After lots of pain with data recovery and associated fun due to my master harddisk totally dying on me, I am back up with a brand new install of Feisty. My old install of Dapper with all the working setup is toast. I was able to copy some files off the partition, but thats about it. In that sense I am missing part of the reference I was going to use for setting up Feisty and I currently don’t have a system that does all I want. So there is a lot to do and here is what I have done so far in terms of tweaking.
Keep in mind that is going to be my all encompassing workstation and media box and I got lots of space so I really don’t care too much about one or two programs being installed I rarely or never use.
So lets start with some basic stuff. In the following I will just mention package names. You can install them from the command line with sudo apt-get install packagename or sudo aptitude install packagename or use the shell program aptitude without commands using its UI. Or you can use the GUI tool synaptic. There are others but lets not worry for now.
My editor(not IDE) of choice is vim so I install vim-full and vim-gnome.
As a next step I install the kubuntu-desktop since my desktop environment of choice is KDE and I use quite a few of the apps coming with Kubuntu all the time. There are digikam for all my photo archival needs, k3b for burning cd’s and dvd’s and kontact for all my PIM stuff.
When it comes to writing large documents I am still an avid LaTeX user. Nothing I have seen comes close to it. The easiest way to install it is to install kile. It is a great editor for TeX documents and has the dependencies so you are mostly ready to go with installing it. I also installed tetex-extras to get pdftex and other goodies. A last TeX related addition is latex2html. Very helpful ;-)
No lets go more to the graphical stuff. Ubuntu already comes with GIMP, but just for kicks I also like to check out the excellent krita now and then. In the next while I also want to play with panorama photos and I have been eyeing hugin for a while. Now it can be found in the repositories. Yeah!
To get some more goodies like the excellent vector drawing program inkscape, the desktop publishing program scribus and the 3D modelling and rendering program blender I just install ubuntustudio-graphics. There might be some more interesting programs I have yet to play with there as well.
For my video editing I can use a similar approach. Just install ubuntustudio-video. There is also a ubuntustudio-audio package that has a lot of good stuff, but I am just not an audio nut enough to bother. In terms of video I also install kino, kino-plus and dvgrab, which should be part of the studio… I also want to have a go at cinelerra at some stage, but that is not yet in the repositories.
As a last pointer for now here is some media players I install: vlc, xine-ui and mplayer including mozilla-mplayer.
Thats it for today. More another time.