LibreOffice 4.0 Beta 2 is currently available by default in Ubuntu 13.04 Daily Build.

It has an impressive list of new features:

• now integrates with various CMS (Content Management System)
• uses Firefox personas to theme it
• contributing to LibreOffice is easy using Gerrit
• converting non-native formats is now improved
• can edit Visio and Publisher documents

Open up LibreOffice and go to Tools->Options->Personalization. Click the Select Persona button, and in the Persona address field, enter the link to the desired Firefox Persona (e.g. this example uses http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/462094).

Liferea
Also called the Linux Feed Reader, Liferea is a full-featured news reader built in GTK, so I’d warmly recommend it for GNOME users. By default, Liferea’s interface is pretty much the same as Akregator, following the same style with a tree view to the left, and the news list and displaying widget to the right side. However it has three different view modes which change the alignment of the widgets (normal, wide and combined view modes). It supports system tray integration and has an option to disable JavaScript as well as modifying the font size.

Blam
Blam is small with a clean interface and fewer options than Akregator or Liferea. It’s written in Mono GTK and it should fit those who don’t need an application with all the whistles and bells.

RSSOwl
Written in Java, RSSOwl is a very powerful feed reader with support for RSS, RDF and Atom feeds. The first time it starts RSSOwl will show a wizard from which you can import pre-defined feeds, feeds from Google Reader or from a certain website. Being Java-based makes the interface a little slow when it comes to response time, but this is balanced by the richness of features that it provides. The latest version is 2.1.2 and you can download it from Sourceforge. The package contains the binary and you will need Java Runtime Environment or any other compatible Java virtual machine to run it.

RSSNOW
OK, so RSSNOW is a Plasma widget for KDE which can be displayed on the workspace. Some find it very useful, making it a good choice since it just stays on the desktop, providing a very basic interface, appearance configuration and global keyboard shortcut.

Newsbeuter
This one is a simple console news reader that runs in command-line mode, so it doesn’t have an ncurses interface and you have to configure it manually.

BlogBridge
Yet another Java-based feed reader, BlogBridge offers some pretty cool features and a whole bunch of configuration options.

ThinFeeder
This one is also written in Java and comes with various options.

Canto
This is based on ncurses, so it runs in a terminal. You will have to use the keyboard in order to navigate in Canto, and press Q to quit it.

Thunderbird
Thunderbird is well-known for being the email client from Mozilla, but it also incorporates a feed reader.

In addition to these, there is also Gnus Rss, a feed reader for Emacs, or Sage, a Firefox add-on with support for RSS and Atom feeds. Of course, the browser-based ones like Google Reader or Bloglines are available too and Firefox itself can handle feeds in a simple way.

There is also another one for GNOME called Straw, but it looks like it hasn’t been maintained since 2008. And Raggle, a command-line reader which also seems dead since 2005.

CMus is a powerful, feature-rich music player for the terminal which uses the ncurses library

mp3blaster
mp3blaster is one of the most popular music players for the terminal out there. It uses the ncurses toolkit, and has features like grouping of tracks, playlists, shuffle and repeat modes.
Homepage

MOC
MOC stands for Music on Console and it is a twin-panel music player with the file browser to the left and the playlist to the right. MOC is built upon ncurses and allows shuffle, repeat, volume control.
Homepage

MOC running in Ubuntu 11.10

Herrie
Another ncurses-based music player for the terminal, Herrie is a minimalistic player that comes with playlists, support for various audio files, including Ogg and MP3, jump to next/previous song.
Homepage

mplayer
This is mplayer, the famous video/audio player and converter. However MPlayer can also be used as a command-line audio player, and it supports all the formats out there, including Ogg, FLAC, MP3 or WAV.
Homepage

SoX
Self-described as “Sound eXchange, the Swiss Army Knife of audio manipulation”, SoX is actually a powerful command-line audio manipulation tool which can also be used as a music player, using the command play music_file.
Homepage

PyTone
Written in Python, PyTone is yet another command-line audio player. Simple and clean, it supports formats like MP3 or Ogg.
Homepage

PyRadio
Another program written in Python, PyRadio is able to play Internet radio inside the terminal. To use it, download it from here, unzip the archive and then run the ./pyradio script.
Homepage

With preselected stations, PyRadio is able to play Internet radio inside a terminal

ogg123
This little command-line tool is included in the vorbis-tools package and is able to reproduce Ogg and FLAC. It’s very basic, yet very fast and useful for quickly listening to songs which are encoded in a free format.
Homepage

mpg123
Just as ogg123, only that mpg123 plays the MP3 format.
Homepage

Shutter
This is a very powerful and feature-rich tool for taking screenshots. Written in GTK and blending well in GNOME, Shutter offers just about anything you would ask from such an application: timer, screenshots of whole screen, windows, widgets, a quick and easy-to-use editor for fast retouching or pointing out certain aspects of the image, support for plugins, exporting/importing and saving to PNG, JPG or BMP. Definitely a winner in my opinion.

