Part 5: Finishing Touches

So everything is going according to plan, you have successfully got the parts, built it, set up the BIOS and installed the OS. Now we are on to our last Building A Linux Computer article.

Now that you have Ubuntu up and running, I am going to outline a few basic ideas and tips to get your system up to speed.

Updating Ubuntu

Ubuntu defaults to letting you know what updates are available, but we want to get it out of the way now.

The first thing you want to do is go to 'System' > 'Administration' > 'Update Manager'. You will have to supply your password again for security purposes.

Once Update Manager has been loaded, it will search for any newer versions of software available from Ubuntu. My newly installed copy of 8.10 Intrepid Ibex has 215 new updates to be installed.

At this point you want to click "Install Updates" to get your system up to date. The system will download and install the new updates without any user intervention. Unless you are updating a "core" component (like the Linux kernel), you may not even have to reboot the system.

Adding Multimedia Codecs

One downfall of Ubuntu is that it doesn't come with a lot of codecs to play your audio and video collections. One way around this is to add a software repository to our Ubuntu system. We do this by opening a terminal at 'Applications' > 'Accessories' > 'Terminal'

Once the terminal is opened you have to add the repository by typing:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list 
--output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

NOTE: If you are running a 32 bit system you will need to use w32codecs. If you are using a 64 bit system you need w64codecs.

Once it has updated the list you can now type:

sudo apt-get install w32codecs

or

sudo apt-get install w64codecs

This installs the codecs used in Windows to play Windows Media files.

If you would like to watch DVD's you need to install the libdvdcss2 package. Most (if not all) commercial DVD's are encoded and this package will decode them so you can watch them. Just type:

sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

Giving KDE A Try

What if you don't like the way your GUI looks, well in Linux you can change it. You are not confined to using GNOME (Ubuntu's default GUI system). If you want to try and give KDE a whirl, you can type:

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

This will install all of the Kubuntu-specific packages. Don't worry, your current system will not change. We are only adding software, not removing anything.

You will be asked to select the 'Display Manager' (the program that shows the login screen) when installing 'kubuntu-desktop'. You will have two options, 'gdm' or 'kdm'. GDM is GNOME's display manager while KDM is KDE's display manager. Personally, I like KDE's but you may already feel comfortable with GDM.

Once the 'kubuntu-desktop' package has been installed, in order to use it you must log out and return to the login screen.

At the login screen, their will be a 'Options' menu in the lower left corner. Click it and select 'Select Session'. Now choose the 'KDE' option. Once selected, log in as normal and take a gander at KDE.

Conclusion

I hope these articles have helped you in building a Linux computer. I have done my best to give you general but sane advice. I do plan on updating these articles, in order to make them as up to date as possible. If you feel anything can be improved on or updated, please do so in that articles comment section. Thanks for reading!

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