Loading ‘er Up

As I continue to re-build my system after a fresh install of Ubinutu 8.10 yesterday, I’ll also continue to document it here. I don’t plan on doing this again in six months, but least I have a record to help myself out (or others) if I do… and will also help in setting up other machines I’m working on I suppose.

The next couple programs I added all can be pulled from the Add/Remove Applications set up. Just click Applications, then click Add/Remove… I changed the Show option to All Open Source applications right off the bat.

First up, FileZilla. Hands down the best all around FTP Client for the money. If you don’t believe me, it was picked at the High Five Winner by Lifehacker readers. It’s multi-flavored as well, and also has a portable version which, like KeePass, I keep in a Dropbox folder so I don’t have to install it on both my laptop and work computers. I just need to find a way for my desktop here to read the same file that keeps track of my server list. For now, I just manually copy the data file once in awhile so I have the same list no mater what computer I’m on.

Next is GParted, the Gnome Partition Editor. More than likely, most users will never need this. But if you add a second drive, or are moving stuff around like I am doing here, you need it. It installs as Partition Editor under the System > Administration menu. Once I have everything off my 8.04 install working under 8.10, all my settings and such copied over, I’ll be able to use this to remove the partitions on my 300GB drive and reformat it to use as a single drive to store stuff on. I’m thinking of starting to move a chunk of my DVDs to that drive as ISOs or something.

Speaking of DVDs, I did a post on adding the DVD Codecs under 8.04 - and it basically still works, but needs to be updated a bit for 8.10. Through a ‘dent someone posted I happened to hit this site this morning, and it had a number of useful terminal commands you can just cut and paste to get the author’s top 10 Things You Should Do Immediately After Installing Ubuntu 8.10

Besides getting you set up for DVDs, MP3s and other media, the author also shows you how to get Skype, Google Earth, Picassa and a few other things up and running with just some simple cut and pasting to the terminal. Yea, you can do the same through the package managers, but that would probably take longer to explain how to do for some.

I haven’t had success in getting Skype to work on this box with my audio card. so not sure if I’m gonna try it again just yet. We’ll see. I’m also waiting a bit on Open Office 3, wait for a stable release to come out.

Bout the only other major thing I have left is to set up XAMPP again, but that’ll be easy.