Author: Ed

As before, most of this is peculiar to my Xubuntu setup, but this way I’ll remember it and you might get some benefit, too… something similar will work for whatever distro you’re using, perhaps with a bit of adaptation.

Note: for all the files you tweak, first copy the original. I tend to save file whatever as whatever.base, but you may do as you see fit.

Edit ~/.bashrc to enable aliases and get a decent colored prompt:

force_color_prompt=yes
 ... snippage ...
PS1="\[\e[1m\][\[\e[33m\]\u\[\e[32m\]@\[\e[36m\]\h \[\e[37m\]\W\[\e[32m\]]\\$ "
 ... snippage ...
alias ll='ls -l'
alias la='ls -A'

What look like gratuitous backslashes in PS1 actually make it work: they escape the unprintable stuff so bash (or whatever) correctly counts the length of the string. That way the command line wraps correctly and backspaces actually back up correctly from line to line.

It seems WordPress randomly eats backslash characters, so here’s that line with backslashes turned into pipe symbols. Use your favorite editor to replace pipes with backslashes and you should get the original text back:

PS1="|[|e[1m|][|[|e[33m|]|u|[|e[32m|]@|[|e[36m|]|h |[|e[37m|]|W|[|e[32m|]]||$ "

Incidentally, the reason you want a colored prompt is so you can find the prompts when you scroll upward in a terminal window. If all the text is the same color, you can’t spot the commands amid the output.

Edit /etc/bash.bashrc to turn on command completion:

if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
    . /etc/bash_completion
fi

Add local addresses to /etc/hosts

192.168.1.1 gateway
192.168.1.2 oyster
 ... etc ..

Create NFS mount points:

sudo mkdir /mnt/bulkdata
sudo mkdir /mnt/diskimages
sudo mkdir /mnt/userfiles
sudo mkdir /mnt/music

Add NFS shares to /etc/fstab so they auto-mount:

oyster:/mnt/bulkdata    /mnt/bulkdata   nfs     defaults,noatime,noexec 0 0
oyster:/mnt/diskimages  /mnt/diskimages nfs     defaults,noatime,noexec 0 0
oyster:/mnt/userfiles   /mnt/userfiles  nfs     defaults,noatime        0 0
oyster:/mnt/music       /mnt/music      nfs     defaults,noatime,noexec 0 0

People pee all over NFS, but the alternatives seem worse. NFS preserves users & groups & permissions, doesn’t have the FAT 2-second timestamp resolution issue, and basically works. Admittedly, when the server goes Tango Uniform, things get really ugly, but that’s not a routine event.

If you have these files already set up on another system, you can fetch ’em using scp:

cd /etc
scp oyster:/etc/hosts /tmp
sudo mv hosts hosts.base
sudo cp /tmp/hosts .

Or, if you’re doing this in another partition, just cp the files from the old installation to the new one. Run diff on the two files to verify that you’ve changed what you think you have and that there’s nothing new sneaking in while you weren’t paying attention.

With a fresh Xubuntu (but it’s similar for the rest of ’em) install up & running, it’s time to set up some basic system-level stuff.

Fire up Synaptic, enable some repositories:

• Backports
• Multiverse
• Restricted

Add custom repositories (first link is the main site, second is repository & install info):

• Medibuntu — https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu
• OpenOffice — https://launchpad.net/~openoffice-pkgs/+archive/ppa
• XFCE — http://jeromeg.blog.free.fr/index.php?post/2009/03/04/Installing-Xfce-4.6-on-Ubuntu-8.04-and-Ubuntu-8.10
• Wine — http://www.winehq.org/download/deb

There’s some public-key installation required to validate each repository; check the howtos or just search for the obvious keywords, then do what the nice man tells you.

Update: There seems to be a Synaptic buglet in 8.10 that prevents the Quick Search bar from finding third-party packages; the ordinary Find works correctly. If you can’t find, say, acroread from Quick Search, do this:

sudo update-apt-xapian-index

That should get it up to speed again.

Update 2: The bug is still present in 9.04, if you’re keeping track: 288797

Reload package info, mark upgrades, apply. Perhaps you’ll get a new kernel out of that, so do one of the few mandatory reboots…

Install useful programs using Synaptic:

• flashplugin-nonfree — but turn off Flash cookies — more on that later
• acroread
• libdvdcss2 — gasp!
• non-free-codecs
• mplayer / mencoder / ffmpeg / sox / lame
• realplayer — to watch NASA TV
• nfs-common
• ssh
• htop
• java-common
• openoffice — not installed by default in Xubuntu
• msttfcorefonts
• pilot-link
• build-essential — you will compile something, eventually
• gizmo or skype
• xchm (for LTSpice IV)
• digikam (it normalizes camera filenames during upload)
• kmail (or all of Contact, sigh)
• kmymoney
• kate

You can shortcut some of those by installing xubuntu-restricted-extras if you prefer.

