Personal Preference: GNOME vs. KDE and GUI vs. CLI

I have a strong preference for the Gnome desktop. I’ve played with several window managers over the years and watched them evolve. I still experiment with others all the time, but I find myself back in Gnome when I want to really get stuff done.I’ve watched arguments about which is better; Gnome or KDE. I’ve tried to run them side by side and usually ended up with preference files and libraries SO messed up I wipe the drive and perform a clean install. So I’m going to focus 99% on Gnome and gdm based packages.I am also a fan of the GUI. I hate the fact that I just can’t seem to do some things without opening a terminal and typing commands in bash. I will try and do as much as I can without resorting to the command line – but there will still be a lot of typing. I am a fan of sites that provide code that can be cut and paste – so I will do the same whenever I can. 

Meet the hardware

Time to meet the machine! My main PC is an older home built system named Sett. I built it several years ago now. It is far from cutting edge technology. However, Ubuntu runs like a champ on it. So here he is:K7VTA3 Mobo w/ a 1.8 GhZ AMD Duron Processor (333 FSB), 512 MB of PC2700 RAM, Nvidia FX5500 8X AGP Video Card, a Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-111D Burner, a 60 GB Quantum Fireball Hard Drive (root) and a 250 GB Wester Digital Hard Drive (/home).  I don’t have much ’spare’ money to spend on computers and parts. The next (and probably last) purchase for this machine will be RAM. 

Welcome

This space is a personal notebook where I plan to write about the processes I go through in tweaking my Ubuntu desktop. It is not intended to be a comprehensive how to for the masses. It is specific to my own set up.I plan on listing my favorite ‘How To’ links and will probably paraphrase many of the guides I’ve found on-line with specifics for my own set up as it sometimes differs from the guides I’ve found.Please feel free to comment on my entries as well as pointing out any errors I make or tips for better ways to do things. 

The Re-Install

So my back ups are complete, new hardware has been added, some hardware removed and a thorough dusting out of the case has been done. Time for a fresh install! For the most part, this will be a standard install of Ubuntu 7.10.After booting from the live cd, double click the Install icon on the desktop. I simply click through the screens entering the correct information as I go – time zone and keyboard layout. When I get to the Partition screen though, I chose manual rather than guided. The partition scheme I want to set up takes into account 2 hard drives.I begin by creating a swap partition. I selected /dev/hda (this is my 60 GB drive), right clicked on top of it and selected ‘new partition table’. I am greeted with a warning that says:

“You have selected an entire device to partition. If you proceed with creating a new partition table on the device, then all current partitions will be removed. Not that you will be able to undo this operation later if you wish.” 

Click ‘Continue’. The previous partitions that were listed under ‘/dev/hda’ are now gone and instead it lists ‘free space – 60040 MB’.

Next I select ‘free space’ and right click on it to choose ‘new partition’. The first partition I always create is my swap partition. The rule of thumb for a swap partition is that is should be twice the size of your physical RAM. So mine should be 1024 MB since I have 512 MB of RAM installed. However, I am going to make it larger because I anticipate a RAM upgrade in my very near future. A 1 GB stick of RAM has just been itching to jump into my mailbox. So I’m going to pretend like I already have 1 GB of RAM installed and make my swap partition 2048 instead of 1024.

In the text field to the right of ‘New partition size in megabytes’ I am type out ‘2048′. I check the ‘End’ button rather than the ‘Beginning’ button for ‘Location for the new partition’. Why you might ask? That is where most guides I’ve read recommend putting it. I will try and discuss the reasons I’ve heard at a later date.

Next I click the pop-up menu next to the line ‘Use as:’ and select swap. You’ll notice the ‘Mount point:’ option becomes grayed out when you do that. swap is different than any of the other partition options and it will not be ‘mounted’ for your general use. I click ‘ok’ and I now have a new partition under /dev/hda.

Again, right click over the ‘free space’ and select new partition. Since I am going to use the rest of the drive as root, I don’t need to edit the size field as it already shows my remaining free space. I’m going to make sure I select ‘Beginning’ for its location. I’m going to format it as ext3 and type ‘/’ in as its mount point. This tells the partitioner I want to use this space as my root folder and will install all of the system related files onto that hard drive. Again click ok.

Next I’m going to set up my 250 GB drive as my home directory. I right click over ‘/dev/hdb’ and select ‘New partition table’. Right click on ‘free space’ and select new partition. Again select ext3 as partition type and type ‘/home’ in the Mount point field. Select ok.I make sure all the check boxes under the heading ‘Format’ are checked and then click Forward. I finish filling out the user information and begin the install. The partitioner will do its thing and then the install will begin. Hopefully in an hour or so I’ll be booting into Ubuntu from the hard drive and not the live cd!