GNOME Screenshot
This is the default screenshot application that comes with the GNOME desktop environment, offering a very basic graphical interface. It’s triggered by pressing Print Screen, and by default it will take the screenshot of the whole screen. Here’s how it looks:

Although it allows to take screenshots of only windows or section of the screen, unfortunately these are not available in the graphical interface, but can be triggered by running gnome-screenshot in a terminal with certain parameters. For example, gnome-screenshot -w will take the screenshot of a window, gnome-screenshot -a will take the screenshot of a screen area, while gnome-screenshot -B will take the screenshot of a window, excluding window borders. Why these don’t have a corresponding tick box in the graphical window is still a mystery to me. That being said, GNOME Screenshot is a very fast choice if you quickly want to grab the whole screen and dump it to a file.

KSnapshot
This is the screenshot application used by KDE and provides a timer as well as possibility to take the screenshot of a particular area of the screen or only a window, include or exclude window decorations. Pretty fast and easy to use.

ImageMagick
Actually the tool is called import and it’s included in the imagemagick package. It can be used in the command-line mode and comes with various options. It can be a little hard to manipulate it and maybe not the best recommendation for a person who uses only GUI, but otherwise it’s very powerful. The easiest way to take a screenshot using it would probably be something like import image.png, and then select the region of the screen you want to capture.

scrot
Or SCReen SHot, scrot is yet another powerful tool for taking screenshots in command-line mode. The simplest way to use it would be scrot image.png, which will take a screenshot of the whole screen and save it in the current directory as image.png. To set a delay time in seconds, use the -d switch, e.g. scrot -d 3 image.png.

…And one more

GIMP
Probably well-known by most users who use to edit images on a daily basis or even occasionally, GIMP is a very powerful and feature-rich image manipulation application. One of the features it also has is the ability to take screenshots. To use it, go to File->Create->Screenshot… and select the desired options in the window that appears.

For those of you who didn’t hear about it before, it’s probably time you have a look at it. Shutter is probably the most powerful screenshot-taking application available for GNOME, including countless features and several useful tools to take screenshots and manipulate them in any way possible.

The latest release brings several new features, including:

• improved uploading by adding a bunch of new image hosting services
• improved CLI interface

Other changes include rewritten code and fixed bugs.

To install the latest Shutter release in Ubuntu, open a terminal and type in the following two lines:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:shutter/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install shutter

The first command will add the Shutter repository to your sources list and the second will fetch and install the latest version.

Features

Shutter supports sessions, exporting to various Internet services, it can save in various image formats, including PNG or JPG, it supports plugins and comes bundled with a lot of them. In addition, Shutter is also highly configurable via the Edit->Preferences menu entry.

It allows you to take screenshots of the whole desktop, a window, a section of desktop, a child window, a single menu or cascading menus, only a tooltip, and it provides a timer too.

For quick editing, Shutter comes with the Shutter Drawing Tool, an application which can be launched from the menu or from the toolbar, and which includes basic painting tools like straight lines or rectangles, but also text or the pixelize effect. However the current version seems to have a bug when trying to save the image, the window closing unexpectedly. Still, exporting to a huge number of image formats works, as well as PDF or SVG.

Drawing tool

The configuration window allows to change the default image format for saving screenshots (PNG, JPEG or BMP), automatically save file, change the default file name (including the numbering style), include or exclude the cursor, include or exclude window decorations, automatically resize window, generate thumbnail, border, reduce colors, enable/disable popups, change the default keybinding in GNOME, upload images to various services.

You can start Shutter at login, hide the window on first launch and also hide the notification icon. Tray icon integration is also provided. Shutter also comes with several plugins, mostly for applying image effects.

