I use it primarily to recycle older PCs usually Pentium III so eye candy and effects provided by Compiz Fusion are not really an option on these systems. But since moving all the computers on my home network to Ubuntu I have been playing around with a few things. I particularly like the Avant-Window-Navigator (AWN) which is a dock app-launcher similar to that in Mac OSX. First you’ll need to find out if your system can handle the effects, Compiz Fusion is already installed in Ubuntu 8.04. Go to System>Preferences>Appearance>Visual Effects. There are three settings try them, if you can’t get normal or extra to work then your system and video card can’t handle the effects so I’d stop here. If you can get normal at least to work great.

To install AWN open Synaptic  (System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager) and search for Avant then mark it for installation and install. You will also need to update your Sources List, you can do this by opening a terminal window and typing sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list this will bring up your sources list in a text editor. Then add these lines

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/awn-testing/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/awn-testing/ubuntu hardy main

or in Hardy just go System>Administration>Software Sources click Third Party Sources and add these two to the list, then reload the list. You will find AWN under Applications>Accessories but if you want AWN to run at start up you’ll need to add it to your session. Go to System>Preferences>Sessions click the Start up tab and then +Add, type Avant in the name field and avant-window-navigator in the command

field, AWN should now start automatically the next time you reboot. You can find out about AWN settings etc. in System>Preferences>Awn Manager. There are other dock app-launchers such as Cairo-dock and Kiba-dock, full details of how to install Cairo-dock in Ubuntu can be found here.

Now if the basic Compiz Fusion functions are not enough for you you can install the Simple Compizconfig settings manager (simple-ccsm) via Synaptic as before. This will give you and added choice of Custom on the Appearance-Visual Effects window where you can modify things the way you want. If this is still not enough then you can install the full blown Compiz configuration settings manager via Synaptic, this will give you access to all the possibilities available in Compiz Fusion in Settings>Preferences>Advanced Desktop Effects Settings.

The window manager or theme manager in Gnome is called Metacity and there are lots of themes available for it. If you are playing around with Compiz Fusion then you might also want to have a go with another theme manager or window decorator called Emerald. You can once again install this through Synaptic and have it run at startup by adding it to your session as before with the command emerald –replace, which will ensure the next time you log on Emerald will replace Metacity. The Emerald Theme Manager can be found in System>Preferences. Again there are a huge number of themes available here for Emerald.

I made a couple of screen casts using Compiz Fusion but quite frankly they were rubbish. There are loads of demonstrations on You Tube, here’s a particularly nice one.

Another thing you might want to try is using other Window Managers. Ubuntu ships with Gnome as the window manager and there are other flavours of Ubuntu such as Kubuntu which uses KDE. There are a few others such as Enlightenment, Open Box, Icewm and Fluxbox, do a search in Synaptic for Window Managers. If you install any of these it’s fairly easy to switch between them, just log out of Ubuntu as normal then log in again. Before you type your username and password click on the Options button on the bottom left of the screen. Here you’ll see a number of options, one of which is Select a Session, click this and select the Window Manager you want to try and that’s it…have fun.

HTML Editors:

Nvu is a great WYSIWYGHTML editor. In fact its the same editor as in Mozilla, just stand alone with a few enhancements.
Mozilla This is effectively Netscape after release to the open source community. it comes with a very good web page creation function (composer) which is WYSIWYG
HTML-Kit Probably the best free
HTML editor I’ve come across. It has a vast ifferent modes, easy, expert, hardcore and normal. Also has built in FTP upload. Arachnophilia An old favourite of mine, it’s very easy to use and quite simple. However, version 5.x is written in Java and I found it a bit clunky on older PCs, but version 4.x is still available.

Tutorials and Help:

W3C Schools At W3Schools you will find all the Web-building tutorials you need, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, XSL, Multimedia and WAP. W3Schools. The Largest Web Developers Site On The Net.
Design and build your site with Mozilla A great step by step tutorial in using Mozilla browser to design and edit your web site.
The Web Design Group A good palce to start whith help and tips on design to validation.
Web Monkey Design Tutorials A good selection of step by step tutorials and howtos.
Big Nosed Bird As the site says, “everything you need to build great web sites”
Dev Shed The Open Source Web Development Site. This site has heaps of stuff.
EFuse A step by step guide to building web sites from planning right through to expanding your site.
Web Builders Toolkit Tutorials, design tips, accessibility
Web Pages that SuckVincent Flanders take on what sucks in web design, a good place to see what not to do.
Fix Your web Site with Dr. HTML Another Vincent Flanders site which will analyse your page and give you some help on how to fix any problems.
Website tips and tricks an educational resource, providing CSS, HTML, and XHTML tutorials,graphics tutorials, articles, tips, information and resources to build or improve your Web site presence.
Beginners web design tips from GIANTmouse, a collection of web design tips, advice and a general guide for anybody who owns, runs or is interested in web design.

Resources:

Scripts

Hotscripts.com Free scripts on just about anything you can think of.
Dynamic Drive A great palce to get free, original DHML scripts and components to enhance your web site.
Meta Tag Generator Just fill in the form to generate the code for your Meta Tags, then cut’n’paste.

Graphics

Elated.comfree graphics, buttons, templates etc.
GuiStuff.com Free graphical user interfaces for web design
Desktoppublishing.com Free clipart, phots and images.
Tucows Loads of freeware and shareware.