Top 6 applications you could install after installing Ubuntu Linux

My top 6 favourite applications to be installed on Ubuntu Linux would be as follows:

1]amaroK:

It’s a media player for the KDE desktop,can be installed on the GNOME desktop which is the default on Ubuntu at the cost of a few extra libraries which don’t affect your PC performance if you have approximately 384 Mb or more of RAM.

It has a inbuilt library(which actually works,in comparison with WMP) which you can use to keep track of all your music at one place,also a tie-up with http://www.lyrc.co.ar which provides automatic lyrics for all your music.In the rare case lyrics are not found at lyrc.co.ar,Amarok helps you find them using Google and highly specialised and accurate search phrases.It also fetches covers for your albums from Amazon.com.If you are not sure of whether your tag information is correct,you can instruct Amarok to look up the MusicBrainz library which provides accurate tag information by comparing a generated musical fingerprint of your doubtful track with it’s vast library of fingerprints and returns accurate tag information down to the genre of that particular album!Unfortunately,tag lookup doesn’t work with MP3s.

Amarok is eminently skinnable with various skins which you can preview before downloading from within amarok.Also,it provides contextual information of the currently-playing track with information from the “Open encylopedia”-Wikipedia.Amarok has a tie-up with Last.fm which records your taste in music and recommends similar artistes to you based on tracks played by you.Of course,this is optional and enabled only if you select the appropriate checkbox in Amarok’s preferences.

2]K3B:

This is a CD/DVD burning program for KDE(again).Offers all the features of Nero or <insert_your_favourite_burning_program_here> and much more.Burning and copying CDs or DVDs is now just a matter of a few clicks.

#Note:Once you have installed any of the KDE apps,you don’t need to install the libraries again for any other KDE app,so for example if you have installed amarok,then K3B won’t require to install those libraries again,thus maintaining the performance of your PC at the previous levels.

3]APTonCD:

In case you went overboard with experimenting with the freedom Linux provides you and had to reinstall a highly customized install and don’t want to download all those apps all over again,APTonCD is the app for you.

It backs up all your packages(software on Ubuntu comes in packages,an advantage is that they are all tested to work with Ubuntu and don’t contain malware) to a small ISO which you can burn to a CD and in the above scenario,use to restore all your packages without downloading a byte.

4]Last Exit

The Last FM site mentioned above also plays recommended artistes on Internet Radio which can be ripped to your hard disk using this application.(That’s an illegal way to accumulate music,but it’s OK in countries where recording from a radio broadcast is legal.) Please check out the appropriate laws in your country before installing this application.

5]Deluge:

This is a young bit torrent client still being actively developed but has received rave reviews throughout the community.I still have to try this app out and will post more details when I gain more experience with it.

6]MusicBrainz Picard:

This is the official tagging client from MusicBrainz which overcomes Amarok’s disability of not being able to tag M4A files and also enables lookup for MP3s.Unfortunately,I’m still stuck halfway through the install process and have posted a thread in the Ubuntu Forums.I will post more details as soon as I get it working.

UPDATE: I got Picard working by compiling source,used it for a while,should say that it works beautifully.Also,now Picard is available in the Hardy repositories,so no need to compile source for this application.