I have been using Ubuntu since 06.06 and during these years I have found out that there are certain things in Ubuntu (or any Linux ) that will come to you by experience only. Here I am sharing some useful tips and softwares that might help new Ubuntu users.   Home Partition : I will begin with the installation. The most helpful thing I guess will be creating a sep arate home partition. You can create a home partition of Ext4 format and mount it under /home. This is recommended because this will help you to reinstall Ubuntu again without losing any files or settings as you will not need to format the home partition every time. The partitioning can be done using the Ubuntu installer or G parted available in the Ubuntu installation media. If you use the same home partition across multiple installations with same username it will work.   Installation on EFI systems : The detailed explanation on how to do this can be seen in my previous post here.   ...

Recently I have came across many people asking how to install Ubuntu in a UEFI machine. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (or UEFI for short) is a new type of firmware that was initially designed by Intel (known as EFI then) mainly for its Itanium based systems. It introduces new ways of booting an OS that is distinct from the commonly used "MBR boot code" method followed for BIOS systems. A detailed description of UEFI can be found at the ArchWiki or Wikipedia .  The installation remains similar to normal installation procedure but needs a little bit of tweaking. Having a PC with EFI firmware does not mean that you need to install Ubuntu in EFI mode. If you have a machine in which there is any operating system already installed in Legacy mode then you must install Ubuntu also in Legacy mode, unless you wish to format the system and start from scratch. If Ubuntu is the only operating system on your computer, then it does not matter, you can install Ubuntu in EF...

                          Two major problems I have experienced with Ubuntu on a laptops are heating up and battery drainage. Most of the modern day devices have the capability to save power. The drivers installed on the Ubuntu has the capability to do that also. But they are underutilized. This results in the dual problems of heavy battery drain and heating up. These two problems are interrelated and they can be solve together by doing some manual configurations. The following methods were successfully tested in three hp laptops ( The laptops used processors: AMD A10 with ATI dual graphics, i5 with Intel and ATI dual graphics and Dual Core without graphics card). 1)  The first and most important solution to the problem is TLP. (Thanks to my friend who told me about this.)  TLP is an advanced power management tool for Linux. It is a pure command li...

Microsoft Office is my favorite office application. The default LibreOffice in Ubuntu 12.10 lacks a lot of Features available in MS Office. After succesfull installation of Microsoft Office 2007 in Ubuntu 11.10 and 12.04/12.10 , I tried installing Microsoft Office 2010 in 12.10. The installation instructions for Microsoft Office 2007 in 12.10 is same as that in 12.04. To install Microsoft Office 2010 in Ubuntu 12.10,  I followed the following steps. There are few changes in the dependencies needed for 201 0 when compared to 20 0 7 . This method works in Ubuntu 13.04, 13.10 and 14.04 as well. This has been tested on both 3 2 and 64 bits successfully . This method is reported to work in Ubuntu derivatives like Mint by users through comment. 1. For 64-bit users first step is to install mesa OpenGL and the 32-bit libraries. For all except 14.04 :   sudo apt-get install mesa-utils mesa-utils-extra libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libgl1-mesa-dev ia32-libs For Ubuntu 14.04 users t...