Ubuntu 13.10: Installing Saucy Salamander

digitaleagle Uncategorized

The time has come again for installing my laptop over from scratch. My goal is to take notes as I go through and capture what I do in case it might help others, or if nothing else, my notes will help me remember what I did.

So, here’s my first post of notes…

Installing the OS

I didn’t screenshot all of the steps in the installation.  Most of the answers where pretty obvious.  The partitioning was more of a challenge.

My laptop has two harddrives.  The first drive is a terabyte conventional drive.  I want this as my home directory.

Choosing Home Directory Partition

I set the Solid State drive as the root directory.

Choosing Root Partition

Don’t forget the swap partition:

Swap Partition

After it was done, I did the ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase thing because I had encrypted my home directory.

Shutter

Shutter is always a good first place to start so you can add screenshots to your notes.  You’ll have to look at my old install notes for detail: A Ruckus with Ringtail.

After installing Shutter from the Software Center, I tweaked the following:

  • Created a screenshots folder in my home directory
  • Under Edit > Preferences > Main, I changed the directory to my new screenshots directory
  • Under Edit > Perferences > Behavior, I checked “Start Shutter at login” and “Hide window on first launch”.

Restoring Backups

This time, I used duplicity, the default backup program, to copy (backup) all of my home directory onto an external USB drive.  It was kind of nice, but the problem was restoring the files.  I didn’t find a GUI way to restore the files.  I had to use this command to do it:

duplicity –file-to-restore <directory to restore> file://<path to backup folder> <restore directory/location>

  • directory to restore: this is the path where the file was when it was backed up.  It is important that you don’t include the beginning slash.
  • path to backup folder: this is the path where you configured duplicity to originally backup
  • restore directory: this is the place where you want it restored (this can/should include the beginning slash)

For example, this restored the 0ad configuration directory:

duplicity --file-to-restore home/skp/.config/0ad file:///media/skp/FreeAgent\ GoFlex\ Drive/backup-repo/pecan/2013-11-28/ ~/.config/0ad

One nice part about the whole backup part is that I could encrypt and password protect the data on the external drive.  When I ran the restore command, it prompts for the password.

These are the directories that I restored from my backup:

  • ~/Documents: This is where I put all my document files
  • ~/Pictures: I have Shotwell pointed at this directory, so it contains all the pictures from my cell phone and digital camera
  • ~/MIS: I keep my work files in a different directory
  • ~/app: This has all of my programming stuff (“application development”)
  • ~/VirtualBox VMs: These are the virtual computers
  • ~/.config/google-chrome-beta: The settings for Chrome (extensions, bookmarks, etc)
  • ~/.gnome2/keyrings: My saved passwords
  • ~/.Skype: Skype history
  • ~/.remmina: The settings for my remote connections
  • ~/.ssh: The keys for my remote ssh connections
  • ~/.local/share/shotwell: The settings and thumbnails for my photos (moved from ~/.shotwell, see Ask Ubuntu)
  • ~/.sword: The downloaded Bible files for Xiphos (and the underlying Sword library)
  • ~/.VirtualBox: The settings for my virtual machines
  • ~/.filezilla: The settings for my FTP connections
  • ~/.local/share/evolution and ~/.config/evolution for Evolution Email (had to reboot for Evolution to pick it up)
  • ~/.sqldeveloper: The connection settings for SQL developer
  • /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections: this saves all of my wireless connections and VPN connections

Main Menu

I usually the Main Menu program to make adding menu items easier later.  It’s the alacarte package.

Installing Main Menu Program

It didn’t work well on this installation.  It would let me add menu items, but then it wouldn’t show them and it would lose the icons.

Instead, I found another program called MenuLibre.  You can find my notes on it here: Ubuntu 13.10 MenuLibre.

Video Acceleration

I tried the  bumblebee-config-gui like I did on my previous installation.  Apparently, the repository doesn’t support Ubuntu 13.10.  Then, I found an article on WebUpd8 that recommended Nvidia Prime.

Installing it was as easy as this command:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-319 nvidia-settings-319 nvidia-prime

One issue I had was that I couldn’t find the glxspheres program that I had used before.  I installed the mesa-utils package from the Software Center, and it at least gave me glxgears.

glxgears gives me this output:

33953 frames in 5.0 seconds = 6790.578 FPS

glxinfo gives me this output:


glxheads: exercise multiple GLX connections (any key = exit)
Usage:
 glxheads xdisplayname ...
Example:
 glxheads :0 mars:0 venus:1
Name: :0.0
 Display: 0x17bd3c0
 Window: 0x5600002
 Context: 0x17d7328
 GL_VERSION: 4.3.0 NVIDIA 319.32
 GL_VENDOR: NVIDIA Corporation
 GL_RENDERER: GeForce GT 650M/PCIe/SSE2

I found that the glxspheres program seems to be in the virtualgl project.  It’s download page is on SourceForge: VirtualGL 2.3.3.  I downloaded the 64-bit Deb file, and I used this command to extract and run just the glxspheres program:

dpkg --fsys-tarfile virtualgl_2.3.3_amd64.deb | tar -xf - ./opt/VirtualGL/bin/glxspheres64
opt/VirtualGL/bin/glxspheres64

Here’s the frame rates that I saw:


Polygons in scene: 62464
Visual ID of window: 0x73
Context is Direct
OpenGL Renderer: GeForce GT 650M/PCIe/SSE2
813.805586 frames/sec - 908.207034 Mpixels/sec
864.934836 frames/sec - 965.267277 Mpixels/sec
865.282148 frames/sec - 965.654877 Mpixels/sec

The frame rates were much, much faster than what I saw back on my Ubuntu 12.10 installation.

Touchpad Driver

First, I had to install git to make checking out the driver much easier:

sudo apt-get install git

Then, I checked out the driver from github:

git clone https://github.com/emmanuelthome/psmouse-alps.git

I had to apply the same fix as my previous installation.  I didn’t repeat the details here.  Basically, I added the third parameter as “, 0” to all of the input_mt_init_slots() functions.

To install, I ran the following commands:

cd psmouse-alps/
sudo dkms add .
sudo modprobe -r psmouse
sudo dkms build -m psmouse -v custom-1.2 --all
sudo dkms autoinstall --force
sudo modprobe psmouse

That seemed to do the trick.  Now, I have Touchpad settings…

Mouse & Touchpad Settings

Resources

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