Install a new desktop

Install a new desktop Organic Design procedure

Download and install

First download and install the operating system of choice, our procedures are suited to Debian-like operating systems such as Linux Mint (preferred), Debian, gNewSense, Mepis or Ubuntu.

Get network access and upgrade to the current state

apt-get update apt-get upgrade

Required utilities and libraries

<bash>apt-get install subversion git python-qt4 p7zip-full bzip2 rar</bash>

Post install checklist

This is my personal checklist of items I do after a fresh installation to get everything I use running and to get it looking the way I like it :-) Some of these items will already be included, or may not be available, depending on which OS you're running.

• Advanced settings (then add all buttons to windows from shell menu, also fonts, see below)
• Keyboard (add US, Alternative International and then fix the Cedilla)
• Geany (the local page shows context-action, colour and line-spacing tweaks)
• VLC
• Pidgin (with OTR and plugin pack and copy backed up .purple after install)
• Thunderbird and Enigmail - apt-get install enigmail
• Inkscape
• Skype (details on installation from the i386 .deb with MultiArch here - note it says sound crashing needs libpulse0:i386 too, or try libasound2-plugins:i386 if still crashing)
• World clock (zones in ~/.tzlist, use custom format %H:%M (%A) - the annoying window-size bug is not present in Debian)
• Go to details in system settings and set the default programs associated with file-types
• Icons (gnome-brave-icon-theme, can be installed via apt-get)
• Transmission (apt-get install transmission-qt)

Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation, and a large community of external contributors. Firefox, officially abbreviated as Fx or fx and popularly abbreviated FF, started as a fork of the Navigator browser component of the Mozilla Application Suite. Firefox has replaced the Mozilla Suite as the flagship product of the Mozilla project, under the direction of the Mozilla Foundation.

Firefox is our choice of web-browser here at Organic Design, and this article lists the extensions and configurations we like to include with it. Note that browsers are inherently risky by the fact that any site you may visit can contain malicious code, and you are also trusting all your installed extensions. For this reason it's a very good idea to install FireJail which gives you super easy sandboxing capability. See below for more detail.

[more...]

Brazilian keyboard settings

To make your keyboard have the accents working for Brazilian Portuguese on Debian-like operating systems in the proper way that Brazilians are used to, you need to add a second Keyboard Layout which uses the English (US, alternative international) language.

The dead keys are single quote, double quote, back-tick and tilde, typing any of these characters while using the international keyboard will result in an accent being applied to the next typed character - unless the next character is a space in which case the dead-key itself will be typed. For example single quote, double quote, back-tick and tilde respectively followed by the letter A results in á, ä, à and ã.

In Spanish, upside down question marks (¿) and exclamation marks (¡) are also required as they work like quotes that wrap around a sentence in Spanish. These characters are available on the international keyboard using right-alt + 1 and right-alt + /.

Cedilla

An annoying hack is required to fix the cedilla, because the apostrophe+C yields a C with an accent instead of a Cedilla! [more...]

SSD optimisation

I've had one too many mechanical disk failures and have finally decided to move over to SSD. They still have a long way to go as a technology since they still suffer from the major problem of flash technology in general which is that each memory bit can only be written to a thousand times (3 thousand on the most recent technology). So I'm just going to get a small cheap one initially and hopefully in six months or so they'll be longer lasting and more practical sizes. I've started with a 120GB Samgsung 840 series, for these reasons. Most of the following optimisation tips are taken from SSD optimisation in the Debian wiki, and another good artile here in the Arch Linux wiki. [more...]

eBooks

Often eBooks are only in formats readable by Amazon Kindles, Androids or other specific devices. The free Calibre e-book management system is an awesome application for converting eBooks between any of around twenty popular formats.

Flash

For Ubuntu 12.10 and above install flashplugin-installer, for earlier install flashplugin-nonfree.

Windows Emulator (Wine)

The windows emulator allows practically seamless integration of native windows applications into the Linux desktop environment. Internet Explorer is more difficult to set up in it than other applications due to its tight integration with the windows internal components, but a package is available allowing easy installation of multiple simultaneous Internet Explorer versions (see Installation on Ubuntu).

Below is a screenshot of my local laptop running Ubuntu. As you can see all the open windows are integrated naturally into the normal desktop environment but some of them are windows applications and some native Linux ones. The top browser window is Internet Explorer 6 running in windows emulation, but the bottom one is Ubuntu's Firefox. Music is playing from the Windows emulated Winamp in the top right, and the middle application is a Windows-only family tree program. I was able to drop a folder of music directly into the Winamp window to play it, and all file paths and open/save dialogue boxes can navigate the entire Linux directory tree just like a native application behaves.

DVD::Rip

We like to use DVD::Rip for converting DVDs into a single video file for simpler viewing and transportation. Detailed information about the first time setup and optimal settings is in our DVD format conversion article, but here is some specific information for what I needed to do to install it on Debian 7 as there were no sources available for using APT.

I needed to compile it from source, so I needed to install the make tools, and also the required dependency transcode was not installed by default on the system.

<bash>apt-get install build-essential transcode</bash>

Also I was unable to use libdvdcss from VideoLAN, but found that libdvdcss2 worked which is available from the deb-multimedia.org software source.

<bash> echo "deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org wheezy main non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list apt-get update apt-get install libdvdcss2 </bash>

When I first tried to build it I came across a missing Perl dependency called Locale::TextDomain so I installed this with CPAN as follows:

cpanm Locale::TextDomain

Then cd into the downloaded and unpacked dvdrip source directory and build it as follows:

<bash>perl Makefile.PL make make test make install</bash>

Finally you can modify the example .desktop file that comes with the source to point the Exec field to the bin/dvdrip file and the Icon field to point to the nice SVG icon that comes with the source, then copy it into your .local/share/applications directory as usual.

Then go to the DVD format conversion article for instructions on first time setup and best ripping settings and practices.

Local development tools

Install these additional packages - if running local wikis, see the install a new server procedure for more required packages, and Nginx for details about installing a single localhost wiki configuration.

<bash>apt-get install build-essential autoconf libtool subversion git python-qt4 cpanminus libwww-perl libxml-simple-perl</bash>

And these Perl modules with cpanm:

<bash>cpanm HTML::Entities Archive::Zip IO::Async::Loop Net::Async::WebSocket::Client Net::WebSocket::Server</bash>

See also

• Debian - has some specific hardware support solutions which could be applicable to your installation
• Linux migration checklist - useful checklist for those considering moving over from Windows
• Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro (XE700T1C) - has some useful configuration for Linux on tablets such as screen rotation and touchscreen support
• Apple wireless keyboard on Linux
• GNOME
• How to fix VirtualBox USB support