LincolnBlogs

Yes, I know, It’s about time. Last night I finally got around to upgrading my Ubuntu install on my mail workstation at home from 7.10 to 8.04. Well, I shouldn’t say upgraded, because it was a fresh install.

I used the default graphical install, which basically means that the new install took a long time. Well, to be fair, the initial install wasn’t too long, but the package upgrades took forever. Perhaps I should have installed closer to the release when there weren’t so many upgrades a? 🙂

One of my biggest concerns was getting my dual monitors running, and this was actually a breeze. All I had to do was enable the restricted nvidia drivers and then add the twinview stuff to my xorg.conf and I was up and running no problem.

Once that was running to my satisfaction, it was time to get all the packages on there that I need to be able to function. This is what I really wanted to mention here. Long ago I decided to start keeping track of what I installed (and actually used) so that I could replicate a usable install faster. What I did was just write it all up in a script. I thought I would share mine with you all, and perhaps you might find it useful yourself!


#!/bin/bash
# Here is the general stuff I need:
sudo apt-get install mozilla-thunderbird sqlite rox-filer php5-common php5-cli php-pear subversion openssh-server clusterssh imagemagick alpine vim synergy smbfs curl
# This is what you would do if you were LEGALLY able to do so - thus giving you the codecs and utilities
# for you to actually watch/listen to the media you have legally purchased.
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vlc libdvdcss2 ubuntu-restricted-extras w32codecs mplayer mencoder build-essential
# You want to install XMMS - it's just better than everything else, no matter what they say...
wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/11173488/xmms_1.2.10%2B20070601-1build2_i386.deb
echo "install xmms_1.2.10%2B20070601-1build2_i386.deb package for xmms!"
#Installing stuff for work:
sudo apt-get install sqlite luma x3270 ldap-utils dia expect


And that’s it! I hope you enjoy! Make your own script, it’ll save you oodles of time getting things “just right” after your clean reinstall.