The Stray World

If I could sum up my exper­i­ence with installing Ubuntu 12.04 Pre­cise Pan­golin, it would be “unbe­liev­ably fast and straight­for­ward” where I had already com­pleted both the install­a­tion and the fid­dling of set­tings and pack­ages within half-a-day.

That is from abso­lutely noth­ing to the same func­tional setup I was using on my pre­vi­ous install­a­tion in half-a-day! Updat­ing and down­load­ing 3rd party plu­gins was problem-free and a second ses­sion with the Update Man­ager after boot­ing into Pre­cise Pan­golin prop­erly ensured my oper­at­ing sys­tem would be at its max­imum health in secur­ity holes and bugs.

As I have been fid­dling with Ubuntu as my primary oper­at­ing sys­tem since 2008, I find myself ven­tur­ing forth with more elab­or­ate tweaks with every dif­fer­ent iter­a­tion. I shall describe the install­a­tion pro­ced­ure I have car­ried out in chro­no­lo­gical order, although some tasks were car­ried out sim­ul­tan­eously they have been cat­egor­ised as if I were per­form­ing them sequen­tially for simplicity.

Par­ti­tion­ing

For this round, I decided to par­ti­tion my hard drive into the fol­low­ing par­ti­tions dur­ing the install­a­tion process:

1. The “/" par­ti­tion for the Oneiric.
2. The "/" par­ti­tion for Precise.
3. A huge chunk of the hard disk as a shared home folder I now name the Vault for the pur­poses of this guide to my setup.
4. A swap partition.

My par­ti­tion set­tings were cus­tom­ised such that the home folder for the installed oper­at­ing sys­tems were now sym­bol­ic­ally linked to the Vault.

Since the Vault was not des­ig­nated as belong­ing to any par­tic­u­lar par­ti­tion type to be used by the sys­tem at start-up, it would not be auto­mat­ic­ally moun­ted. This would be a prob­lem as I desired to sym­link my Pic­tures, Music, Videos, Com­pile and other folders to the Vault from the home folder in Pre­cise Pan­golin. The fix to this prob­lem proved to be eleg­antly easy.

First I iden­ti­fied the par­ti­tions I wished to mount at start-up by first mount­ing the par­ti­tions via Nautilus by click­ing on their icons in the sidebar.

Next, I ran the mount com­mand to give me the device name. For example:

rewarp@Enceladus:~$ mount
/dev/sda6 on /media/a14cb5de-4a9f-44bb-a59f-63c2dedc4950 type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks)

In this instance, I figured out that the device I wish to auto­mat­ic­ally mount can be found at /dev/sda6. Note that a less geeky method of find­ing out the device loc­a­tion is to run Sys­tem Mon­itor and switch over to the File Sys­tems tab.

Now to auto­mat­ic­ally mount the drives is as simple as adding the com­mands for mount­ing the par­ti­tions I need to the rc.local file.

sudo gedit /etc/rc.local

Whereupon the fol­low­ing com­mands were added before the “exit 0″ line:

/usr/bin/udisks –mount /dev/sda6
/usr/bin/udisks –mount /dev/sda1

Reboot and see if it works, and if not check for spelling errors.

Restor­ing PPAs

A bunch of gen­eral main­ten­ance work fol­lowed. The most import­ant of which was to add PPAs to updated pack­ages of my favour­ite soft­ware, which included Clem­entine and Deluge.

I had pre­vi­ously backed up my repos­it­or­ies using the Y PPA Man­ager as recom­men­ded by the Web Up8 team.

First of all, I highly recom­mend turn­ing on the Ubuntu Indic­ator that is to be found in the set­tings page of Y PPA Man­ager. Oth­er­wise, like me, you may find your­self con­fused by the appar­ent lack of any indic­a­tion of activ­ity. I would have pre­ferred a ter­minal to pop up with the com­mands run­ning, but the indic­ator noti­fy­ing me when cer­tain tasks have been com­pleted was good enough.

Under Advanced, I had pre­vi­ously backed up my repos­it­or­ies in Oneiric. In Pre­cise, I only had to quickly restore them, re-enable them, and update the release names from Oneiric to Pre­cise. A simple pro­cess that saved me a huge amount of time where I would have pre­vi­ously searched and added the repos­it­or­ies one at a time.

