Install Ubuntu 11.04 and migrate

This is my story of installing Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwall on an SSD partition and migrating my existing Ubuntu 10.10 to the new system for the applications I use.

I use my machine primarily for web development and the majority of my tools are web-based. With that in mind, my migration was easier than what it could have been.

Installation

There are many guides out there that will lead you step by step through the installation process. For the most part it's a breeze.

After the installation, I ran into one major hurdle - the UI wouldn't boot properly. After looking through the log files, I identified the problem to be related to the nvidia drivers. After some experimentation, I ended up uninstalling the driver that came with the distribution and installing the latest nvidia drivers from the repository and that fixed my problem.


sudo apt-get remove nvidia-173
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
reboot


SSD Related tweaks

I made a few basic changes to optimize the performance of the file system for SSD drive.

First, change disk scheduling to noop.

sudo apt-get install sysfs

Then add

block/sda/queue/scheduler = noop

to /etc/sysfs.conf

Next, add the noatime option to the SSD drive in /etc/fstab
Finish off by mapping the /tmp folder into RAM. That way a lot of the random, not important writes will go directly to RAM instead of wearing the disk. This also has the side effect of clearing the /tmp folder on reboot. Add the following line to the /etc/fstab file.

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec,mode=1777 0 0


Migration

This is what it took to migrate my applications and settings I needed to resume work.

SSH keys

A lot of systems I login to authenticate me via my SSH key. To carry that forward, I copied the ~/.ssh folder over to the current home directory.

Sudo

I like sudo to do its thing without pestering me for a password all the time. This is how I do this:

Replace

%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

with

%admin ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL


NFS

I have a few NFS shares mapped to my machine. I had to install NFS and copy the shares information from the old system.

sudo apt-get install nfs-client

copy remote systems from /etc/fstab

Compiz Settings

Unity is a compiz plugin, but even though the system runs compiz, the compiz manager was not installed by default.

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

Once I had that installed, I searched for compiz and found the config manager.
One of the features I was missing was the enhanced zoom shortcut. To enable that, in enhanced zoom, enable shortcuts for zoom in and zoom out.

Another point of interest in the compiz configuration is the Unity section, where you can adjust the Ubuntu Unity Plugin setting.

Applications

I am used to vim and have grown to expect it when I type the vi command. To fix this, just install vim.
sudo apt-get install vim

Browser

I use google chrome as my main browser. Download from google.com/chrome (get the 64-bit .deb package)
After it's installed, enable account sync. With google chrome and the account sync, all my bookmarks, saved passwords and other browser settings were migrated automatically.

FTP Client

My FTP client of choice is Filezilla for features, speed and supporting SFTP.

sudo apt-get install filezilla

copy ~/.filezilla folder over to preserve all saved FTP accounts

Code Editor / IDE


sudo apt-get install geany

I also install a few geany plugins (geany-plugin-* - codenav, prj, webhelper, treebrowser)

Source Control


sudo apt-get install git


Remote Desktop

tsclient is installed by default. To copy your Remote Desktop Server configurations,
copy ~/.tsclient to your home directory

Terminal

I find the drop down consoles quite handly, so I use guake (a quake like console)

sudo apt-get install guake

It is advised to setup guake to start on login. In unity, search for "Startup Applications" and select "Guake Terminal".