Taming the Ibex

Ok, I am a couple days late, but I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10, Inrepid Ibex today. Actually, I did one spare computer with the Edubuntu add-ons that is eventually going to my niece and nephew, added it to my Acer laptop using WUBI so I can use Ubuntu or Windows, and then did a fresh install on my Acer desktop. Been a busy day.

Since I did a fresh install, that means there’s a LOT of stuff I have to redo. The reason I chose to do a fresh install is that I have two hard drives in this computer, a 300GB and a 500GB. The 500GB I haven’t really used for anything. The 300GB had partitions from both version 8.04 and 7.10. So I figure I would put 8.10 on the 500GB drive, and once I’ve copied all my old stuff over that I need to keep, I’ll repartition the 300GB back in to one drive. And yes, I did back all the stuff in my Home folder up first.

In fact, if you want to do a basic backup of a folder, rsync is pretty much the best way to go. I may write up something basic about it at some point, but the point of this posting is some of the steps I’m going through as I put stuff back on this desktop computer.

First thing after I booted up the first time was the ATI driver for my graphics. Ubuntu detected the hardware and gave me the option of downloading the driver for it. Now, it’s not supported, but it does work pretty darn good. After that, first on my list of stuff I wanted to get installed was Dropbox. I had planned on taking a bit of a break, and since I had over 3GB of files Dropbox was going to have to download, I installed it and set it up before heading to the other room to watch some tv, letting it do it’s thing. Dropbox has only gotten better since I first wrote about it (Do You Dropbox), including adding a 50GB for $10 a month or $100 a year option. I may have to do another write up on it and some of the more creative ways I’ve been using it.

After my break, I came back and did a quick install of Griffith, just… cause. And just like last time, it was simple as pie. Tho the respository has a current version now I believe, and it seemed to work fine under 8.10. Oh, and I have well over 300 DVDs now.

Because I still work in a Windows world, and need to share documents with Win based computers, I wanted to get my fonts updated. Fortunately, adding the MS standard fonts to Ubuntu is as easy as two simple terminal commands

First of all, open a terminal window and type sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts at the prompt. This grabs the fonts via apt and installs them. You can either log out and back in to refresh the font cache, or just enter this in to the terminal to manually reset it sudo fc-cache -fv

I also have a collection of other TrueType fonts I want to add, so all I do is drop them in to the ~/.fonts folder (you may have to create it) and refresh the cache again. I’ve created some sub-folders in there to help me keep my fonts a bit organized, but that’s just me.

The next thing to install before crashing for tonight is KeePassX. KeePass is one of the best opens-sourd, cross-platform password managers around. Actually, it’s probably bout the best period. It comes in Windows and Linux flavors, and there’s a portable version for Windows that you can throw on a USB drive. Plus there’s a bunch of add-ons that make it even better.

Here’s a preview of one of my Dropbox tricks that I used along with KeePass. I have a folder in my Dropbox where I keep my password file, and I also have a copy of the portable version of KeePass in there as well. On my laptop or work computer or any other Windows computer I have Dropbox installed on, I can run the portable version and access my data file. On this box, I have the Linux version installed, and I just read the data file in my Dropbox. One central place to keep my password info, accessible from just about anywhere I would ever need it to be. If they just made a version I could sync with my Centro, it’d be perfect.

Alright, that’s enough for one evening. I’ll have to re-do a few more things on here yet to get things really up to speed, but that’s ok. I could have upgraded, but each time I do a fresh install like this I’m leaning more and more tricks and tips… which I can pass on here I suppose. So in the end, it’s all good.

Oh yea, the stuff on installing the fonts I originally found here.