Focal Fossa | Tuning Ubuntu

Two years after my post on the beaver, it has come the time to tune this fine free software to my liking.
It was released with a few significant changes, particularly under the hood. To check whats new, please check these posts by Canonical here and here. Visually its the best Ubuntu yet (at least in my perspective) even better than the long 10.04 (my favorite), a wonderful kernel for future proofing and running things smoothly.

Still, I need to make a few adjustments, hence this new cheat cheat. I’ve made a small script to automate 98% of the commands listed here. It’s available on my GithHub, here.

But for now, let’s get dirty.

This time, Ubuntu presents an option of doing  a minimal or full installation. I opted for the minimal, since I feel like its easier to add layers, than to peel them off.

1. Update!
I don’t like to update things during install, so I do it afterwards. Simply run:

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

and reboot.

2. Enable all partner repos so Ubuntu can be more robust and do better magic.

Then do some more typing to check if there any more updates

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade

3. OpenJDK, Git & Synaptic

$ sudo apt install openjdk-11-jre git synaptic

With partners enabled, we can add some more zing to ubuntu.

4. Restricted extras

I never was a fan of this package strangely, but saves time and it’s rather complete. Info about it here.

$ sudo apt install ubuntu-restricted-extras

5. Multimedia

5.1 – Some video and audio players and or decoders. Like support for DVD & BLU Ray play, that doesn’t come out of the box. I’ve grown fond of Gnome Videos (formerly known as totem), But VLC is chosen by many many people. here’s how to install both:

$ sudo apt install vlc

$ sudo apt install totem

5.2 – Support for DVD and Blu-Ray playback

$ sudo apt install libbluray-bdj libdvdcss2

You’ll be presented with the following screens:

say amen to all of them and afterwards just type as said before:

Step Two

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure libdvd-pkg

5.3 – And it’s all for video. Now let’s go to the audio side of things, because not everything is about Spotify.

$ sudo apt install rhythmbox

With multimedia out of the way, lets head to a more productive side of things

6. Extra support for compressing and decompressing files

$ sudo apt install unace rar zip unzip p7zip p7zip-full \
p7zip-rar sharutils uudeview arj cabextract

7. Internet stuff
7.1 Firstly, ftp support: filezilla

$ sudo apt install filezilla

7.2 Install Chromium (optional) since Firefox takes care of all my browsing needs.

$ sudo apt install chromium-browser

And here’s to install flash support on Chromium

$ sudo apt-get install pepperflashplugin-nonfree

8. Firewall

A very nimble firewall is gufw, frontend for ufw. Simply install it by:

$ sudo apt install gufw

Now, check your state/settings…

$ sudo ufw status verbose

…and add some rules

$ sudo ufw deny 5353/udp && sudo ufw deny 5900/tcp && 
sudo ufw deny 22 && sudo ufw deny 25/tcp 
&& sudo ufw deny 135,139,445/tcp 
&& sudo ufw deny 137,138/udp && sudo ufw deny 110 && sudo ufw deny 2049 
&& sudo ufw deny 143 && sudo ufw deny 21/tcp && sudo ufw deny ssh

If not enable at this point, please run

$ sudo ufw enable

9. Gimp & Extras

$ sudo apt install gimp gimp-plugin-registry gimp-data-extras

10. Battery Laptop Tweak

With this nifty little command line, we manage to install TLP tht makes wonder to a laptop’s battery

$ sudo apt install tlp tlp-rdw

Now to start the service:

$ sudo tlp start

Do a final reboot and, Bang!!