Suppose you've just installed standard ubuntu (say 8.04 or 8.10). What other apps do you want to get? (By way of a footnote: Now suppose you have just got a random but internet capable mobile phone, which apps do you want to get? See mobile.)

Contents 1 Medibuntu: Google Earth and Skype 2 Edubuntu 3 Open Office 4 Opera

[edit] 1 Medibuntu: Google Earth and Skype

You might also want to make sure that you have the medibuntu respository installed, so that you can get skype and google earth. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu

Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex":

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron":

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

Then

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update

Skype didn't appear under add/remove software, but could be installed via synaptic. Same for google earth.

Of course you might also want to consider Google video chat for linux, and of course satellite images can also be obtained via http://maps.google.com. There's always more than one way of doing things!

What packages can you get via medibuntu? See http://packages.medibuntu.org/hardy/index.html and http://packages.medibuntu.org/intrepid/index.html.

(Instructions for skype: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Skype , https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GoogleEarth )

[edit] 2 Edubuntu

You may also want to check out the edubuntu applications. They can simply be installed via the Ubuntu package manager. I am not sure how you install all edubuntu apps in one go (i.e. so that you have everything that would come with edubuntu as standard). However, a list of applications is here http://www.edubuntu.org/applications/8.10. Some interesting apps:

• Kstars is a nice desktop planetarium application (it comes bundled with ubuntu on the thin clients we used in Samfya, which is how I came across it, but it's a great app).
• Kalzium (a periodic table) is also nice, and
• it would be worth exploring Ktouch for touch typing.
• There are also some apps here http://edu.kde.org/ as part of the kde educational suite.
• More specialised apps are Gobby (http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/) a collaborative editor, which is always great fun, as well as
• iTalc http://italc.sourceforge.net/ which is a tool to control other computers in your network, e.g. for class room management. This looks very promising. In Samfya we'd used our own screen blanking script, but there is so much more that could be done, and it seems that iTalc has got quite a few very useful features. The best part is that it's part of edubuntu, so it should be easy to install, and will hopefully work nicely with an LTSP deployment. (Edit: Apparently we tried this before we went to Samfya and we couldn't quite get it to work. But it still looks promising. --Bjoern 11:21, 6 January 2009 (UTC))

(You might also want to note that http://edubuntu.org/Download says "The 8.10 release continues the restructure of Edubuntu into the Ubuntu Education Edition. The education desktop and application bundle install as an add-on to a standard Ubuntu desktop.")

[edit] 3 Open Office

Well, I guess this comes as standard with Ubuntu, but if you don't know what it is, it's really worth exploring! (OpenOffice fits another nice paradigm, which is that of an open source cross-platform application.)

[edit] 4 Opera

Following the comments on mobile and Opera mini on desktop, I thought it best to check out installation of Opera on Ubuntu. Instructions are here https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OperaBrowser. Strangely, for 8.04LTS Hardy, adding the Ubuntu partner repository didn't work, so I had to add the opera repository. Firstly, go to System / Administration / Software Sources. Select the third party software tab, and click add. Enter:

deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ stable non-free

and close the application. Then open a terminal and type

sudo wget -O - http://deb.opera.com/archive.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install opera

You now have opera. Again, strangely, add/remove software didn't show opera, so that I needed to install via apt-get, as above. This seems weird particularly given this announcement for 6.04. Further configurations for Opera on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OperaBrowser .

I've only played with Opera desktop briefly, but it seems that Opera desktop and Opera mini will play together nicely, and so this could make a nice solution if your internet access is partially from desktop, and partially from mobile. Cf. also Samfya, where quite a few of the summer school participants might be in this situation.