Ubuntu on the edge

Post-install configuration
If you go ahead and install Edgy onto your hard drive, just as with previous releases, some extra work is needed to get it fully up and running as a Desktop system. These steps are almost all associated with multimedia support, a problem that persistently affects open-source operating systems because of US software patents.

These patents are not valid in many countries (including in the UK), but since open-source software can be distributed anywhere in the world, distributors usually do not include any such code. Feisty Fawn will address some of these issues by allowing you to download the software automatically as needed, but for now it must be done manually. Thankfully it’s very straightforward and has changed little from Dapper.

The first and most important step is to enable the universe and multiverse software repositories. There is a utility that Ubuntu provides to add repositories such as these, but the quickest and most painless way is to run the ‘Add/Remove Software’ application. As soon as it is loaded, enter ‘mp3’ into the search bar at the top, and click ‘Xine extra plugins’.

This software includes support for many audio and video codecs, and as it requires packages from the two extra repositories, Edgy is clever enough to add these for you and update the internal list itself. Next find ‘Gstreamer extra plugins’ and add that too. If you want to run any Java applications, enter ‘java’ into the search bar and tick ‘Sun Java 5.0 Plugin’. This enables the runtime environment for normal Java applications (such as Azureus) as well as the web browser plug-in for Firefox. Apply the changes and exit.

Additional components
The Synaptic application gives you a good GUI front end to all the software in the repositories. It makes browsing and searching for software a breeze. However, if you know the names of the applications you want, it’s much quicker to use the command-line front end, apt-get. Start up terminal and enter:

$ sudo apt-get install sox

vorbis-tools flac lame

mpg321 faad faac

Running this command will download and install additional useful multimedia software. Next, it’s a good idea to replace the video player Totem with the Xine-back-end version:

$ sudo apt-get

install totem-xine

To have Totem play video DVDs you will need to download libdvdcss. To get the latest version head to http://download.videolan.org/pub/libdvdcss and download the most recent ‘deb’ package.

At the time of writing the latest version was called ‘libdvdcss2_1.2.9-1_i386.deb’. Simply double-click on the Desktop icon to have Ubuntu install the package, or run ‘dpkg -i’ at the command line if you prefer.

Mostly for security reasons, Edgy includes no server software at all in a standard Desktop installation. The two packages you are most likely to want are Samba (for setting up Windows-compatible file shares) and OpenSSH (for logging in remotely):

$ sudo apt-get install samba ssh

Finally, if you intend to build or compile any software you will need to install some development packages. Edgy provides a meta package called ‘build-essential’ that will download the most important packages for you. It’s a good idea to install the X11 development packages too using the ‘xorg-dev’ meta package:

$ sudo apt-get install

build-essential xorg-dev

If you want to save yourself a bit of typing you can run a single apt-get install command with all of these packages listed on one line.