Ubuntu is pretty good out of the box, but personally I need a few more things to make it feel like my computer. Before I start I install w32codecs and libdvdcss2 (on machines with a DVD drive) this allows me such wonders as DVD and MP3 playback.

Audio and Video

I remove

• Rhythmbox,
• Serpentine and
• Totem

and install

• Amarok,
• Grip,
• mplayer and
• acidrip (on systems with a DVD drive)

sudo apt-get remove rhythmbox serpentine totem totem-gstreamer totem-xine totem-mozilla
sudo apt-get install grip lame amarok mplayer

Firefox

I install

• Media Connectivity Plugin and point it to mplayer for playback and
• Adblock Plus and subscribe it to EasyList in order to avoid having to waste my time and bandwidth on adverts.

Then I swap the Google search engine for the Google UK search engine by clicking on the search engine drop down and clicking “Manage Search Engines”. I do the same for the Ebay and Amazon search engines.

Vim

For some bizarre reason Ubuntu comes with a crippled version of Vim that it calls “vim-tiny”. I replace this with vim-full

sudo apt-get remove vim-tiny
sudo apt-get install vim-full

and put the following in my .vimrc

syntax on
set expandtab
set autoindent
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set textwidth=78

That way vim works in a way suitable for pretty much everything I use it for as soon as I open it.

Remote Access

If I want to be able access the machine remotely I install sshd then if it’s open to the internet I use iptables to block bruteforce attacks.

If I think of anything else to add here I’ll update this post.

I’ve been running Various distros of Ubuntu linux for several years and have accumulated a long list of out of date kernels that I no longer use, this is not a problem except that I now want to add an extra boot option and don’t want disappearing to the end of the list, or having to search within the list for it.

Before starting this howto, please read it all and make sure you understand what is going on, I cannot be held responsible for anything bad that happens and there is a big chance of you breaking something if you do it wrong.

1. Backup the existing grub menu.

sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst-backup

2. Remove the old kernels and their supporting files.

Files starting with vmlinuz- are kernel files, there will also be files starting with abi-, initrd.img-, config- and System.map- for each kernel as well. My /boot folder, where kernels are stored for booting, had kernels dating from 2.6.12.

WARNING: Do not delete your current kernel or your computer will definitely not work.

Find out your current kernel version.

uname -r

My current kernel is 2.6.17 so I removed the ones lower than that.

sudo rm /boot/*2.6.12* /boot/*2.6.15*

3. Update grub’s menu.lst

sudo update-grub