I just did a fresh install on my Macbook after picking up a new hard drive yesterday and was looking for some ways to minimize my system’s footprint as much as possible. While doing this I stumbled upon an application called Monolingual. Essentially it allows you to remove the loads of unnecessary language resources that are spread throughout your system. It is really quite amazing when you start seeing the amount of foreign languages that are supported by default and would never be used by the average user. I was amazed at how much free space I gained after doing it, almost 2GB!

You can find the application here.

Im not a huge fan of taskbars, and being a Mac user as well has made me like Expose and the general task switcher idea more. I stumbled upon a great little app today called Skippy which is great for getting similar functionality on my Linux machines. Here is a quick run down on getting it installed and running on your Ubuntu system.
First we need to get the Skippy source, which you can find here.

Once you have the source, you will want to ensure you have all the requirements installed. Luckily this can all be taken from the Ubuntu repos.

$ sudo apt-get install xorg-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libxft-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libimlib2-dev

Now untar the Skippy source we downloaded.

$ tar -xjvf skippy-0.5.0.tar.bz2

You should be able to now call make and build the Skippy binary. Once the compile finishes you will need to copy over the default Skippy configuration file into your home directory.

$ cp skippyrc-default /home/craig/.skippyrc

And now you can start Skippy and invoke it with its default key binding being F11.

Enjoy.