software for ubuntu

If you are a LTS user like me and stuck on Hardy Heron, sometimes packages are availible that have the newest shiniest thing prepackaged for you. Emacs 23 can be installed with a simple

sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot-gtk

and then I wrote a little script to launch emacs with my favorite font:

#!/bin/sh
exec emacs-snapshot \
  -fn "Monospace-11" "$@" 

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Another bleeding-edge thing to check out is Google Chrome's native Linux edition. Go get it from this page.