VNovember

1. Simple, preinstalled Desktop Theme manager

I don’t know about your ubuntu install, but mine didn’t come with Emerald or any sort of stable gnome theme manager. I for some reason remember them coming installed in the past, but the current install I have doesn’t have any theme manager built in. Making Ubuntu look futuristic and cool is one of the coolest things about the OS–plus who wants to look at that ugly brown and orange default theme anyways.

2. VMWare, or something similiar

I’m not the most advanced linux user on the planet, but I’d like to have something out of the box to run virtual machines. If I could run Photoshop and a few other OSX based pieces of software in a virtual machine, I’d uninstall windows and use Ubuntu exclusively. Dual booting sucks. There is a forum post on ubuntu on how to get VMWare running, but it’s a bit lengthy and it’d be nice to have this process streamlined or at least brought to the fore front so people who may not know what virtual servers are can get the same setup

3. Gdesklets and Widgets

I know you can get these by opening up synaptic or by using apt-get, but why not just have them ready to go by default? I love having the Dash on OSX where I can twitter, post blogs, and look at my istat right from the desktop. It makes me less productive at work, but that’s beside the point.

4. Launchy

I love launchy. Let’s put it on their by default… I know my default install is kind of asking for alot and the system could get bloated, but I’d like to have a simple add/remove programs style area with these things included as an alternative. As far as I know now, for any dock, dashboard, or widget t ype of install, I have to updated my apt sources and use apt get or synaptic.

5. A decent Coda style HTML/CSS/Programming utility.

I don’t mind using nautlius for sftp and bluefish or gedit to do my programming work, but why can’t I even get a decent html/css eidtor like cssedit, or skedit, or coda where FTP and text editor are included in the same program so I can open directly from FTP or SFTP? I’ve heard people have gotten this working in Quanta, but I for some reason have no been able to get it to work properly.

I zipped up a working version of the wordpress blog I created for my apparel company Assault. You can grab the theme’s zip file at The Assault Blog.

There are still a few bugs to work out but it should be done in the next week or so. It also supports widgets!