I’m a little later than I wanted to be, but I’ve finally installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 18.10: Bionic Beaver. I like to do a fresh install to test my backup skills and to try to get rid of extra stuff I may have installed that I don’t need anymore.
This article is my install notes.
This is a continuation of my notes on installing Ubuntu 16.04. In this post, I install the programs that I use for working with different kinds of media like recording audio or creating videos.
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This is a continuation of my notes on installing Ubuntu 16.04. In this post, I install the programs that I use for programming and technical work.
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This is a continuation of my notes on installing Ubuntu 16.04. In this post, I install the programs that I use to work (aside from programming).
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Continuing on with outfitting my new Ubuntu 16.04 install, this post contains my notes for installing the utilities that didn’t really fit into another post. I have some configuration changes that I like to make it my own.
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The MenuLibre tool makes it easy to add shortcuts that allow you to launch programs from the Unity menu. It is a must have if you install anything manually without using a deb pacakge.
Install:
sudo apt-get install menulibre
Note: If you have shortcuts from an old installation, those would be located in the ~/.local/share/applications directory. (That helped me with shortcuts for which I forgot all of the command line parameters)
I use the File Roller application usually. But, I wanted the 7zip and rar libraries available:
sudo apt-get install p7zip-full p7zip-rar
For my dual screen setup at my desk, I have a few tweaks that I like to make. I can open the “Displays” settings app to make these changes:
With as much trouble as I am having with the Ubuntu Software app, I want the power of Synaptic.
sudo apt-get install synaptic
Another tool is the Y PPA Manager from Web Upd8:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/y-ppa-manager sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install y-ppa-manager
The Compiz Settings Manager is a handy tool to tweak the compiz settings. I installed the compizconfig-settings-manager package from the Software Center.
sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager sudo apt-get install compiz-plugins
If you search for “compiz” in the Unity menu, you can easily open it.
I like the Wobbly Windows, so I enabled that. It requires disabling Snappy Windows, which it will do for you.
I installed the Unity Tweak Tool for a few more changes:
sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool
Then, under “Panel”, I added the seconds, date, and weekday to the clock. And, I checked “Display remaining battery life”. Under scrolling, I changed the scrollbars to legacy. I don’t like the Overlay ones that hide.
In the Appearance Settings app, I made 2 changes:
There are times that I don’t want my computer to lock. I am finally installing the caffeine indicator to make that easy.
Previously, you had to add a repository. I found in this bug report, that caffeine has been brought into the main Ubuntu repositories.
sudo apt-get install caffeine
After installing, I added the indicator to the startup applications. I opened “Startup Applications” from the dash. “Caffeine” was already in the list. The indicator was not. I added “caffeine-indicator” to the list.
My first step this time around after restoring files was to install the network-related applications. I needed to get back online quickly with being able to talk to people, connect to clients’ VPNs, and hit websites.
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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.
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I didn’t take screenshots of the install process. I just basically accepted the defaults.
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.
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.
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:
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.
If you want to follow along with my install process, you can check out the next post: Ubuntu 16.04 — Internet.
Labor Day Weekend made for the perfect time to get my laptop updated. I know Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) has been out for a while, but I am just now getting it installed. Here are my notes.
I didn’t take screenshots of all of the steps. They were pretty straight forward. The one thing that I did change was the partitioning. I read that having the Swap partition on the SSD drive will wear it out, so I went ahead and moved it onto the regular drive.
So, here’s what it looked like:
In previous installs, I was using Duplicity/Deja Dup. This time, I have been using BackupPC for backups. It is a nice centralized solution that de-dups and compresses nicely.
Now, to restore… The BackupPC FAQ: SSH Setup is a good place to start.
To troubleshoot, I went to the backuppc server, and ran:
$ ssh pistachio ssh: connect to host pistachio port 22: Connection refused
That tells me that the ssh server is not installed. So, I ran:
sudo apt-get install ssh
On the BackupPC server, I had already run the keygen. So, I just had to open the id_rsa.pub file and copy it’s contents.
sudo vi /var/lib/backuppc/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
Then, on my laptop, I pasted it onto the end of the authorized_keys2 files (which, in my case I had to create):
$ sudo mkdir /root/.ssh $ sudo vi /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2
Next, I tried to connect to my laptop of the backuppc user on the server:
sudo su - backuppc sudo ssh root@pistachio
I had to run:
ssh-keygen -f "/var/lib/backuppc/.ssh/known_hosts" -R pistachio
These are the directories that I restored from my backup:
From here, you can see all the steps that I took in this series, or the next step is the Utilities and Configuration.
This is part of my series on installing Ubuntu 14.04 on my laptop. In the previous post, I configured my hybrid graphics card. In this post, I am walking through various settings and utilities that I like to install to make the final tweaks on my installation.