ubuntu 11.04 setup

23 August 2011 - Fairbanks

I managed to have Fedora 15 for about two weeks before I gave up on Gnome3 and then decided Xfce just isn’t what I want for my laptop. Gnome 3 is missing too many small customizations not letting me quickly get rid of annoyances.

Ubuntu 11.04’s Unity was a good laptop interface. This post will be my notes of what customizations I did to make myself happy.

Chrome

Google’s Chrome 64bit .deb for Ubuntu works great. Just download and let it automatically install itself.

CapsLock key is dumb

Press the ‘windows’ key, type keyboard to get Keyboard Preferences control panel -> Layouts Tab -> Options button -> Ctrl key position -> Check Make Caps Lock an additional Ctrl

try doing that sanely in gnome 3

Select those windows

I’m a mouse over to focus guy. Press the ‘windows’ key, type windows -> launch Window Preferences control panel -> check Select windows when the mouse moves over them

RVM

Get dependencies for rvm plus the system ruby (handy for root)

1.
sudo apt-get install curl git-core ruby irb
1.
bash < <(curl -s https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/install/rvm)
1. automatically sets up your .bashrc so just
1. open a new terminal window to get rvm in your path
rvm notes
1. review their notes for ubuntu - I just want 1.9.2
sudo apt-get install build-essential bison openssl libreadline6 libreadline6-dev curl git-core zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev autoconf libc6-dev ncurses-dev automake
1. development dependencies hopefully installed correctly
rvm install 1.9.2
1. hopefully that works well - make it the default
rvm use 1.9.2 --default

Rubygems

There are a few rubygems I expect on all my systems:

gem install cheat     # command line cheat sheets
                      # http://cheat.errtheblog.com/
gem install getopt    # I'm ghetto like that
gem install highline  # stop rewriting 'ask()'
gem install trollop   # I need to stop being so ghetto

GIS tools (qgis gdal)

For work I need GIS stuff. Getting the basics from apt is a good start. Customized qgis and gdal can come later. Default will hand you Qgis 1.4 (OUCH!) so make sure you setup the third party bleeding edge stuff. official qgis ubuntu words

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qgis qgis-mapserver python-qgis
1. this gets some dependancies I want like grass, proj, and others
sudo apt-get install gdal-bin dans-gdal-scripts

dayne.broderson.org