below.
Go to System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts.Xkill is ready for use. Press the above key combination to turn the cursor to an X-sign, move the X-sign and drop it into a program interface to terminate the unresponsive program, or cancel the X-sign with a right-click.
After full installation, Ubuntu is set to be the default operating system to boot up if no key is pressed within a few seconds on a multi-boot system. You might want to set your preferred operating system to boot up by default. This can be done easily with StartUp-Manager.
Go to Applications (or Main Menu) > Accessories > Terminal.With StartUp-Manager, you can also do others such as manage Usplash themes, adjust bootloader menu resolution or set timeout in seconds. Avoid changing timeout to 0 seconds if you need to select a system to boot up from a multi-boot menu.
Each time when Ubuntu updates to a new Linux kernel, the old one is left behind and the boot menu gets longer. If your new Linux kernel works well, it's safe to remove the old one and clean up the boot menu. Do take these steps carefully as incorrect removal of the items can make your system unbootable.
A simple command can be entered in the Terminal to schedule a time for the system to shut down.
The system will then shut down within the minutes or at the time specified. To cancel a scheduled time, enter sudo shutdown -c in the Terminal.
GShutdown is a GUI program for scheduling a time to shutdown the system but the current version 0.2 is noted not working well in both Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04.
Do you prefer Windows TrueType fonts to the default fonts installed by Ubuntu? The Windows fonts can be installed and activated easily in a few steps below:
Go to Applications (or Main Menu) > Accessories > Terminal.The screenshot here uses the following settings:
Application font: Verdana 9
Document font: Verdana 11
Desktop font: Verdana 11
Window title font: Sans Bold 10
Fixed width font: Monospace 10
After completing the above steps, if you like the Tahoma font which is not included in the mscorefonts package, you might want to copy the two files tahoma.ttf and tahomabd.ttf from /Windows/Fonts to the Desktop. Next, move them to the restricted folder by entering sudo mv Desktop in the Terminal. This font will then be available in step 4 above.
Screenlets are small applications to represent things such as sticky notes, clocks, calendars around on your desktop. You can launch a pre-installed screenlet from Screenlet Manager, or install a new one into the Manager for launching it. Here are the steps for installing and launching a screenlet, for example, WaterMark System Information.
Install Screenlets Manager if it has not been added.More screenlets are available for installation from screenlets.org.
Ubuntu uses OpenJDK by default, but I note that some web services such as ezyZip.com might need the Sun Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to be installed in the system for running the services properly. If you would like to get the proprietary Sun Java packages for your system, you can download and install them from the Canonical Partner Repository with the steps below:
Ubuntu Software Center lets you search and get free software. If an application you need is not included in the Center, you can go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager, type in an application name to search and install a software package from the repositories.
Alternatively, you can get the latest freeware applications by clicking the Install this now button from the GetDeb Repository after the getdeb package is installed with the instructions given.
See also our Best Free Software for Linux.
Note: CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm) can be installed here if not added:
To conclude this hopefully persuasive bit of Linux Advocacy, it must be stated that an Operating System without suitable Applications is of little use. There are free web browsers and email clients for Linux, as well as the free Star Office product from Sun Microsystems. Star Office includes the traditional productivity applications: Word Processing, Spreadsheet and Database. Corel Office is also available for Linux at little or no charge.
As more small businesses adopt Linux, the number of Indepdendent Software Vendors offering industry specific (Vertical Market) applications will increase. As I learn of business applications designed for Linux, I will document them on this site.
Warning: The tutorial on this page is for an internal drive that will serve as an extra data partition. If you would like to mount a separate drive or partition as /home instead, you want a different tutorial.
First you have to determine what the partition is called and what filesystem it is. One quick way to do it if you know what filesystem you formatted the drive as (Ext3, for example) is to just type the terminal command
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 524 4208006 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 525 1044 4176900 83 Linux
As you can see, I'm able to locate that /dev/sda2 is my Linux partition, but in System, I don't find out if it's Ext3, Ext4, Reiserfs, or what it is. If I happen to know it's Ext4, cool.
But let's say I didn't know. Well, one way to find out for sure is to install GParted and find out:
You can go to System > Administration > GParted and enter your password to get it started.
Ah, now I can definitely see it's Ext4 for sure. Under Partition I see it's /dev/sda2, and under Filesystem, I see it's Ext4.
If you have a second physical hard drive (not just another partition), you might have to click on the top-right corner to focus on the second hard drive. (Click on the down-pointing arrow to get the drop-down menu.)
So now I'll create a mount point for that partition:
Next, I want to determine the UUID of my partition.***
Once in there, I should add in this line:
Then I can save (Control-X), confirm (Y), and exit (Enter).
Since we've made changes to the /etc/fstab file, we need to have Ubuntu acknowledge those changes:
Now I need to give it the proper permissions. Let's just assume, for this example, that my username is jessica.
Now the partition is mounted in the /storage folder and is ready for use!
