Ubuntu Notes

See http://xed.ch/help/dpkg

A serious problem with Ubuntu is its clownish window manager. I don’t even know what it is called (Unity? MacWindowsForGnome7?) and don’t care. But it must be bypassed. There is an awesome package and easily installed. There seems to be an ubuntu-mate-desktop package too but I didn’t test that.

The trick is in figuring out how to switch to it. The display manager is kind of dumb too, but the trick is you need to press the round spiky icon in the lower right corner of the log in screen and change window managers there. The problem I ran into is that you can’t just log out after installing awesome because that option will not be loaded for this session of the display manager. After a full reboot, that option is present and after pulling my configuration repo in, it is possible to use this annoying system just fine. In summary, Ubuntu is doing such a good job of being like Windows that you need to reboot to do simple configuration changes.

Pretty much cured it as far as I can tell.

Some of that may be superfluous.

If you have to use Ubuntu, there’s probably some technicality forcing the issue which means it is very probable that you’ll want a static IP address. Fortunately, it’s only a slight pain in the ass to get one.

I created a file called: /etc/netplan/99_config.yaml containing this:

Then run netplan apply — of course sudo everywhere. Note that this will cut off an SSH connection immediately but I was able to reconnect with the new number.

Ubuntu has a lot of cruft designed for a huge variety of possible use cases. But if you are trying to control a robot with ROS and it requires Ubuntu (ahem), you may not need a fancy window manager or even a window manager at all. There is a lot you may not need. When checking the processes or disk space to see what is hogging all the resources, you can find some surprising things.

I’m pretty much done with Ubuntu. Really just use Debian. But if you’re ever in a very weird situation where some very messy stuff barely doesn’t work with Debian and the people who set up that messy stuff swear it works in Ubuntu, it may be necessary. For me, the least icky way to run native Ubuntu without it having any impact at all on my real systems is to use a USB flash drive for the complete system. Yes, instead of a hard drive. I’m not talking about a Live CD system (which we will actually use a bit for installation). I’m talking about running the whole OS as if the USB flash drive was the hard drive. It not only works, it works really pretty well. Sometimes you get some odd hanging for a couple of seconds but I’ve run this kind of system hundreds of interactive hours and never had a problem, even playing big Steam games with absolutely no hard drive use at all.

Here is what you need.

Here is the step by step process I use.

At this point you are ready to use the system. It can be helpful to customize Mate as I describe in my Debian notes.

One is not supposed to need notes with Ubuntu. It’s all supposed to just work and if it doesn’t, it’s supposed to be obvious how to fix it. But as Ubuntu struggles desperately to debase itself enough to be acceptable to normal people, it leaves me personally quite irritated. I am not alone.

The main problem to start with is the Unity window manager or maybe it’s a window manager theme on a window manager on a windowing system. Confused yet? This Unity is clearly designed for tablets. That may be fine if you have a tablet, but if you don’t, it’s like putting motorcycle handlebars in place of a car’s steering wheel.

The first thing to do is to get rid of Unity. One possibility is this.

But I now am pretty convinced that this is the superior solution.

I hate things wasting valuable screen real estate, especially on the more limited Y pixels. The main reason to get rid of Unity is that it insists on wasting the top of your screen with a stupid Mac-inspired bar. The top "panel" as it’s officially called is easier to deal with in xfce4. With xfce4 just right click on an empty part of it, then select "Panel" and then "Panel Preferences". From there choose "Automatically show and hide the panel". This is the same in Mate and sufficiently solves the problem. There may be a way to get rid of it completely, but if you’re that serious, look into ratpoison (or awesome or dwm).

The bottom panel is easy to get rid of in Mate. I don’t mind the workplace switcher which shows if I have things open in other windows (hidden until bidden, of course). I add that to the top bar and then right clicking on the bottom bar allows a "Delete this panel". Problem solved.

Check the Debian notes for more on smooth dealings with Mate.

Sensible keyboard shortcuts are now under "System→Control Center→Keyboard Shortcuts".

How do I get an SSH agent? The old fashioned way, I guess.

Ubuntu comes with tons of software, much of which I wish it wouldn’t. Unfortunately it’s missing some crucial obvious stuff that serious people would like. For example, the SSH server and the full and proper version of Vim.

Wow, it sure can be a pain to install something like GP6. Here’s roughly what I did that mostly worked.

Note that I had to download the sound bank and install it manually. Worked though.

Interested in making your own Debian style packages? Maybe this will help.