In this case, we are going to use the installation of the Google Chrome browser and this is not because I think that Google is or Google Chrome is better than Firefox and Firefox ships by default with all Ubuntu installations. But it's mainly because if you're taking this course I'm assuming that you're taking in preparation to take some of my other courses whether it be Ruby on Rails or Python or any of those and when I am building out those types of applications I'm using chrome and I may also be using some tools specific to Chrome like their specific type of web developer tools and so if you're wanting to follow along then it would make sense to also use that browser.

But if you are very comfortable with Firefox and you prefer it then you can just skip this guide entirely but it may be helpful to watch just in case you have never worked with Linux and you've never installed any desktop applications on it so I'm going to start off by opening up Firefox right here and going to navigate to google.com/chrome and this is going to take me to the download page.

So here I can say download chrome and I want the 64 bit Debian Ubuntu version and then I can click accept and install

and then say open with the default installer so I'm just going to hit ok

As you can see right up here it shows the progress.

and so it's downloading and now it opens up the Ubuntu software system and it's asking if we would like to install this so I'm going to click on install and then depending on how slow or fast your system is this is going to go through.

You need to type in your system password and click on authenticate

and it's going to go and then install the browser for us and we'll be able to test it out.

Then afterwards I'm also going to show you how you can work with these little symbols in these shortcuts here on the left-hand side because the taskbar can be pretty helpful.

so it looks like our version of Chrome installed successfully so that's good. I'm going to close out of here and also close out of Firefox and now let's customize what we have here on our taskbar. I like having system settings there that can be helpful but I don't do a lot of shopping on Amazon on my virtual machine so I'm going to right click on it and unlock it from the taskbar

and do the same thing with software and the same thing with office Impress their version and these are their opensource versions of things like Excel and Word and PowerPoint. If you want to use those feel free to but for the case of development I'm not going to and so like having any wasted space here so I'll unlock that one. We are not going to be using Firefox so I will unlock that and then this is the file manager. If you'd like you can keep this here and I'll keep it here. Just so you can have access to it if you ever want to access your files in a visual graphical interface instead of the command line.

And then there's just going to be 2 items that I want to add here. One is going to be Chrome so I'm going to add Google Chrome to it so I'm going to click on it. That will open the browser up and as you can see any active programs will be here on the left-hand side and so as soon as it loads up then we'll be able to add it permanently to the taskbar and looks like it had a little issue starting up. So let's click on it one more time and once again it's not working so don't worry I have had this happen before.

So whenever that is the case a reboot will usually fix it. It's just one of the issues related to working with the virtual machine sometimes. So open up the terminal and up. There we go. Finally did decide to load up so you can see the error says Ubuntu has experienced an internal error.

We can send that report. And now Google Chrome finally did load up. Sometimes when you install a new piece of desktop software that can happen. So it is asking if we want to make Google Chrome the default browser. Yes, we do and then automatically send usage that's up to you. I will add a click. Okay.

And now you can see that Google Chrome came up and now I'm going to pin it to the taskbar.

So here I can say lock to Launcher and so now even when I click out of it I'm still going to have access to it right here and I want to do the same thing with the terminals. So you can right-click here and then just say lock to Launcher

and so usually if you see my personal development environment this is usually what I have just so I can very quickly come over here. Open up a new terminal session and then that will allow me to make my work a little bit more efficient.

Now there is another very helpful shortcut. If you click on your windows or command key you go and if you click on it and hold it down you will see that the items here on the taskbar switch to numbers

and this is very helpful so imagine that I do not want to go and click this little terminal icon right here. I can just type command 4 or Windows 4 and it automatically brings that up

and you could also do the same thing for Chrome. If I type Command 3 it's going to open up the Chrome browser and now we have access to it.

So that is a very helpful set of shortcuts and just a few other ones that I've found that can be incredibly helpful is let's open up a few new terminal sessions so you can open up as many of these as you feel are necessary and I'm going to open up a few chrome windows as well. And just so you can tell they are different and let's go to the Wall Street Journal and then I'm going to go to. Let's see, we'll go to something else and it will go to daily smarty in the other one.

So we're going to have a few windows open now. We have some web browser windows open we have terminal and now if you type alt + tab what this is going to allow you to do is to navigate to every one of the windows that you have open.

So if I press alt + tab I can navigate between all four of these terminal windows I have open.

If I keep on pressing tab it's going to then open up all of the Google Chrome windows that I have.

And as soon as I let go of alt it is going to then focus on whatever one I released on. So if I want this terminal session

I can let go of alt and here it is here is the terminal session that I selected.

So you're going to see as I go through courses when I'm using a virtual machine. You're going to see that I switch between windows very quickly and I rarely will come over here on the left-hand side. And so typically what I'll do is all use a shortcut keys.

So I'd definitely get in the practice of being able to play with those because it's going to make your entire process your whole development process much more efficient. When you don't have to worry about moving your mouse over every single time that you want to change windows you can simply go and loop through wherever you're trying to access. And then it's going to make you just really have a better workflow.