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.
Contents
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...).
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 anyway, as does Gnome 3 and Gnome classic, I decided to use Mate, which at least is a decent interface.
FIXME: Installation instructions.
FIXME: Current glitches.
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).
