Ubuntu GNOME Shell Remix is unofficial Ubuntu remaster in which Unity has been replace with GNOME Shell. Besides this, Ubuntu GNOME Shell Remix also comes with some applications that are a part of GNOME and aren't installed by default on Ubuntu, such as Evolution, GNOME Sushi, Contacts or Cheese.

TV-Maxe is an application that you can use to watch TV stations online, through a P2P technology called SopCast. It comes with two TV channel lists by default: one international and one Romanian, but more unofficial lists are available on its wiki (for France, Hungary, United Kingdom, Danmark, Spain, Russia and Ukraine).

Wallch is an automatic wallpaper changer that works with GNOME 3 (and Unity). It features desktop/sound notifications, random image and time changing, live earth wallpaper (a 'live' picture of the earth updated every half hour), taking screenshots or webcam image.

The application also comes with Unity launcher support, so you can start or stop Wallch, select the next or previous wallpaper or start the live earth wallpaper from the Unity launcher:

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin has been released and many of you have already upgraded or plan on upgrading, so I've made yet another post that you'll hopefully find useful, with things that you may want to tweak, fix or install in Ubuntu 12.04.

Some of the tweaks in this article are old, and we've already talked about it in the previous posts about things to tweak after installing Ubuntu 11.10 or 11.04, but there are also many new things to install and tweak and also, some improved old tweaks.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS has been released, so let's take a look at the most important new features and changes.

If you haven't used Unity and you've only seen it in screenshots, at a first look, Ubuntu 12.04 may not seem very different than 11.10, but in fact there have been a huge amount of changes in the latest Ubuntu 12.04 to make Unity more stable, better looking and easier to use and it's not just Unity, but every default package has received special attention to make Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin pixel perfect.

Unity has matured a lot with Ubuntu 12.04 and has got multi-monitor support, an improved Dash search which now doesn't rely purely on Zeitgeist and of course, there's also HUD, the new optional smart menu that lets you quickly find the action you want to perform without having to manually look through menus.

gThumb is an image viewer and organizer that includes some basic image editing features like rotation, resizing and cropping, image enhancing and more, and alsso, it can export your images to websites such as Picasa Web, Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket or as a web album.

gThumb 3.0.0 has been released recently with GTK 3 support as well as some new features:

Ubuntu Tweak 0.7.0 has been released today, bringing some important new features, especially for Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin which will be released tomorrow.

As you probably know, starting with version 0.6, Ubuntu Tweak had lost some of its main features. Well, with the latest 0.7.0, some of these features are back: App Center, Source Center (which is a PPA database that you can easily enable/disable from Ubuntu Tweak), Templates and Scripts. The Source Center comes with integrated PPA Purge feature and App Center with "Installed Apps" view:

Phoronix has started reporting that Steam is coming to Linux since 2010, and many didn't believe it but now it finally seems real because in a new post, Michael Larabel from Phoronix has posted some images with Steam running natively on Linux:

Speed Dreams is an open source, multi platform (works on Windows and Linux) motorsport simulator that was forked from the open racing simulator TORCS with the purpose of adding new features such as new cars, tracks, AI opponents and making the game more enjoyable and realistic.

As you probably know by now, each Ubuntu version has a code name in the form of "Adjective Animal" and initially, they weren't in alphabetical, until Ubuntu 6.06 Drapper DRAKE.

It looks like Pantheon, the elementary OS DE will be getting a new notification daemon called Pantheon Notify which supports several notifications at once, it expands on hover if the text is too long to be displayed in a regular notification and it supports closing the notifications.

Ubuntu 12.04 hasn't been released yet, but Canonical is already planning Ubuntu 12.10 and an initial release schedule draft has been published on the Ubuntu wiki.

Picasa for Linux isn't a native Linux application and instead, it uses WINE which comes bundled with it (so the user doesn't have to install WINE), though it does have some tweaks to make it integrate better with Linux. Well, even this Wine Picasa for Linux has been deprecated by Google.

A while back, the Firefox 2012 roadmap was announced and it included quite a few important changes, some of which are already available in the latest Firefox Nightly.

A few days ago, a Firefox Nightly update finally introduced a new built-in download panel which is displayed on the top right and shows the time remaining until the download finishes:

Rosa Media Player (ROMP) is a media player forked from SMplayer, used by default in ROSA Desktop, a Linux distribution based on Mandriva that comes with some special features. Besides being able to play almost any audio/video formats (it uses Mplayer), Rosa Media Player can also extract audio from videos, trim videos or record the desktop.

MATE is a GNOME 2 (which is now unmaintained) fork that lets you use the old GNOME 2 interface. It uses renamed packages and applications so it doesn't conflict with GNOME 3 and you can have both MATE and GNOME3 installed in the same time, something which isn't possible with the vanilla GNOME 2.