*** Yes, I could just use the name of it (/dev/sda2), but UUID is more precise. It's unlikely that I'll unplug my internal drive, plug in a new internal drive, and then plug back in my original internal drive so that the partition names are reassigned. Still, it's safer to use the exact partition identifier in /etc/fstab.
You'll be using "fdisk" to accomplish this. Refer back to the logical name you noted from earlier. For illustration, I'll use /dev/sdb, and assume that you want a single partition on the disk, occupying all the free space.
If the number of cylinders in the disk is larger than 1024 (and large hard drives always have more), it could, in certain setups, cause problems with:
Otherwise, this will not negatively affect you.
1) Initiate fdisk with the following command:
sudo fdisk /dev/sdb
2) Fdisk will display the following menu:
Command (m for help): m
Command action
a toggle a bootable flag
b edit bsd disklabel
c toggle the dos compatibility flag
d delete a partition
l list known partition types
m print this menu
n add a new partition
o create a new empty DOS partition table
p print the partition table
q quit without saving changes
s create a new empty Sun disklabel
t change a partition's system id
u change display/entry units
v verify the partition table
w write table to disk and exit
x extra functionality (experts only)
Command (m for help):
3) We want to add a new partition. Type "n" and press enter.
Command action
e extended
p primary partition (1-4)
4) We want a primary partition. Enter "p" and enter.
Partition number (1-4):
5) Since this will be the only partition on the drive, number 1. Enter "1" and enter.
Command (m for help):
If it asks about the first cylinder, just type "1" and enter. (We are making 1 partition to use the whole disk, so it should start at the beginning.)
6) Now that the partition is entered, choose option "w" to write the partition table to the disk. Type "w" and enter.
The partition table has been altered!
7) If all went well, you now have a properly partitioned hard drive that's ready to be formatted. Since this is the first partition, Linux will recognize it as /dev/sdb1, while the disk that the partition is on is still /dev/sdb.
To format the new partition as ext3 file system (best for use under Ubuntu):
sudo mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb1
To format the new partition as fat32 file system (best for use under Ubuntu & Windows):
sudo mkfs -t fat32 /dev/sdb1
As always, substitute "/dev/sdb1" with your own partition's path.
When formatting the drive as ext2/ext3, 5% of the drive's total space is reserved for the super-user (root) so that the operating system can still write to the disk even if it is full. However, for disks that only contain data, this is not necessary.
NOTE: You may run this command on a fat32 file system, but it will do nothing; therefore, I highly recommend not running it.
You can adjust the percentage of reserved space with the "tune2fs" command, like this:
sudo tune2fs -m 1 /dev/sdb1
This example reserves 1% of space - change this number if you wish.
Using this command does not change any existing data on the drive. You can use it on a drive which already contains data.
Now that the drive is partitioned and formatted, you need to choose a mount point. This will be the location from which you will access the drive in the future. I would recommend using a mount point with "/media", as it is the default used by Ubuntu. For this example, we'll use the path "/media/mynewdrive"
sudo mkdir /media/mynewdrive
Now we are ready to mount the drive to the mount point.
You can choose to have the drive mounted automatically each time you boot the computer, or manually only when you need to use it.
You'll need to edit /etc/fstab:
gksu gedit /etc/fstab
Add this line to the end (for ext3 file system):
/dev/sdb1 /media/mynewdrive ext3 defaults 0 2
Add this line to the end (for fat32 file system):
/dev/sdb1 /media/mynewdrive vfat defaults 0 2The defaults part may allow you to read, but not write. To write other partition and FAT specific options must be used. If gnome is being used, use the right-click, mount method. Then launch the mount command from terminal, no options. The last entry should be the FAT drive and and look something like:
/dev/sda5 on /media/mynewdrive type vfat
(rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,shortname=mixed,uid=1000,utf8,umask=077,flush)
All of the parts between the parenthesis are the mount options and should replace "defaults" in the fstab file. The "2" at the end instructs your system to run a quick file system check on the hard drive at every boot. Changing it to "0" will skip this. Run 'man fstab' for more info here.
You can now run "sudo mount -a" (or reboot the computer) to have the changes take effect.
If you want to allow a normal user to create files on this drive, you can either give this user ownership of the top directory of the drive filesystem: (replace USERNAME with the username)
sudo chown -R USERNAME:USERNAME /media/mynewdrive
or in a more flexible way, practical if you have several users, allow for instance the users in the plugdev group (usually those who are meant to be able to mount removable disks, desktop users) to create files and sub-directories on the disk:
sudo chgrp plugdev /media/mynewdrive
sudo chmod g+w /media/mynewdrive
sudo chmod +t /media/mynewdrive
The last "chmod +t" adds the sticky bit, so that people can only delete their own files and sub-directories in a directory, even if they have write permissions to it (see man chmod).
Alternatively, you may want to manually mount the drive every time you need it.
For manual mounting, use the following command:
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/mynewdrive
When you are finished with the drive, you can unmount it using:
sudo umount /media/mynewdriveThat's it
