Category: Install Help

Ubuntu 16.04 — Restore

This is my first post in the series for installing Ubuntu 16.04 on my Inspiron 17R laptop. In this step, I am mainly just restoring files and putting the data back after formatting the drive.

Series Navigation:

I didn’t take screenshots of the install process. I just basically accepted the defaults.

Restoring files

These are the directories that I restored.  Maybe it will give you an idea of things you may want to restore if you do the same thing.

  • ~/.ssh: The keys for my remote ssh connections — most important because of backuppc restoring
  • ~/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
  • ~/GideonTaylor: I keep my work files in a different directory
  • ~/.config/google-chrome: The settings for Chrome (extensions, bookmarks, etc)  (or, ~/.config/google-chrome-beta)
  • ~/.local/share/keyrings: My saved passwords
  • ~/.Skype: Skype history
  • ~/.remmina: The settings for my remote connections
  • ~/.local/share/shotwell: The settings and thumbnails for my photos
  • ~/.sword: The downloaded Bible files for Xiphos (and the underlying Sword library)
  • ~/.filezilla: The settings for my FTP connections
  • ~/.sqldeveloper: The connection settings for SQL developer
  • ~/.vim: stores the plugins installed in Gvim
  • ~/.vimrc: preferences for Gvim
  • /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections: this saves all of my wireless connections and VPN connections

My backup this time was located on an external USB drive.  I also had a BackupPC installation, but I didn’t restore a lot from it.  For smaller directories/files, just copy and paste works fine.  For larger directories, it was better to use grsync, which I installed from Ubuntu Software.

Shortcuts / Menu Entries

I had a couple of items that I had added to help me get to Vmware View machines.  Unfortunately, I didn’t remember the exact commandline.  Instead of looking it up again, I found that I could copy the .desktop files from the directory:

  • ~/.local/share/applications

BackupPC

I’m not going through the whole configuration of the server.  In this case, I just need it to connect and begin to back up the laptop after my install.

I checked the version of my apps:

$rsync --version
rsync version 3.1.1 protocol version 31

First, SSH is not enabled on Ubuntu 16.04 by default.  I had to install it:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Then, I generated the keys with this command (left the passphrase blank)

sudo ssh-keygen -t rsa

On my backup server, the backuppc user’s home directory is /var/lib/backuppc (you can confirm in the /etc/passwd file).  Using vi, I copied the contents of  /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub on the client to /var/lib/backuppc/.ssh/known_hosts.  I’m not sure this step worked … on my test I had to remove the pistachio key (maybe I should have done that first):

ssh-keygen -f "/var/lib/backuppc/.ssh/known_hosts" -R pistachio

Then, I opened up /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2 on my laptop (client) and pasted the contents of /var/lib/backuppc/.ssh/id_rsa.pub from the server. In the end, Copy and Paste in a text editor wasn’t good enough. I had to scp the file across between the computers.

I verified security on the directory:

sudo chmod -R go-rwx /root/.ssh

Finally, I tested as the backuppc user on the backup server:

sudo su backuppc
ssh -l root pistachio whoami

To troubleshoot, I ran the server with debugging messages as root:

service ssh stop
/usr/sbin/sshd -d

Next time, I will configure Backup PC to backup the root .ssh directory to avoid having to reconfigure all of this.

Next Steps

If you want to follow along with my install process, you can check out the next post: Ubuntu 16.04 — Internet.

 

Resources

Ubuntu 14.04: Hybrid Graphics

This is part of my series on installing Ubuntu 14.04 on my laptop.  In the previous post, I worked through installing Virtualbox for VMs.  In this post, I am working through installing the video drivers for optimal use of the video cards.  My laptop has a hybrid graphics card, so I attempted to use Nvidia Prime.  When that didn’t work, I dropped back to Bumblebee.

Just so you can see what I have, I looked in lspci.  Here’s the Nvidia controller:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107M [GeForce GT 650M] (rev a1)

Here’s the Intel controller:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)

 

Here’s what I did…

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Ubuntu 14.04: Virtualization

This is a continuation of my series on installing Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr.  My previous post covered going through the different media programs that I installed back onto my laptop.  In this post, I’ll install Virtualbox to allow using virtual machines.  If you would like to see the complete list of posts, check out my Ubuntu 14.04 install page.

Last time, I just downloaded the deb package from Virtualbox’s Download website.  This time, they showed that they have a respository.  By installing from the repository, it should keep Virtualbox up to date.

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Ubuntu 14.04: Media Programs

This is a continuation of my series on installing Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr.  My previous post covered installing programming environments and applications.  In this post, I’ll go through the different media programs that I installed back onto my laptop.  If you would like to see the complete list of posts, check out my Ubuntu 14.04 install page.

Visual

One of the most important programs that I use now is Shutter.  It allows me to easily take screenshots of what I am working and edit the screenshots.  The shutter package is easily installed from the Software Center.  Once installed, I tweaked a few of the settings in Edit > Preferences.

First, I changed the path for the screenshots from the Pictures folder to a new folder that I created called screenshots.

Setting Shutter Output Path

In addition, I checked the first two options on the “Behavior” tab to allow it to start when I boot up the computer.

Shutter Preferences

I installed the following other programs for working with visual media:

  • Gimp: for editing photos
  • Inkscape: vector-based drawing
  • Xournal: has features that allow marking up a PDF

Audio

Videos

These are the programs I use for playing and editing video:

Codecs

This installed many different things for media.  For example, I noticed that it installed True Type fonts.  It also installs codecs for playing videos, etc.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

In addition, I installed the libdvdcss to get the restricted formats.  That was simply by installing this package…

sudo apt-get install libdvdread4

Then, I ran the script…

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

Finally, I determined that I had to use the /dev/sr0 as the device for playing my DVDs.  Like this:

Opening a DVD in VLC

Next Steps

If you are following along with the complete install, check out my next post about Virtualbox.  Or, you can go to the list of posts in this series (Installing Ubuntu 14.04).

Resources

Ubuntu 14.04: Programming Environments

This is a continuation of my Ubuntu 14.04 Install.  In the previous post, I covered all of my notes on installing network/Internet-related configuration.  In this post, I’ll cover setting up my programming environments and applications.  If you would like to see the list of posts in this series, you can look at the Ubuntu 14.04 Install page.

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