Initial batch of packages after Ubuntu 8.04 installation

For now, I too would like to provide you with a list of the programs and packages that I installed very shortly after completing the fresh installed of Ubuntu 8.04. There are similar lists throughout the blogspere so this is by no mean unique but you can’t have too many examples (plus, I’m about to install Ubuntu on a new laptop as well and I need the reference for myself).

1. Conky

Conky is a very useful tool to track various aspect of your computer (memory, disk, etc…) It sits on your desktop. Visit conky for more details.

sudo install apt-get conky curl

2. OpenSSH Server

The client portion of OpenSSH is installed by default but not the server portion. Even though I’m not running a server, I find it very useful to be able to login to my system remotely from time to time. I rely on SSH to do that. sudo apt-get install openssh-server

3. DVD support

I want my system to allow me to play DVDs. The best way to do this is to enable the Medibuntu repository. See the full instructions at Medibuntu.
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

4. Enabling mp3 and other stuff

By default, mp3 support is not included in Ubuntu for legal reasons. To get this going, you need to enable the “multiverse” package source (System | Administration | Software Sources) and check the multiverse on the very first tab then sudo apt-get install package gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse.

5. lame and flac

These are the command line utilities to create .mp3 and .flac files. They are quite usefull to have if you spend anytime managing your on-line music collection. sudo apt-get install lame flac

6. soundconverter

This application does with a GUI what lame and flac do on a command line.. Soundconverter can create mp3, ogg, wav and flac files from your originals. Very usefull sudo apt-get install soundconverter

7. Amarok

Not perfect but close. It’s a personal choice but I find this application better than the default application installed by Ubuntu. sudo apt-get install amarok

8. filezilla

Very good FTP application. One of the few that understands that some of us have to work through a proxy to get out of our corporate network. Not the case for me at home but I do us this at the office so why learn something different? It works. sudo apt-get install filezilla

9. lm-sensors, hddtemp and sensors-applet

The fact that this package was not installed by default baffled me. lm-sensors allows your applications (like conky, see 1. above) to access the various temperature gages of your system. hddtemp is a similar utility to access the temperature sensors in most modern hard drive. sensors-applet is a desktop utility to display the temperature information on your taskbar. sudo apt-get install lm-sensors hdtemp sensors-applet

10. minicom

Believe it or not, I still find that I have to access old style, serial communication devices fro mtime to time. Life savers when you try to debug some of the older gear. By the way, the normal serial port on the PC is normally found at /dev/ttyS0 (corresponding to COM1: in DOS/WIndows). sudo apt-get install minicom.

11. Wine

Having Wine on my Linux desktop allows me to run some old favorites for which I have yet to find Linux alternatives. The two major ones are DVDDecrypter and DVDShrink. Because wine changes and evolves very rapidly, I opted to install the package directly from the Wine repository instead of through the standard repository.

Full instructions are found on the WineHQ web site: http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb

12. Youtube downloader

A great package that allows you do download videos from youtune and watch them on your PC. sudo apt-get install youtube-dl ffmpeg

13. System Information

A simple utility to report all kind of information about your system. sudo apt-get install sysinfo (the only thing this utility is missing is a print option; great information to have when you hae to rebuild your system after a major incidents!

Summary:

To install most of the package mentioned above: sudo apt-get install conky curl openssh-server lame flac soundconverter amarok filezilla lm-sensors hddtemp sensors-applet minicom youtube-dl ffmpeg

Follow the instructions to get wine.

That’s it for now. Hope this was useful.

First thing first: installation!

I’m not going to spend a lot of time going through the installation of the Ubuntu distribution.  There are a lot of good sites (in addition to the Ubuntu official site) that can walk your through this step.  I will however note a couple of things that I like to do:

1. ALWAYS do an MD5SUM check on the downloaded ISO: We can lazy something since we download a lot of stuff and it always works but in the case of the ISO for the OS, it is important to make sure that we start with a perfect image.
2. ALWAYS do a CD check upon first booting the new image: again, because the original computer download and created a perfect image on it’s CD/DVD writer does not mean that the CD/DVD reader on the current machine will be able to read it fully without errors.

During the installation, Ubuntu does a great job of selecting pretty much everything for you including the partitioning of the disk.  This is where I start to leave the beaten path a bit but modifying the standard partitioning scheme and instead using my own.  In particular, I keep my /home directory on a physically separate hard drive.  I found over the years that this makes it a lot easier to move my stuff around or to update/upgrade distribution and not loose anything.  And now, I also have a 3rd hard drive that I assign to /data during the installation.  This is where I keep some of my “other” stuff.

Go ahead, take the plunge!

Hello world!

Hello world indeed.

My intention with this blog is to capture my experience with Ubuntu 8.04 installation on a new PC.  Well, actually, the PC is not new nor I am new to Ubuntu.  I have used various flavours of Linux for about 10 years now.  But this is my first attempt at sharing with the entire world my experience and documenting it as I go along.

If there is something in here that you like, good… let me know.  If not, I’m still glad you stopped by.