, 4 min read

Installing Ubuntu 14.04 Server Edition

I recently installed Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) on my new 2TB hard drive. I do not use the desktop variant of Ubuntu because I think it is too bloated. Rather I specifically install packages as needed. Below is a list of packages I install after the server edition.

  1. jpilot, of course, see my posts Possible Enhancements to J-Pilot, jpilot-dump + jpilot-merge, Syncing with J-Pilot via Bluetooth
  2. icewm, see post A Praise for IceWM ("not getting in the user’s way")
  3. `xinit`, for starting `icewm`
  4. xterm, probably the most important program
  5. p7zip-full, zip file handling
  6. indent, a beautifier for C source code files
  7. gcc, of course
  8. make
  9. git
  10. expect, see Linux commands: expect and kibitz
  11. valgrind, for identifying hard to find memory leaks
  12. whois for whois and mkpasswd
  13. lm-sensors, for sensors which provides information on temperature and power consumption, see posts CUDA Performance, Newer GPUGRID Tasks Keep GPU Really Hot, Plotting Power Consumption of my Desktop PC
  14. alsa-base, for sound, then use alsamixer to unmute
  15. mplayer, for viewing videos and hearing music
  16. geeqie, for image viewing, also installs ImageMagick and zenity
  17. sqlite3, see post Clearing Cookie Junk in Google Chrome Web Browser
  18. aumix, for setting audio volume
  19. xawtv, for viewing television
  20. bluez, Bluetooth handling, hciconfig, etc., see post Syncing with J-Pilot via Bluetooth
  21. bluez-compat, for dund, see post Syncing with J-Pilot via Bluetooth
  22. mupdf, a fast PDF viewer, as xpdf seemed to be broken
  23. x11-utils
  24. bc, arbitrary precision calculator, luckily got installed by default
  25. boinc-manager, for Einstein@Home and GPUGrid, see my posts here and here
  26. mesa-utils, for glxgears for checking graphic card performance
  27. perl-doc, to read manuals on Perl
  28. x11-apps, for xclock, xeyes, xcalc, etc.
  29. xmaxima, for formula manipulation, installs gnuplot as well
  30. octave as MATLAB clone, installs Java (openjdk-7-jre-headless) as well
  31. texlive-latex-base, for $\TeX$ and $\LaTeX$
  32. libgtkglext1-dev, for Gtk and OpenGL, see my post OpenGL Program: Earth with Moon Rotating around Sun
  33. inotify-tools, see post inotify-tools: inotifywait
  34. youtube-dl, see Youtube video to mp3
  35. libreoffice, so that I can read Word and Excel files, and occasionally write letters and reports
  36. antiword, so that I don't have to fire up LibreOffice all the time and can read the text part of a Word document, see Antiword: a free MS Word document reader
  37. zmap, for scanning the entire internet, see Zmap
  38. poppler-utils, for pdftotext
  39. mutt, The Mutt E-Mail Client

For some strange reasons Ubuntu 14.04 no longer provides xlock (old package: xlockmore). So I copied the binary from Ubuntu 12.04 to my private bin-directory. The "old" xlock binary works flawlessly in 14.04.

I encrypted my new harddisk with LUKS and LVM, as indicated in a recent Phoronix article, The Performance Impact Of Linux Disk Encryption On Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, written by Michael Larabel. The article in Phoronix clearly indicates that homedirectory encryption compared to full-disk encryption is a terrible performance hog. So I used full-disk encryption. I measured transfer rates from old disk to new disk of 75 MBytes/s to 120 MBytes/s, i.e., read unencrypted old disk and write to new encrypted disk. Generally the picture looks like this, according to the aforementioned article: Phoronix

Why encrypt the hard-disk? I pay taxes, I pay GEZ (forced payment for television in Germany), I am forced to pay VG Wort for printers, I am forced to pay GEMA for USB sticks and hard-drives. And now I am even forced to sacrifice my valuable CPU resources, such that tax payed intelligence is not spying on me (the taxpayer). Because otherwise, as Glenn Greenwald puts it:

They [the government] completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop "the terrorists", and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name.

See Glenn Greenwald: detaining my partner was a failed attempt at intimidation. Is the government helping me finding and convicting the hit-and-run guys? No. My car was hit multiple times. They just want my money and spy on me. So, I am fed up.