It helps that the other com­mands are sen­tences rather than single word choices for you to guess their mean­ing, so if after run­ning the stand­ard “sudo apt-get update” in the ter­minal, the com­mon prob­lems like duplic­ate repos­it­or­ies and miss­ing GPG keys can be resolved without fur­ther hassle.

And after installing Syn­aptic Pack­age Man­ager, I could head straight away towards installing all my favour­ite pro­grammes without need­ing to bother about adding most PPAs anymore.

Com­pil­ing Programs

I have some ink­ling on how the latest builds of MPlayer2 exceed that of the one to be found in the offi­cial repos­it­or­ies, and have even once added the PPA for the latest builds which con­veni­ently came with the latest SMPlayer2 build. How­ever, I even­tu­ally went back to build­ing the pack­ages myself because I had some­how man­aged to entangle the lib­rar­ies being used by MPlayer2 with the stand­ard lib­rar­ies in Ubuntu.

To pre­vent poten­tially dis­astrous break­age, I went back to using the com­piled from source version.

Since I had a Com­pile folder for all the soft­ware I wished to build from source, it was as simple an affair as copy­ing the folder to its new loc­a­tion in the Vault to be sym­bol­ic­ally linked to the Home folder.

A pre­lim­in­ary test of lines from a script I had spe­cific­ally writ­ten to update and install FFM­peg with x264 fol­low­ing the install­a­tion instruc­tion here showed that I had made no errors in my folder hier­archy although I had a few miss­ing depend­en­cies which were quickly resolved.

Per­sonal Preferences

As much as I like Unity and HUD, they are still unable to stop me from installing the Awe­some Win­dows Man­ager. A light­weight, highly cus­tom­is­able, though less pretty desktop envir­on­ment. Over the past two months, I have found myself default­ing to Awe­some most of the time because of its speed.

There would be no lag in using Fire­fox and Deluge at the same time (con­sid­er­ing I am using a budget laptop model ori­gin­at­ing from 2010) unlike what the case would be on the other major desktop envir­on­ments (Gnome, KDE, and Unity). In fact, play­ing videos while run­ning Deluge and Fire­fox along with a myriad of instances of other pro­grams left no impact on the per­form­ance of my laptop.

I still haven’t figured out how to launch a few pro­grams prop­erly (Wine Bottle Man­age­ment comes to mind) in Awe­some, but it is now good enough to be my pre­ferred win­dows man­ager — until I earn enough money to get myself a Sys­tem 76 laptop.

Syn­aptic is still my pre­ferred means of installing applic­a­tions. It works really well in find­ing the pack­ages I need along with the depend­en­cies quickly. A com­plaint with the Ubuntu Soft­ware Centre I have is the same as that I hold for Unity or Gnome Shell — speed and responsiveness.

Sound Bug Fixed

Finally, after tol­er­at­ing a strange bug that makes the use of head­phones with audio jacks abso­lutely use­less since 2010, I can finally lay this bug to rest.

Someone some­where released a fix which has made its way to Pre­cise Pan­golin. It is unfor­tu­nate that I do not know who it was who helped to patch the bug, so I will just issue a gen­eral state­ment of grat­it­ude to the Ubuntu com­munity for fix­ing a great annoyance.

The only other annoy­ing thing left unfixed would be the inab­il­ity to eas­ily adjust bright­ness set­tings on my laptop. Though at this stage, I am not as bothered by the prob­lem any more because I have got­ten used to it.

Con­clu­sions

Ubuntu 12.04 Pre­cise Pan­golin has been at present, the best desktop exper­i­ence I have ever had. It’s fast, highly cus­tom­is­able, with a solid back-end where my only com­plaints are hard­ware related.

The install­a­tion pro­cess has been the smoothest of all in memory, par­tic­u­larly when com­pared to the dis­astrous bug from Oneiric that caused the install­a­tion to crash if one chose to install 3rd party pack­ages while upgrad­ing because of prob­lems with the Flash package.

If you have the time you should con­sider installing Ubuntu today. If you do not have the time, but would love to try it any­way without the hassle of set­ting it up, I am for hire in you are stay­ing in the Pen­ang area (sub­ject to change).