I’ve been doing a lot of development on my Ubuntu box lately — though my machine of choice is still my laptop, the advantage of a dual-monitor setup for coding really can’t be overstated. It’s an interesting mix of incredibly easy-to-use, easy-to-install software and the usual dependency-chasing (Perl modules, I’m looking at you). But here are some pages I’ve found useful lately:

• Rails on Ubuntu. An entirely hand-held, un-scary process despite what the documentation looks like.
• Medibuntu – non-free codecs and whatnot that can’t be distributed with the OS, but which you should install tout suite.
• Linux Twitter clients. There are quite a few roundups, but this one has pretty pictures, and it’s lovely to notice the gradation from your standard GTK look’n'feel down to AIR-for-Linux apps. Of course, for those of us with a more command-line bent…
• Twitter for irssi – ah, the joy of Open Source. “Maybe I could just put twitter as a fake ‘irc’ channel? Let’s see if there’s a plugin… Oh, there it is!”. There seem to be a couple of others, too – I’ll update if this one doesn’t work.
• Nvidia Dual Monitor HOWTO – Verging on the specific, here, but the very first thing I had to do on my new Ubuntu install was dive into xorg.conf. Ah, the memories.
• Even more specific: Aliasing SSH using .ssh/config (if your login name on one machine is different to those you regularly SSH to, this saves typing!) and setting up passwordless ssh.
• Don’t forget some awesome Blizzard wallpapers, of course.
• Lifehacker also kindly rises to the occasion with Five Tweaks For Your New Ubuntu Desktop and an excerpt from Ubuntu Kung Fu. Interesting takeaway: Dropbox supports Linux, so no excuse not to back up.
• Finally, did you take advantage of Codeweavers’ free software day last week? Even if you didn’t, I’ve found the CrossOver products to be worth paying for if you find there’s something you really can’t live without — if gaming’s more your thing, I used Cedega to great success when I first started playing WoW. Productivity tip: don’t install either, and force yourself to reboot to play games. You get more work done, trust me…

Obviously that barely touches the Ubuntu iceberg, so maybe there’ll be a power-tools followup at some point. However, all you really need is ssh, screen, vim, a keyboard and monitor, right?

[CD image from themactep]