What to do after installing Ubuntu 18.10

For me, a sub-average long-time software developer, Ubuntu is a great operating system. Canonical, the company who releases Ubuntu, does so every six months, in April and October; therefore, version 18.10 was released in October 2018.

My system : Lenovo Yogo 2 Pro x86_64 Grub GNU Debian Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish

Normally I like to install every new Ubuntu release for the following reasons:

I remove all the cruft I have gathered, notice I said “install”, not “upgrade”,
new features available.

Partitions
Pre-Install
Post-Install
- Update
- Tools
- Network
- System Monitor
- Firefox
- Sublime Text
- Sublime Merge
- Slack
- E-mail
- Development
- SSH keys
- Hugo
- Terminal
- Bash
- Applications
- System config
Previous Installs

Partitions

Partition information is important when using a custom install.

$ sudo lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL
NAME    FSTYPE     SIZE MOUNTPOINT      LABEL
sda              238.5G
├─sda1  vfat       477M                 WINY
├─sda2  swap       8.4G [SWAP]
├─sda3  ext4        28G /
├─sda4  ext4        51G /home
├─sda5  ext4      81.7G                 Meadow
├─sda6  ntfs         4G                 LENOVO
├─sda7  vfat       250M /boot/efi       BOOT
└─sda10 ext4      61.8G                 Distroer

Pre-Install

Note: You are going to have to backup your current files to another partition like I did or you could use an external drive or USB stick. I keep my bash files in a GitHub repo, see [Dotfiles] below.

The main things I backed up were:

~/bin/
~/.bash_links/
~/.config/sublime-text-3/Packages/User/
~/.ssh/config
~/.gitconfig
~/.hgrc
~/.s3cfg
~/.scrapinghub.yml
/etc/hosts
bookmarks
Evolution
Gramps
dconf dump /org/gnome/terminal/ > gnome_terminal_settings_backup # https://askubuntu.com/questions/967517#967535
cp ~/.bash_links/* -L * /media/stav/Meadow/xenix

Post-Install

Here is my list of things I had to do to after the install to get up and running with a fresh Ubuntu.

Update

First update Ubuntu with any recent security fixes

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Tools

sudo apt install curl htop vim gnome-tweak-tool

Restore ~/bin/

Network

Merge /etc/hosts

System Monitor

I love to have system info in the Top Panel so that I can alway have a quick glance at cpu usage and network traffic; but, my beloved indicator-multiload applet no longer works on recent version of Ubuntu.

So now I switched to an extension/applet called [Gnome Shell System Monitor] (https://github.com/paradoxxxzero/gnome-shell-system-monitor-applet). I installed: the system dependencies the browser extension and the host connector and then restarted Gnome; but, unfortunately Firefox could not detect the connector:

Although GNOME Shell integration extension is running, native host connector is not detected

So I had to download the tarball from Github and install manually which was really easy:

make install

Then run Gnome Tweak Tool and enable in Extensions.

Firefox

Use dark theme

about:addons -> Themes

Update search engine to Duck Duck Go:

about:preferences#search -> Default Search Engine

Do not warn when closing multiple tabs:

about:config

Search: “browser.tabs.warn”

browser.tabs.warnOnClose `false`
browser.tabs.warnOnCloseOtherTabs `false`

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is an excellent editor.

Install

wget -qO - https://download.sublimetext.com/sublimehq-pub.gpg | sudo apt-key add -

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https

echo "deb https://download.sublimetext.com/ apt/stable/" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sublime-text.list

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install sublime-text

Errors

Note that when I tried to run it I got errors

$ subl
Unable to load libgdk-x11-2.0.so
....

So I installed this package

$ sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0

License

Add under help menu.

----- BEGIN LICENSE -----
Steven Almeroth
Single User License
EA7E-... 104B
------ END LICENSE ------

Package Control

You want Package Control from wbond.

Install Package Control

Command Pallate (shft-ctrl-p) -> Install Package Control

Install packages

Restore the following file from your backup and Package Control will automatically install all missing packages:

~/.config/sublime-text-3/Packages/User/Package Control.sublime-settings

  "installed_packages":
  [
      "Anaconda",
      "GitGutter",
      "Hugofy",
      "INI",
      "Package Control",
      "Pretty JSON",
      "Python Pretty Print",
      "Theme - SoDaReloaded",
      "TrailingSpaces",
      "Vue Syntax Highlight"
  ]

Copy Files

Copy backup files to ~/.config/sublime-text-3/Packages/User/

Sublime Merge

I also now use Sublime Merge from the same people.

