Xubuntu Workbench: Wow!!!

During Ubuntu Loveday last Saturday, August 23, 2008, one of the presenters talked about Ubuntu derivatives. One derivative that he mentioned is Xubuntu Developers Workbench. I googled and found its download site in:

http://my-codebits.site88.net/workbench/index.html

The installer is a 1.6GB DVD iso image, and since my DVD drive is not working anymore, I decided to use Unetbootin to prepare a USB stick installer from the Workbench DVD iso file. Unetbootin is available from:

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Using the USB stick installer, I installed Workbench on our old Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop, on which I have 2GB ram. I believe that 2GB ram is just the right amount for program development. After installation, I got the beautiful desktop shown.

Some things worth noting: the base operating system is Xubuntu, so that you get a lightweight desktop environment. Workbench then adds in loads of developer utilities including Anjuta, Bluefish, Eclipse, Gambas, Geany, Glade, Lazarus, Monodevelop, Netbeans, SVNWorkbench, Umbrello, and wxGlade. Also added in are lots of different editors like Gedit, Cssed, gPHPed, HexEditor, ManEdit, Poedit, etc. You will find the desktop excellent and wonderful since you get a MacOS-Leopard-like dock, and your choice of screenlets like CPU meter, Clock, NewsFeed, Weather, etc.

After installation, I checked if all the tools that I needed are already there. I found that I had to install the following myself: manpages-dev, g++, gmp3, and mysql-server and apache which I need for LAMP-development (LAMP stands for Linux-Apache-MySQL-Perl for me, but Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP for others).

YouTube worked right away, which means that Firefox-3 has pre-installed flash. I'm still trying to get Totem to play DVDs, but I'm not sure if the problem is the lack of proper codec or my hardware problem with the built-in Sony DVD/RW.

I strongly recommend Workbench for students of computer science who have to do a lot of programming in various languages, and for professional developers.