Setting Up Lucid Lynx

It's been a long time since I've posted anything, it seems I just don't have the ego required to maintain a regular blog. Oh well, I'll continue posting things that I find interesting at my own pace. Like a lot of my posts are probably going to be, today's post will mostly be for my own benefit. I want to write down all that I did to set up my new install of Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). That way if things go wrong I won't have to depend on my terrible memory to set it all back up again.

First things first, installing. Something about the way the new Ubuntu handles graphics doesn't agree with my laptop (Asus K60) so I can't run the Live CD or anything. Instead to do a "clean" install I had to install Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), install a proprietary NVIDIA driver and then do a distribution upgrade. Total time about 3 hours.

Before doing any more package management it's best to switch to the fastest server. So just go to the Update settings and press Choose Best Server. That'll make all the rest happen a lot faster.

Some packages to remove:
  • Most of the included games (although I like gbrainy)
Some packages to add:
  • ntp (and then adjust the time and date settings to make use of the nearest ntp server)
  • ubuntu-restricted-extras
  • easytag (I'm a little neurotic about how my music files are tagged)
  • chromium
  • fotoxx (my favorite app for editing photos, the repositories only hold a very out dated version so I get it straight from the source)
  • gimp (I don't use it very often but sometimes it's nice to have a photo editing app a little more powerful than fotoxx)
  • ccsm (choosing between none, normal and extra is no way to manage desktop effects)
  • vlc (it just plays everything)
  • gnome-do (I hate navigating menus to launch apps and Gnome Shell isn't quite ready yet)
  • tilda (got to have a terminal just a key press away)
  • conky (though I'll probably do it differently for 10.04, this was my old set up)
  • ubuntu tweak
  • meld (a great graphical diff viewer)
  • Compiz 0.8.6 (it's been stable for a while but the default repositories still only have 0.8.4)
  • powertop
  • backintime (set this up with an external hard drive and it's the easiest back up system ever)
Flash 10.0 has some issues on 64 bit machines (like not being able to press any buttons inside of flash). Luckily there's a stable beta of Flash 10.1 that works fine. The easiest way to get it is to use the Get64bitFlash script that michael37 put up on the Ubuntu forums.

Some settings I like to change:
  • power (I don't want my laptop going to sleep when I close the lid to carry it into another room)
  • font rendering (full hinting baby!)
  • window buttons (use gconf-editor to put them back to the right where they belong)
  • enable color bash prompt (uncomment the right line in ~/.bashrc) use green [0;32]
  • panels and panel elements (I like having only 1 panel at the top and no separate App, Places, System menus)
  • startup applications
  • language support (add French and German)
  • Re-enable Ctrl-Alt-Backspace
  • Firefox speed settings (though I don't use it much, I still want it to be as fast as possible)
  • Bash history search (I like my up and down arrows to auto-complete from history based on current input rather than just go through the list of all commands. To do this just add 2 lines to ~/.inputrc: "/e[A": history-search-backward and "/e[B": history-search-forward
Some extensions I like to add to Chromium:
And that's my setup.
Posted by Oliver Schmid / Sunday, June 6, 2010 /
Labels: , , , , ,

0 comments:

Post a Comment