INSTALLING UBUNTU 8.04 (HARDY HERON) Here's how I installed Hardy on my desktop machine (Dell Optiplex GX620). I expect to do exactly the same to work on my laptop (Lenovo T61). 1) Installed from the "desktop" CD. 2) Logged in and ran sudo aptitude update sudo aptitude full-upgrade 3) I wanted to try antialiased fonts in emacs so I installed the snapshot version of emacs sudo aptitude install emacs-snapshot-gtk emacs-snapshot-el and I put the line Emacs.font: Monospace-12 in my .Xresources file. Run "xrdb .Xresources" and then start emacs. See below for other new emacs font possibilities. 4) Now (using "sudo emacs") I made a backup copy of the file /etc/apt/sources.list and edited the file as follows: a) Uncomment the lines for Canonical's 'partner' repository. b) Add the following lines for CRAN so that we always get the latest official release of R. Install the public key for the archive for additional security and to avoid annoying messages when installing packages from this site: ## CRAN ## To install the key (not required) ## gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key E2A11821 ## gpg -a --export E2A11821 | sudo apt-key add - ## or download key manually from http://keyserver.noreply.org/, ## save to key.txt, and type "sudo apt-key add key.txt". deb http://cran.us.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu hardy/ c) Add the following lines to enable the medibuntu archive. Mainly this is to get the acrobat reader. Again, installing the public key for the archive adds security and avoids annoying messages when installing packages: ## Medibuntu - Ubuntu 8.04 "hardy" ## Please report any bug on https://bugs.launchpad.net/medibuntu/ ## To install the key (not required) ## wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ hardy free non-free d) I didn't uncomment the backports repository lines, although I usually do. I think I'll wait until I know of something there that I really want or need. Now run sudo aptitude update 5) Now its time to install all your favorite packages. The one-line command to do this is below, but first some explanation. I keep my own private copies of the emacs packages auctex, ess, and bbdb, but you will probably want to use to install them as below. I took the mailcrypt package out of the list because I'm not using it anymore and if I do, I would probably install my own private copy. Similarly, I prefer to use R's own package installation interface to install R packages (i.e., I do not install them as debian/ubuntu packages), so you won't find any of those here. For this, I would suggest that you do the same. I like to have as many browsers available as possible, so I install opera (a fast commercial browser), ephiphany-browser (the gnome browser; uses the same gecko rendering engine as firefox), and konqueror (the kde browser on which apple's safari browser was based). Note however that installing konqueror requires installing a ton of KDE libraries and stuff, so you may want to forgo it. The ubuntu-restricted-extras package is a one-stop way to install some non-free packages that give support for MP3 playback and decoding, support for various other audio formats (gstreamer plugins), Microsoft fonts, Java runtime environment, Flash plugin, LAME (to create compressed audio files), and DVD playback. I used to install beagle but I took it out. Apparently "tracker" is intended to replace beagle, so I'll give it a chance. Apparently beagle is still better in many ways and some apps depend on it, but tracker is faster and less of a resource hog. For reasons of disk space, the database and equation editor components of OpenOffice.org, as well as Java integration support, are not included on the installation CDs. To get the full OpenOffice.org suite after install, you have to install the the openoffice.org metapackage. You might want to forgo this unless you really use openoffice a lot or you have a fast internet connection. I used to install this list of interesting apps too: scribus blender inkscape skencil sodipodi xaralx xaralx-examples xaralx-svg xcircuit but I'm going to forgo them since I haven't been using them anyway. Scribus especially looks like an app our secretarial staff might profit from. Ok, here's the promised command. The shell treats the backslashes like continuation characters, so this is really just a one line command. sudo aptitude install \ emacs-snapshot-gtk emacs-snapshot-el auctex ess bbdb \ texlive texlive-bibtex-extra texlive-math-extra \ r-base r-base-dev r-recommended \ gcc-doc g++ g77 g77-doc gfortran gfortran-doc \ thunderbird \ openoffice.org \ opera epiphany-browser konqueror \ a2ps aish enscript gv html2text netpbm p7zip pdfjam pdftk \ pgf ps2eps pstotext psutils unace unrar \ xpdf-reader acroread acroread-plugins mozilla-acroread \ gnupg2 gnupg-agent gnutls-bin gnutls-doc \ openssh-server vpnc network-manager-vpnc \ unison unison-gtk \ ubuntu-restricted-extras \ timer-applet \ skype \ build-essential \ rcs subversion tla tla-doc \ sane-utils gocr gocr-gtk hplip-doc \ imagemagick 6) Configure TeX (at least get the papersize right) sudo texconfig-sys 7) Follow the instructions here (http://www.stat.ufl.edu/system/vpn.shtml) to set up vpn. 8) On my IBM Thinkpad at least, putting keycode 234 = XF86Back keycode 233 = XF86Forward into my ~/.Xmodmap file makes those funny keys with symbols that look like folders (on either side of the uparrow key) work to go forward and back through the history in Firefox 3.0. There is a lot of other interesting keyboard mapping information at http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_get_special_keys_to_work 9) Remaining issues? a) When the install of ubuntu-restricted-extras installed msttcorefonts, I got the following message: │ msttcorefonts uses defoma │ │ │ │ Msttcorefonts uses the DEbian FOnt MAnager (defoma). If you wish to use │ │ the fonts provided by this package under the X Window System, you must │ │ configure it to use defoma fonts. │ │ │ │ The easiest way to do so is to use the x-ttcidfont-conf package. For │ │ more information, install the x-ttcidfont-conf package and consult its │ │ documentation under /usr/share/doc/x-ttcidfont-conf. │ │ │ │ For uses of msttcorefonts not related to the X Window System (e.g. │ │ printing) this is not required. So I installed this package and in its README.Debian file I saw that it said to add the lines FontPath "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType" FontPath "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/CID" to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Well, I tried that on my desktop machine and it freaked out X11 (maybe because of the graphics card or lack thereof: my desktop uses the onboard Intel graphics). Removing those lines from /etc/X11/xorg.conf seemed to fix the problem. I think I'll look into this more before I try it again. However, I did read in several places that ones needs to run sudo fc-cache -f -v so I did that. I also tried a few more font possiblities for emacs in my ~/.Xresources file, e.g., Emacs.font: Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-12 Emacs.font: DejaVu Sans Mono-12 I'm currently using the bitstream, but I can't really see much difference between these. b) UbuntuGuide is a useful "unofficial" place to find out about some other things you might want to do http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Hardy Of course the Ubuntu forums (fora?) are also very useful. c) If you want to make your ubuntu install look like Mac OS-X, check this page: http://www.rowtheboat.com/archives/17