Plugins

Behavior options

In addition to these, Shutter also includes several nice command-line switches which provide the possibility to take screenshots directly from the terminal (for example shutter -w will take the screenshot of a window while shutter -f will capture the fullscreen).

Finch
Based on libpurple, Finch is developed by the Pidgin project, and it pretty much supports the same features of it, except for the graphical part, of course. There are many chat protocols which it supports, including AIM, IRC, MySpaceIM, WLM, SILC, Yahoo! or ICQ.

Finch allows you to change the status, report idle time based on keyboard activity or turn it off, it supports plugins, file transfers, sounds, status messages, chat timestamps, customization of the contact list. In addition, it also lets you change and remembers the position and size of the windows.

The very nice thing is that once you get to know how to use it, Finch becomes a great tool for getting the job done.

Finch plugins

Several plugins can be configured and some of the plugins that come bundled with Finch by default include:

• Autoaccept – auto-accept file transfer requests from selected users
• Buddy Notes – store buddy notes
• Grouping – provides alternate ways to group buddies in the contact list
• Join/Part Hiding – hide join/part messages in large rooms

For using Finch you can find a comprehensive guide that I wrote a while ago following this tutorial. This page on the official homepage may be of help too.

Some of the basic keyboard shortcuts include Alt+Q to quit, Alt+A to open the options window, Alt+N to switch to the next window, Alt+C to close current window, Alt+R to resize a window, Alt+M to move a window, Tab to switch through options and Space to tick/untick an option.

CenterIM
CenterIM is another powerful IM client which is being actively developed, and supports the following protocols: ICQ, Yahoo!, WLM, AIM, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu and LJ.

When it starts, CenterIM shows a configuration window with various general options that can be changed or toggled by pressing Enter. The window that follows allows you to set up accounts for all the supported protocols.

CenterIM provides a default interface with the contact list to the left, and the discussion windows to the right. The online contacts are separated from the offline ones. I tried it using the Yahoo! protocol, and the contact groups seem to be ignored. After writing the text you want to send, press Ctrl+X to send it. Use the Escape key to switch to the contact list and Q to quit CenterIM.

Configuration window

CenterIM supports aways messages, anti-spam features, windows size configuration, keyboard binding, logs, aways system.

One feature which I found to be great is the possibility to enable Emacs/Vi keyboard bindings in the text editor, this making it easy for a person who is used to one of these ways of text input.

This first release, codenamed ‘Betta splendens’, includes just a handful of features for now, however it is the base on which development of more advanced features will take place. Still, the goal of NeonView is to remain clean and lightweight, while also trying to implement only the needed functions that a simple image viewer should have.

Some of the features of NeonView:

• supports many image formats, including JPG, PNG, SVG, GIF or TGA (any format supported by gdk_pixbuf)
• allows navigation with next/prev buttons with images sorted by name
• fit to window or normal size image view modes
• it remembers the window size between sessions and can be started maximized (in order to remember these use Ctrl+Q to quit it for now, or just edit the ~/.neonview/neonview.cfg file)
• allows manual configuration via ~/.neonview/neonview.cfg

The full announcement is located on the NeonView homepage, here.

Download

You can download NeonView 0.2.0 binary package from here. To run it just uncompress the archive and double-click the neonview executable.

According to the official announcement, Firefox 5 includes:

• more than 1000 improvements and performance enhancements
• adds support for more modern web technologies
• now supports CSS animation standards
• Do Not Track privacy feature now available on Android too
• the new Add-on SDK allows local development of add-ons

To install it immediately in Ubuntu rather than waiting for the PPAs to update, you can follow this tutorial I wrote a few days ago. It shows how to install Firefox manually and Flash too.

Download Firefox 5

sudo apt-get install dolphin

Nautilus | Homepage
The default file manager in GNOME, Nautilus has an intuitive interface and offers features like previews, sorting, three view modes (icons, list, compact), bookmarks. Nautilus can be expanded via plugins and it also supports context menus.

sudo apt-get install nautilus

Konqueror | Homepage
Konqueror is a powerful KDE application which has been around for years. It is not only a file manager, but a web browser or image viewer too, and more. I will highlight here the main features that are brought by Konqueror as a file manager only: profiles, extensions, fullscreen mode, window splitting left/right or top/bottom, four view modes (icons, details, columns, terminal emulator), previews or sorting.

