Things I did after installing Xubuntu 11.10

Yeah, I am riding the bandwagon on this one… However, this time around some things were a bit more hard this time around, primarily installing Sun java.

First thing I do is install Sun Java, and remove OpenJDK as well as IcedTea. Mainly because I need JRE for my online bank, and OpenJDK does not work for some reason. However, Canonical has decided to remove Sun Java from their repositories, why I don’t know, but it’s not there. Luckily there is a PPA just for Sun Java, so just open a terminal window and type in:

UPDATE:

Commenter panchromatic added a better way of doing this, cause that ppa is not being kept updated (i.e. a severe security risk on your system):

Go to http://www.duinsoft.nl/packages.php?t=en if you want an alternative repository to use.
A respected member of the Dutch Ubuntu Community maintains this shell script to automate the retrieval and installation of the Oracle (Sun) Java Runtime Environment.

Next item I change my power saver settings. Especially in Xubuntu the defaults are fairly annoying, where the screensaver goes on after 10 minutes. To change the settings, open Settings Manager and go to Power manager, and tweak your settings there. Since I use a desktop computer (not a laptop), only interesting settings are under the On AC tab, but feel free to tweak as needed. If you, like me, don’t like screensaver, you can also disable the screensaver under the Screensaver icon in Settings Manager.

The final “tweak” I did was to make sure my font settings were correct, mostly the DPI, aliasing and  Sub pixel order. To change these settings, go to Settings Manager, click on the Appearance icon and from there select the Fonts tab. My settings are Full aliasing (make sure you have a video card that supports this), sub pixel order is RGB, and my DPI is set to 96. However, if you want larger or smaller fonts, feel free to experiment with the DPI settings.

Pretty much all I did, though I also changed to Aw0ken icon theme, cause it is awesome (check out gnome-look.org to find it), as well as installing Gnome DO, Chromium Web Browser, Spotify, Last FM and conky, but all those are a matter of taste really, and freaking easy to install.

UPDATE 22/10:

I’ve updated this a bit. Adding a PPA through Software Source will leave you with an key error each time you update or try to install it. Adding it with add-apt-repository makes it import the key as well (have not been messing much about with PPA’s before). Also, corrected sun-java6-jre-plugin to correct package name, namely sun-java6-plugin.