Install

https://www.sublimemerge.com/docs/linux_repositories

Slack

https://snapcraft.io/slack

sudo snap install slack --classic
# slack 3.3.3 from Slack✓ installed

E-mail

Add settings in Thunderbird setup

Development

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall
sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev libgtk2.0-dev libvte-dev
sudo apt-get install git git-extras gitg meld tree
sudo apt-get install python-pip python3-pip python3-venv virtualenvwrapper

$ python
Python 2.7.15+ (default, Oct  2 2018, 22:12:08)

$ python3
Python 3.6.7rc1 (default, Sep 27 2018, 09:51:25)

Pipenv

https://pipenv.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install/#installing-pipenv

pip install --user pipenv

Note: after installing pipenv you will need to make sure that the user install location (~/.local/bin) is in the path, easiest way is to logout/login

Node

Install nvm

https://github.com/creationix/nvm/blob/master/README.md#installation

This will update your .bashrc

$ wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.33.11/install.sh | bash

Open a new terminal, or else you can setup the environment variable manually which the installer will explain how to do.

$ nvm --version
    0.33.11

Install node

$ nvm ls-remote |tail

   v10.11.0
   v10.12.0
    v11.0.0

$ nvm install 11 --latest-npm

Downloading and installing node v11.0.0...
Downloading https://nodejs.org/dist/v11.0.0/node-v11.0.0-linux-x64.tar.xz...
Computing checksum with sha256sum Checksums matched!
Now using node v11.0.0 (npm v6.4.1)
Creating default alias: default -> 11 (-> v11.0.0)

SSH keys

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "stav@phinix"
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa
sudo apt-get install xclip
xclip -sel clip < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Note that new keys will have to be uploaded to remotes:

GitHub
Bitbucket
cowboy:~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Hugo

It’s good to update this document as I’m installing.

sudo snap install hugo

mkdir -p ~/Work/stav/Hugo
git clone git@github.com:stav/stav.linode.gen.git ~/Work/stav/Hugo/steven.michael
git clone git@github.com:gcushen/hugo-academic.git /home/stav/Work/stav/Hugo/steven.michael/themes/academic

Terminal

Reload backup settings.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/967517#967535

cp ~/.config/dconf/user /tmp # backup
dconf reset -f /org/gnome/terminal/
dconf load /org/gnome/terminal/ < gnome_terminal_settings_backup

Bash

git clone git@github.com:stav/dotbash.git ~/.bash

Install bash_it

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/Bash-it/bash-it.git ~/.bash_it
~/.bash_it/install.sh  # keep existing `.bashrc` and append templates

Install Powerline theme

https://github.com/Bash-it/bash-it/tree/master/themes/powerline

mkdir ~/Public/powerline

cd ~/Public/powerline

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/powerline/fonts.git

./fonts/install.sh

wget https://github.com/powerline/powerline/raw/develop/font/PowerlineSymbols.otf

wget https://github.com/powerline/powerline/raw/develop/font/10-powerline-symbols.conf

mv PowerlineSymbols.otf ~/.local/share/fonts/

fc-cache -vf ~/.local/share/fonts/

mkdir -p ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/

mv 10-powerline-symbols.conf ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/

Close all Terminal instances

Copy files

.bash_projects
.bash-it.bash
.bashrc

Link files for editor reference

stav@thelatae:~$ ll .bash_links/
.bash-it.bash -> /home/stav/.bash-it.bash
.bash_projects -> /home/stav/.bash_projects
.bashrc -> /home/stav/.bashrc

Applications

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser gimp mpv lynx elinks

System config

See Lenovo Yoga Ultrabook SSD Tweaks

Previous Installs

I previously installed some other stuff:

What to do after installing Ubuntu 18.10

Contents

Partitions

Pre-Install

Post-Install

Update

Tools

Network

System Monitor

Firefox

Sublime Text

Install

Errors

License

Package Control

Install Package Control

Install packages

Copy Files

Sublime Merge

Install

Slack

E-mail

Development

Pipenv

Node

Install nvm

Install node

SSH keys

Hugo

Terminal

Bash

Install bash_it

Install Powerline theme

Copy files

Link files for editor reference

Applications

System config

Previous Installs