What you need

First, you will need a working Firefox browser. That is simple as nearly every distribution ships with Firefox. Next you will need to install the application apturl. To install this you can either find it from within Synaptic (NOTE: You will not find this within the Ubuntu Software Center) or you can install it from the command line. Let’s install from the command line:

1. Open up a terminal window.
2. Issue the command sudo apt-get install apturl.
3. Type your sudo password and hit Enter.
4. Accept any necessary dependencies.
5. Let the installation complete.

Now you are ready for a little Firefox configuration magic.

Configuring Firefox

Figure 1

If you’ve never worked with the about:config piece in Firefox, you are about to. The about:config page is a way to configure numerous hidden options in Firefox. This also allows you to create new configuration options. To get to this page open up Firefox and enter about:config in the address bar. You will be warned about the dangers of messing with this configuration and you will have to accept by clicking a button to continue on. Once within about:config you will see numerous strings that can be edited (see Figure 1).

Figure 2

What you have to do is create a new string. To do this right click anywhere on the page and select New > String. In the resulting window (see Figure 2) enter the following string:

network.protocol-handler.app.apt

Click OK and a new window will appear pre-filled with the string:

/usr/bin/apturl

OK that string to complete the new configuration. Now you have to add one more string. Right-click the about:config page, select New > String, and enter the following:

network.protocol-handler.app.apt+http

OK that and then OK the pre-filled in string for the value.

You are now ready to give it a try.

Installing

From Firefox, go to the site http://appnr.com and locate an application to install. You will notice, when you mouse over an application, an Install button will appear. Click on that application’s Install button and you will prompted for your sudo password. Once you authenticate to sudo the application will install without having to open an external application. Although the same things are going on in the background, it is just one step quicker than the standard GDebi install from within Firefox. And anything to make Linux easier is a plus.

The typical action of cutting and pasting does and should (in most cases) work across applications as well as into the command line. The trick is knowing either the key combinations or the correct mouse buttons. So whether your copying and pasting from one document to another, from document to email (or vice versa), or just about any application to any application Linux can copy and paste. Let’s find out just how.

The Mouse

This is the big one that makes your copy/paste life very simple. With the Linux operating system there are three mouse buttons: 1, 2, 3. The left mouse button is button 1, the right mouse button is button 2, and the mouse wheel is button 3. If your mouse doesn’t have a mouse wheel then pressing both 1 and 2 together is the equivalent of button 3. Now that we have that out of the way I am going to show you a nice trick. Go to a document (OpenOffice, Abiword, or even compose an email). Highlight some text by clicking button 1 and dragging the mouse over the text you want to highlight (simple text selection). Once you have selected your text click your cursor in a blank area of the document and click button 3. What you should see is the selected text is pasted where you clicked with button 3. So the action of highlighting text with button 1 is copying and clicking with button 3 is pasting. How simple is that? This action also works from document to command line and vice versa.

The Keyboard

Naturally the standard keyboard key combinations will work for copying and pasting. There are a couple of exceptions. When copying within (or to and from) some terminal windows there are different key combinations to use. For example, in gnome-terminal instead of Ctrl-c and Ctrl-v (for copy and paste) you use Ctrl-shift-c and Ctrl-shift-v for copying and pasting. This can be changed within the profile editor in gnome-terminal (if you want this feature to echo the standard combination.) Be aware, however, that if you copy text by selecting via the left mouse you can not paste by using Ctrl-v. The Ctrl-v combination (or Ctrl-Shift-v combination) only works in conjunction with the Ctrl-c or Ctrl-Shift-c combinations.

The Menu

As you can imagine nearly every Linux GUI application has an Edit menu that includes the Copy/Paste entries. These work exactly as you would expect. These menu entries also work in conjunction with the Ctrl-c/v combinations, but not the button 1 highlight action (button 1 copy action only works with the button 3 paste action).

Final Thoughts

I will warn you that once you get used to the button1/3 copy/paste action you will find yourself attempting it in all other operating systems. This method of copy/paste is the easiest means of copying and pasting content bar none. It is nice, however, that the various Linux distributions include other means for those users who prefer the standard methods.

As with everything Linux, there are multiple ways to install applications: Command line, from source, from binary, or GUI front end. What we are going to discuss is the Ubuntu Graphical Package Management front end Synaptic.

Synaptic is an incredibly easy to use front end for the apt package management system. Synaptic is a one-stop-shop for applications. You can think of it as an equivalent to the Apple App Store for the iPhone – only you don’t have to pay for anything. You just fire up Synaptic, search for the application you want to install, select the application, and click Apply. You will, of course, have to supply your sudo password in order for the changes to be applied.

Let’s take a closer look at how Synaptic works.

Fire it up!

When you first start up Synaptic you will be greeted by the main window.

Synaptic Main Window

As you can see there are three panes, a toolbar, a menu list, and organization selection icon list. The panes are fairly simple:

• Left Pane: This is the package listing. From here you can select categories of applications.
• Upper Right Pane: This pane lists the various packages from either categories or search results.
• Lower Left Pane: This pane reveals information about a selected package.

Let’s first take a look at how to search and install a resulting application. Say you want to install ardour (an open source digital audio workstation). Enter ardour into the Search text area and hit enter. The results will pop up in the upper right pane.

Search Results

As you can see the package you were looking for is right at the top of the list. To install Ardour on your system click the check box and a menu will appear. This menu is the action menu that allows you to select what action to take on a package. If the package is not installed your only option will be to mark the package for installation. You “mark” packages this way so you can go through and mark multiple packages to install, remove, re-install, upgrade.

Select your action

Once you have marked all of the packages you can then click Apply and a new window will appear. This new window informs you what will need to be installed to resolve any dependencies for the requested application.

Dependency resolution

Once you click “Mark” you will be sent back to the main window where you can click “Apply”. After clicking Apply you will have one more window to view which is the Summary Window.

Summary

Once you click Apply the progress window will open to show you how things are going.

Synaptic progress window

When the application installation is complete a window will appear informing you the process is finished.

Changes applied

Now let’s say you don’t know what package you want to install, but you know what category it would fall under. Let’s stick with our example above. Since we know Ardour is an audio application we can be pretty sure it will fall under the multimedia category. If you click through the three Multimedia listings in the category pane (left pane) you will find Ardour in the Multimedia(universe) repository.

Ardour Found

Once you find the listing you will walk through the same steps as you would have above.

And that’s it. Installing an application in Ubuntu is simple. On top of the system being simple, it is a centralized repository where you can find thousands upon thousands of possible applications to install.