The National Weather Service radar plots require Genuine Sun Java, so:

• install sun-java6-jre, -bin, -fonts, -plugin
• remove default-jre, default-jre-headless, openjdk6-jre, openjdk6-jre-headless, -lib

Doing it in that order makes the dependencies work out. Otherwise, you’d yank the entire OpenOffice suite out by the roots.

Installing KDE apps perforce drags in much of the KDE infrastructure, but it mostly works. The KDE program menu fonts are tiny and there seems no obvious way to crank them up.

Download & install:

• LTSpice IV — circuit simulation

The conventional wisdom for Linux installations is to put your /home directory in a separate partition, so that your next installation won’t blow it away. The intent is to save your settings for the new installation and avoid a bunch of tedious reconfiguration.

That probably made sense back in the day when Unix installations didn’t change very much, very often, but it seems nowadays that hulking programs use elaborate configurations and don’t take kindly to being blindsided by old config files. I can’t provide specific details, but some upgrades have gone awry for mysterious reasons; a clean install fixed everything up again.

I now do a clean OS installation in a freshly formatted partition, then spend a day or two tweaking everything. This eliminates a tremendous amount of cruft, takes advantage of new features, and generally seems to be more productive than dicking around trying to figure out exactly which old setting pooched the new version.

Two meta-configuration choices help a lot:

• All our “data” files live on a file server in the basement that’s mounted via NFS, so the local system doesn’t have much more than its own configuration.
• Hard drives have plenty of space, so slicing the drive into smaller chunks and preserving the old installations doesn’t cost anything.

Case in point: I’m setting up Xubuntu 8.10 on a system with partitions containing Kubuntu 7.10 and 8.04. I’ve blown away several different trial installations of Kubuntu & Xubuntu in this partition already; now things are looking good. The trick is to use manual partitioning and aim the installer at the correct spot.

Make sure you get that right and always back up your partitions first!

The disk layout on this box:

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19452 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd0f4738c

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1           7       56196   de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda2   *           8        2489    19928633    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3            2489        2973     3888569+  db  CP/M / CTOS / ...
/dev/sda4            2974       19452   132367567+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5            2974        3496     4200966   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6            3497        6107    20972826   83  Linux
/dev/sda7            6108       15245    73400953+  83  Linux
/dev/sda8           15246       19452    33792696   83  Linux

Yup, it has Windows on it; rarely gets booted, but it’s there. You cannot begin to imagine the number of reboots required to update even a minimal Windows install after a year.

So, to begin…

The first steps with a new PC:

• back up the drive
• shrink the Windows partition down to maybe 20 GB
• snuggle the other pre-installed partitions next to it
• create an extended partition over the rest of the disk
• set up the Linux partitions

After you’ve done that the first time, you never have to do it again… just ping-pong between two (or three!) Linux partitions with each new installation. There’s a bit of fussiness with grub, but it’s easy enough to either let the new installation capture the MBR or re-aim it at the old installation after the fact.

For more details on partitioning & backups, particularly for laptops, go there. Use partimage (use System Rescue CD) for whole-partition backups to a USB drive and move on.

I favor the mini.iso installation method, as it tends to install less cruft and loads the latest versions right from the start. Start from there and proceed as directed.

Don’t do an x86_64 installation, even though you think it’d be cool. Flash doesn’t work yet and restarting Firefox a dozen times a day simply isn’t attractive. Trust me on this.

Although XFCE is rather short on creature comforts, it handles my dual output video card with separate X sessions on two monitors and doesn’t fall flat on its face with the right-hand monitor rotated into portrait mode. Some apps don’t maximize quite correctly, thinking the bottom is at 1200 (1080?) rather than 1680, but overall it works fine.

The XFCE version shipped with Xubuntu 8.10 is now backlevel, but you can fetch the latest & greatest from www.xfce.org. Add the repository (and corresponding public key), then do a normal upgrade.

You’ll also want to install/upgrade OpenOffice 3 from the PPA repository. Do the obvious search to find the most current links. There’s no need for the manual install hocus-pocus using a tarball from the OOo site.

You can’t have separate wallpaper on each virtual desktop, you must have the same number of desktops in each X session, and there are some other aggravations, but … no showstoppers so far.

Bottom line: It (pretty much) Just Works.

More on the system setup in a bit, as I get some useful results.