Useful PPA list

I'm using Ubuntu as my primary OS. It serves me well and I like it. I know some of it's bugs and problems and nice ways to avoid them to live in peace and harmony.

After removing previous version (because it was death slow after my horrible experiments) and installing Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat I realised that some of my favourite software is missing. That was because PPA (Personal Package Archive) died together with previous install of Ubuntu. So I had to recollect a list of my daily used software and search for a correct PPA.

So to prevent such failures in future I decided to make a list of useful PPAs:

• ppa:docky-core/ppa - is a development PPA for a great nice looking dock, written with Mono, if it means something to you
• ppa:ubuntu-on-rails/ppa - a set of plugins, themes and code highlighting schemes for gEdit for RoR development, like TextMate. In fact it suits for Django'ers too, and I was using it for quite a long time. But now a Gemini plugin is broken for me (issue on github) so I'm trying to switch to vim. Process goes slowly and painfully and when it will come to end I'll report it here. This PPA gives you good editor that is both powerful and fast (not to mention monsters like PyDev and PyCharm) to do almost everything you need. With vim I just want some more power and opportunities to shoot myself in a leg :)
• ppa:am-monkeyd/nautilus-elementary-ppa patches your Nautilus and makes it sleek and sexy. Many unnecessary elements of it removed, it looks cleaner and more usable. It also contains Gloobus Preview, wich is another nice "MacOS X" kind of app.
• ppa:team-xbmc/unstable - fresh version of XBMC - big multimedia combine. (Until now PPA on this position called ppa:team-xbmc/ppa. But they didn't make any updates since Maverick, so I decided to move to unstable XBMC release)
• ppa:chromium-daily/ppa - this is what I can't live without. Daily builds of opensource version of Google Chrome - Chromium. It's great to see improvements here and there of the software that is updated every day. The downside - sometimes, when they do really great changes, you can suffer much. It's bleeding edge for sure :)
• ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa - newer version of Wine, that works faster and better.
• ppa:ubuntu-desktop/ppa - fresher version of Unity, Ubuntu's default desktop environment. New features and fixes right from developers!
• ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-2 - text editor that I use daily
• ppa:mitya57/ppa - PPA which has nice Markdown editor Retext with preview and tabs

There's a few more of PPA in my OS, but I'm not sure what they are doing and do I actually need them :) I guess they were part of my experiments.

To install any of those PPAs type in terminal:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update

After that you can install software from PPA with
sudo apt-get install ...

But you have to know exact package name of the app in PPA, which is not the name of PPA itself. Chromium package in chromium-daily PPA is chromium-browser. It is much easier to go to Software Center, where all of your PPA are listed and see what you actually need to install.

In the end I want to say that PPA is a handy way to keep your software up to date, see all the new shiny features right away. But quite a big problem with PPA is that they do not support dependencies more then in main Ubuntu repositories. It means it can break your system if you install something from PPA that was made without needed care and love. So watch out!

Tell me other interesting PPAs if you know any!

P.S. As Blogger Stat tells me, some people googles here in searching Opera PPA. I wouldn't comment my attitude to Opera, but I'll try to ease your pain and tell you the answer (taken from UbuntuUpdates) in 3 steps:

1. wget -O - http://deb.opera.com/archive.key | sudo apt-key add -
2. sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ stable non-free" >> 
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/opera.list'
3. sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install opera