Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa

Version

Use Ubuntu 20.04.2 or later rather than the original 20.04.

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' or 'something else' option in the partitioner. /boot should about 1GB, use the rest of the space for /.
  2. After partitioning the disk mark the partitions that you want encrypted as 'physical volume for encryption' and the format the corresponding 'mapper' partitions.
  3. There is no real need for a swap partition but if you do use one it must also be encrypted. If you do not allocate a swap partition the installer will create a swap file on /. You can decide for yourself later whether you want it or not. If not, just comment out its fstab entry.
  4. Do not encrypt /boot.

Sorting window buttons 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.

After installation

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

For a development machine I also want:

If using SSDs mark their filesystems as noatime. It will prolong the life of the SSD.

Screensaver

xfce4-screensaver did not work prolperly for me; either it did not lock the screen at all or, on the PC waking from sleep, I got a black screen with just a mouse pointer. Removing xfce4-screensaver and installing xscreensaver instead solved the problem.

On upgrading from 18.04 I finished up with two screensavers, both xscreensaver (the old one) and xfce4-screensaver (from the upgrade).

Netbeans

I have had previous problems with 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 - it makes for fewer things to go wrong.

Mailman

I run mailman as www-data:list rather than as list:list. To this end I have to edit mm_cfg.py and /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/mailman.conf.

At the dn of mm_cfg.py insert the line 

    MAILMAN_USER = 'www-data'
and in /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/mailman.conf change the ownership of /run/mailman to www-data.

I now run Maiman in a Docker container, so this has become a non-issue. See http://www.mankin.org.uk/howto/mailman.html

Thunderbird

If you are usingThunderbirrd mail and the new version no longer connects to your IMAP server, see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-78-faq#w_after-upgrading-to-thunderbird-78-i-cannot-get-or-send-email-messages

As of Thunderbird 38 there is no title bar by default.

Press Alt or F10 to restore the menu bar in case it's hidden.

Then Tools > Options > Advanced > General tab. Click 'Config Editor' there. Copy and paste mail.tabs.drawInTitlebar into the search bar and double-click on it to set it to "false" and the title bar should be controlled by the OS again.

Apache

Modules that I need: