Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Desktop

Installation notes for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on my new Intel Core i5 4440. You can find more complete Howtos on the Net, so I won't repeat this here.

Download

Downloaded the Live-DVD. Install. Done. I actually did not like the installer. It's so dumbed down, that it asks almost no questions at all any more (yes, there is an "advanced settings" button or something, but...).

Doing nothing, you get a suboptimal setup with 8 GB swap on a 8GB machine and ext4 filesystem (xfs or btrfs would have been better).

Basic install

Painless, everything worked out of the box, except for the mouse (see below).

Additional repositories

If you can't endure Unity, you probably want to install an alternative desktop (no, Gnome 3 Shell is not one). See below.

nVidia closed source drivers

Can be installed using the graphical third-party driver selectio tool. Very painless.

Oracle Java

FIXME.

Truetype fonts

FIXME.

Flash

Installed automatically.

Google Earth

Needs some fixing. The 64 bit package seems to be broken, but the 32bit one works with some extra base packages. See http://askubuntu.com/questions/366438/how-to-install-google-earth-64bit-in-ubuntu-13-10-ia32-libs-dependency-error

Eclipse

FIXME.

Tweaking

The quest for a usable desktop

Unity sucks -even more so, because it does not work with my mouse. LightDM (the standard graphical login greeter) sucks as well. Or maybe my mouse sucks. In any case, there where strange problems with 30 second delays from entering the password to the desktop (on a quad-core SSD-only machine...). The mouse stops working after around 30 seconds into using the desktop (even with the tweak described below), log off/log in helps.

As Unity sucks anyways, as does Gnome 3 and Gnome Classic, I decided to use Mate, which at least is a decent interface.

See http://www.webupd8.org/2014/03/how-to-install-mate-18-in-ubuntu.html for short and painless install instructions of Mate 1.8 (not part of Ubuntu 14.04 at time of writing). This has a glitch (Mate menu editor "mozo" not working due to a packaging error) but otherwise works as advertised and is not worse than the slightly old Gnome 2, which shipped with CentOS 6.4.

Aside from the broken menu editor, which prevents you from removing unwanted Gnome and Unity related packages from the Applications menu, there where some issues for me regarding Sound settings (had them disabled in Gnome 3 shell, and they stuck to that setting no matter what I choose in Mate).

The font settings for the default Firefox and Thunderbird appear to ignore the Mate font settings and look more like tweaked for the default too large and too bold font of Gnome 3 -with no way of correcting this (at least not using any of the usual GUI tools (Gnome-, Unity-, Mate-tweak-tools).

Default bold coloured fonts for the Mate terminal where horrible, had to change them from "Ubuntu" to "Monospace".

Legacy OSS games

FIXME.

Cyborg R.A.T. 5 mouse

My current mouse was known to have issues with Linux. Doh.

The X11 desktop did not recognize mouse clicks roughly 30% of the time.

This could be fixed by Googling as per [1] (basically add

pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 0 0 0

to your /etc/X11/Xmodmap).

In addition, the sensitivity and acceleration can not be dialed down enough using the graphical mouse config. Based on http://patrickmylund.com/blog/lowering-gaming-mouse-sensitivity-in-ubuntu-9-10/, putting the following script into my list of startup applications helped

#!/bin/sh
xinput --set-prop "Saitek Cyborg R.A.T.5 Mouse" "Device Accel Constant Deceleration" 2 
xinput --set-prop "Saitek Cyborg R.A.T.5 Mouse" "Device Accel Velocity Scaling" 1