sudo apt-get install konqueror

PCManFM | Homepage
PCManFM is a fast and lightweight GTK file manager with features like tabs, file/folder sorting, four view modes (icon view, thumbnail view, compact view and detailed list view), File-Roller archiver integration, bookmarks.

sudo apt-get install pcmanfm

Thunar | Homepage
Written in GTK, this is the default file manager in the Xfce desktop environment, which has the goal of staying simplistic and only offering basic features. Tab support is missing, however Thunar features a left sidebar for fast access to common places, sorting, zooming, three view modes.

sudo apt-get install thunar

ROX-Filer | Homepage
ROX-Filer is yet another GTK file manager, starting by default with a compact interface, that is only a toolbar at the top and the space for displaying files and folders occupying the rest of the window.

sudo apt-get install rox-filer

Xfe | Homepage
Xfe is a great file manager written using the FOX toolkit, and although it doesn’t blend very well with neither KDE or GNOME, it has some cool features and a somewhat different way of using it, which can please certain users.

sudo apt-get install xfe

GNOME-Commander | Homepage
As its name suggests, GNOME Commander is a twin-panel file manager for GNOME, with an interface that resembles the one of Midnight Commander.

sudo apt-get install gnome-commander

Krusader | Homepage
I think this is *the* twin-panel file manager for KDE. Krusader brings any feature possible, and can be configured to behave differently depending on the user’s needs.

sudo apt-get install krusader

Midnight Commander | Homepage
Midnight Commander is a popular twin-panel file manager for the terminal, based on ncurses library and therefore using a text-user interface.

sudo apt-get install mc

Vifm | Homepage
Vifm is yet another twin-panel file manager for the console, also built using ncurses, including Vim-style keyboard shortcuts.

sudo apt-get install vifm

emelFM2 | Homepage
This is yet another GTK2-based file manager with a twin-panel interface, and comes with functions to perform basic file management functions, an output panel, run as root.

sudo apt-get install emelfm2

Dired | Homepage
Dired is the default file manager in the powerful Emacs application and it can be started pressing Ctrl+X and then pressing D. Dired has support for file operations, including creating symlinks or hard links, change permissions, encrypt/decrypt files, diff and integration with many other tools. Dired also features an embedded image viewer.

sudo apt-get install emacs # start it with ^X-D

Tux Commander | Homepage
Yet another twin-panel file manager, Tux Commander offers simple file manipulation functions, bookmarks, network support, plugins support, configuration of external applications.

sudo apt-get install tuxcmd

Double Commander | Homepage
Double Commander is not included by default in Ubuntu’s 11.04 repositories, but I included instructions on how to install it from a PPA. Double Commander offers both GTK and Qt interfaces (so the first one blends well in GNOME while I recommend the second one for KDE), comes with a twin-panel style and includes a big number of configuration options.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexx2000/doublecmd
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install doublecmd-gtk # for the GTK (GNOME) version
sudo apt-get install doublecmd-qt # for the Qt (KDE) interface

Gentoo | Homepage
This is not the Linux distro although it has the same name. Gentoo is another GTK two-panel file manager with functional buttons at bottom. Although Gentoo seems a pretty decent file manager and provides enough configuration options, its interface design is kind of cluttered.

sudo apt-get install gentoo

Worker | Homepage
Worker is a simple file manager which doesn’t have a top notch interface, however it has features like twin-panels and shortcut buttons to file management functions.

sudo apt-get install worker

FileRunner | Homepage
FileRunner is an older twin-panel file manager (it hasn’t been updated since 1999) written in Tcl/Tk which provides a simple yet pretty powerful interface. One of the big downsides of FileRunner is that when you click a file it will automatically try to display it. I did it by mistake with an ISO image and FileRunner rendered by computer almost completely unresponsive, so I had to kill it in the console. Although I do not believe FileRunner is fit as a 2011 file manager, some might prefer it since it’s really light on resources.

sudo apt-get install filerunner

Lfm | Homepage
Last File Manager, or Lfm for short is an ncurses file manager for the terminal which follows the model used by Midnight Commander.

sudo apt-get install lfm

muCommander | Homepage
muCommander is a typical twin-panel file manager written in Java with features like window splitting, bookmarks, sorting, quick buttons for various functions.

To install in Ubuntu, download the DEB file from here, then make sure you have Java installed and type sudo dpkg -i mucommander_0.8.5_all.deb in a terminal.