Cairo Dock (or GLX Dock) is an animated application launcher (dock bar) for Linux that runs under GNOME, KDE or XFCE.

Pinta is a cross-platform, simplified image editor based on Paint.NET, designed to serve as an alternative to more advanced applications like GIMP, for casual users. The application features drawing tools, unlimited layers, includes over 35 image effects and adjustments and can be configured to use a docked interface or multiple windows.

Unity 5.10.0 (both 2D and 3D) is currently building on Launchpad and should be available soon for Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin users.

A while back, Firefox got an option to only load tabs when they are clicked, which makes Firefox a lot faster if you have many open tabs.

But this was only implemented for regular tabs and didn't work for app tabs (pinned tabs), until Firefox 12 which got an about:config option to load app tabs on demand too.

Sopcast Player, the P2P streaming application that allows you to watch various TV channels online, is now available for Android, allowing you to watch TV on your Android smartphone or tablet.

Bluebird, a simple yet stylish theme that was used by default in Xubuntu 10.10 is now available for GTK3 (it supports GTK 3.2 and 3.4) and works with both Xubuntu (Xfce) and Ubuntu (GNOME / Unity).

JDownloader is a free, open source download manager which makes it easy to download files from one-click hosting sites (supports more than 110 services) including using premium accounts, support for downloading from YouTube, Vimeo and other such websites, it allows parallel downloads, automatic CAPTCHAs, automatic archive extraction, automatically acquire a new IP (if your router is supported) and more.

JDownloader 2 beta is available for download. The new version brings a reworked user interface, simplified settings, new options for some of the available plugins and more. The JDownloader Google+ page also says there are "many new features and improvements under the hood" but unfortunately, there's no official changelog for the latest JDownloader 2.

A while back, Canonical announced that it will no longer fund Kubuntu, the KDE Ubuntu flavor, thus making it a community-only Ubuntu flavor. But there is some good news for Kubuntu users: Blue Systems will start sponsoring Kubuntu starting with version 12.10 for which the development cycle starts in May.

WebUpd8 reader Brian Bentsen has created a PPA repository to easily install extra Cinnamon themes, applets and extensions in Ubuntu, Linux Mint and LMDE.

The PPA is new but it already provides around 40 packages, including a classic menu applet, Gpaste, hardware monitor applet, messaging menu, places applet, force quit, window menu, window icon list, coverflow alt-tab as well as themes like Eleganse, Holo, ICS, elementary, Ambiance, Glass, Baldr and many others.

Gloobus Preview was recently fixed so it now works with Ubuntu 12.04 too. Besides the Ubuntu 12.04 fix, the latest Gloobus Preview from BZR comes with GTK3 support, support for password-protected documents, a rewritten documents plugin, WebM support, fixed ttf, pdf and video plugins and other fixes.

I've recently got a Dell XPS L702X laptop and I was trying to get Nvidia Optimus GPU switching to work in Ubuntu 12.04, through Bumblebee but when running "optirun", I was getting this error:

After trying various different solutions available on the Bumblebee wiki and other websites, I've finally found one that worked, so I though I'd share it with you, in case you encounter the same issue as me.

In the Ubuntu 12.04 community wallpapers post, I was telling you about some plans to provide packages for the wallpapers in each Ubuntu version. Well, as it turns out, this hasn't been postponed after all and an updated "ubuntu-wallpapers" package has landed in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin which lets you install the community wallpapers from Ubuntu Karmic, Lucid, Maverick, Natty, Oneiric and obviously, Precise.

Linux Mint Debian Update Pack 4 is finally considered stable and is now available for all LMDE users. The update replaces GNOME 2 with GNOME Shell (although it's possible to "freeze" LMDE to GNOME 2) and it also brings Cinnamon and Mate desktop, so LMDE users can choose from three GNOME-based "shells".

Orion, a cool, light GTK3 theme pack is now available for GNOME 3.4 (which includes Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin) and is compatible with the latest Unico GTK engine. The new release also brings support for Openbox.

VirtualBox 4.1.12 has been released and with it, the VirtualBox repository has been updated to support the latest Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, even though this isn't mentioned on the VirtualBox Linux downloads page yet.

One of the best GTK themes, elementary, has been updated to version 3.0 today, this being the first stable release that supports GTK3.

Just like in the last few releases, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin won't use a completely new wallpaper by default but only a slightly modified version of the previous background.

A few days ago, we wrote about setting up window dodge for maximized windows in Ubuntu 12.04 but if you want the real dodge windows behaviour for the Unity launcher, here's another script that does this.