¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

As stated in my last post, I’m now using Ubuntu as my main linux distro. This is temporary and might even hurt a little, however I’m willing to keep going with this goal for a while.

In this post I’m going to document some cleanups and tips/tricks/whatever that I find interesting and, sometimes, important too.

Disclaimer: I am a heavily biased Arch Linux user. Anything related to it in this post is probably not a coincidence. This disclaimer won’t be repeated through other posts of this series. So, you have been warned. This is important to understand some of the motivations behind the changes I’ll list here.

Now, just one thing: one of the reasons I’m using Ubuntu right now is so I won’t spend much time customizing it. So, I am deliberately cutting this list in more than a half. There are other things that I would usually do but I simply won’t.

1. Enable the root account – by default, the root account is disabled on Ubuntu. This is great so newbies won’t harm the system; however, powerusers don’t like that, this is simply annoying for them. You might do that as follows:

$ sudo passwd root

Then just enter a password for it. Now you might become a superuser by invoking su.

2. Install aptitude. And never, I mean ever****ever touch apt-get. apt-get is evil and will break your system sooner or later. Top used aptitude commands are probably aptitude install, aptitude upgrade, aptitude remove and aptitude search. The -y flag is useful sometimes, too. So,

$ sudo apt-get install aptitude -y

Then forget apt-get!

3. Install unity-tweak-tool then change some annoying Unity defaults. What is annoying depends on each user taste.
4. I like to create a Ramdisk. How? Arch Wiki Ramdisk. This also works for Ubuntu.
5. Install the classicmenu-indicator package.
6. I like using a clipboard manager. clipit is a good choice and is well integrated with the Unity panel.
7. Add/activate workspaces. 4 of them is (usually) okay. Use Ctrl + Alt + directional keys to cycle through them.
8. Super + D shows the desktop. (Super is usually the key with the windows logo).
9. Ctrl + Alt + L locks the screen.
10. Install the nautilus-open-terminal package.
11. Improve your .bashrc. How? See here. You’ll also find my .bashrc there (search for thiagowfx).