Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver

Setup encrypted disks

The exact sequence of operations to set up whole-disk encryption is not terribly obvious.

  1. Partition your disk. You will need three (at least) partitions: one for /boot, one for /, and one for swap (if you are using swap). Use the 'manual' option in the partitioner.
  2. After partitioniing the disk use the 'create encypted disks' option to encrypt the root and swap partitions. Do not encrypt /boot.

Ethernet Device not managed

Some people have found that while their wifi interface works correctly, hard-wired interfaces do not. What worked for me was: 

    touch /etc/NeworkManager/conf.d/10-globally-managed-devices.conf
    service network-manager restart
Other ideas may be found at https://askubuntu.com/questions/71159/network-manager-says-device-not-managed and https://askubuntu.com/questions/882806/ethernet-device-not-managed/893614#893614.

Sorting window button alpahbetically

To sort the windows alpahbetically in the top ribbon right-click on the panel, navigate to Panel > Panel Preferences..., then change to the Items tab, and select the "Window Buttons" item. Click the settings button, and in the dialog that opens, change the Sorting order dropdown menu to "Window title".

Taken from https://askubuntu.com/questions/235784/fix-order-of-window-buttons-in-xfce-panel.

Extra goodies for XFCE

If you are running XFCE then these packages contain useful stuff:

Netbeans

NB 8.0.2 would not install on a clean Ubuntu 18 build even though it installed with no problems on a machine upgraded from Ubuntu 16. NB 8.2 installed with no problems but needed a --jdkhome argument added to its command line, including in the whisker menu. Alternatively one can edit /usr/local/netbeans-8.2/etc/netbeans.conf and alter the "netbeans_jdkhome" parameter.

NB is fussy about which version of the JDK you are using. I found that NB 8.2 worked with open-jdk-8. open-jdk-11 was unreliable.

Also check that /usr/lib/jvm/default-java is symlinked to java-8-openjdk-amd64/ and not to java-11-openjdk-amd64/ (the default). It is better to have only one JDK installed - fewer things to go wrong.

http://wiki.netbeans.org/FaqRunningOnJre

Synaptic and update-manager won't run from the menu

No policykit is installed. Install policykit-1-gnome and apt-xapian-index, logout and login.

Glitches in upgrading my server to Ubuntu 18