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Artikel di bawah ini adalah hasil search diinternet ketika baru saja melakukan instalasi ubuntu linux (dapper).

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Prepraring Ubuntu for Everyday Use
28 tips to make Ubuntu 6.06 LTS perfect
by Keir Thomas
source : http://www.beginningubuntu.com/dapper_tips.html

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For those who have been waiting for the Linux desktop revolution, well, I’m pleased to tell you it’s here and knocking on your door. It’s called Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.

Below are over 25 tips that will let you tweak and personalize the latest Ubuntu release so that it’s perfect. Think of it as polishing the diamond.

In the tips I explain some simple stuff, such as replacing that gloomy wallpaper with something prettier, to more essential stuff, such as enabling all the Ubuntu software repositories so that you get the fullest choice of software. You’ll also learn how to configure proprietary 3D graphics drivers.

Most of the tips are taken from my book, Beginning Ubuntu Linux. Go buy it! Now! OK, that’s the blatant advert done with

Tips for using the tips:

Editing config files: When I ask you to edit a config file using sudo, it’s probably best to type the following at the command prompt: sudo gedit config_filename, replacing config_filename with the name of the file I mention. Then make the edits.

Entering commands: If I ask you to enter commands, or open a shell, you’ll need to open a terminal window. To do this, click Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal.

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Installation won’t work on my computer!
These tips are useless if you can’t even install Ubuntu. This release of Ubuntu comes with a fancy but brilliant new graphical installer that makes life easier for everyone. This seems to work fine for most people but there are almost certainly going to be incompatibilities for a minority. If you find it just won’t work, switch back to the old text-mode installer. To do this, you’ll have to download a different ISO image and burn it to CD-ROM.

Visit http://releases.ubuntu.com/6.06/ and download the Alternate Install CD. Then boot from it and install.

Use ndiswrapper to get wifi working
My notebook has a Broadcom BCM4318 wifi card (according to Ubuntu’s Device Manager; System -> Administration -> Device Manager). Unfortunately Broadcom won’t release open source drivers for this series of devices. Although a driver module has been reverse engineered by some enterprising hackers (bcm43xx), it won’t work with my card. However, Ubuntu installs it in the belief that it will.

So there were two things I had to do:

1. Stop the bcm43xx driver attaching to the hardware; and
2. Let ndiswrapper attach to the hardware instead, which it’ll do automatically when setup correctly.

In a nutshell, ndiswrapper lets you install Windows wifi drivers under Linux. You’ll need the relevant .inf and .sys Windows files, which are often found in the Windows driver .zip file. Tracking down these files is outside the scope of this brief article although if you to have a Broadcom 43xx series card, you can download the drivers I used by clicking here (edit: link removed because it was killing my bandwidth; you’ll have to track down the drivers yourself. Try this link).

To stop the bcm43xx module loading at boot-time, add it to the kernel module blacklist. This file is located at /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist. I loaded it into a text editor (use sudo), found a blank line, and added blacklist bcm43xx. Then, to test the setup, I rebooted. Sure enough, the entry for the wifi card had vanished from the Network Settings confiuraton applet. Good. That means no kernel module is associated with the hardware.

The trick following this is to make ndiswrapper associate with the hardware. To do this we need to:

1. install ndiswrapper configuration tools from the Ubuntu CD;
2. use ndiswrapper’s configuration tools to install the Windows drivers;
3. configure networking as usual using the Networking applet, including configuring any WEP protection.

Assuming that you’ve configured the universe and multiverse repositories in Synaptic (see Setting-up Multiverse and Universe Repositories below), search for ndiswrapper-utils and install it.
Then type:

sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf

although you should obviously replace the .inf filename with that of the driver you’re using. Then type :

sudo ndiswrapper -m,

to write the module to Ubuntu’s configuration files.

You should now find a new wifi card entry in the Network Settings dialog (System -> Administration -> Network), and you should be able to configure it as usual.

Setting up multiverse and universe repositories

Ubuntu has two fantastic software repositories available to it by default—Main (aka Officially Supported) and Restricted (aka Restricted Copyright). The former contains software that’s licensed under the GPL (or a compatible) license. The latter contains a small selection of software under prohibitive (usually proprietary) licenses that some Ubuntu users need. Examples include some wifi drivers.

There are two more “official” repositories, however—Universe (aka Community Maintained) and Multiverse (aka non-free). The former contains a ton of software from the Debian archives and the latter is yet more software that’s available under licenses not 100% compatible with the GPL (although that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s proprietary).

Universe and Multiverse aren’t setup by default, and it’s a good idea for you to add them because it gives you the broadest choice of software.

Open Synaptic Package Manager (System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager) and then click Settings -> Repositories within Synaptic. Look for the heading that reads Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Binary); it should be the first in the list. Select it and click Edit. Then ensure there’s a check in the Community Maintained and Non-Free boxes. Click OK, then Close, and then click the Reload button the main Synaptic program window. You should now have access to the extra repositories.

Adding PLF repository to Synaptic for non-GPL software
Certain items of software aren’t supplied by Ubuntu at all, because to do so is legally or ethically questionable. For example, many Linux users like to install the Windows multimedia codecs so they can play movies in Windows Media or QuickTime format. The system files required to do this are quite literally ripped straight from a Windows installation and packaged for Linux, without any kind of official permission. It is at best a legally grey area.
The Penguin Liberation Front is, as its website explains, “a team that builds litigious packages (packages that are patent encumbered or proprietary)”. This means they host a software repository that can be used with Synaptic and that contains software such as the Windows multimedia codecs, Skype’s proprietary VoIP software, RealPlayer, and much more.
Adding the PLF repository to Synaptic is easy. Start Synaptic and click Settings -> Repositories. Then click the Add button, and then the Custom button in the dialog that appears. In the “APT line” box, type the following:

deb http://packages.freecontrib.org/ubuntu/plf/ dapper free non-free

Once done, click Add Channel, then Close, and then the Reload button on the main Synaptic program window.
Here are some of the packages offered by the PLF that I installed—just use Synaptic’s Search function to track them down:

Package name Description

w32codecs

The Windows mutlimedia codecs that will add Windows Media Player, QuickTime etc support to Linux (see below for details of extra steps needed to configure multimedia)

libdvdcss2

DeCSS software to allow DVD movie playback under Linux

realplay

RealPlayer (note this is also offered in the Ubuntu repository; the PLF version is better because installation is fully automated)

skype Skype VoIP software

For the full list of packages, see the bottom of the following webpage: http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/doc/plf.

Making multimedia playback work properly

Ubuntu comes configured for multimedia playback and offers the Totem application for the purpose. However, as good as this is, it’s a better idea to use Mplayer, a more mature product. Installing the packages listed below will install all the multimedia codecs you need and also install Mplayer to work with them. It will also add the Mplayer Firefox plugin so that online video will play fine.

See the step above about adding the PLF repository and the universe/multiverse repositories to Synaptic. Once this is done, search for and install the following packages using Synaptic:

w32codecs
mplayer
mozilla-mplayer
libdvdcss2

Once these are installed, multimedia playback of practically all types of video files should work within Mplayer (Applications -> Sound & Video -> Mplayer) and also within Firefox. To configure automatic playback of video files in Mplayer when you double-click them, right-click any video file and select Properties. Then click the Open With tab and ensure the radio button alongside Mplayer in the list. Then click Close. Note that you’ll need to do this for all types of movie file you want to play automatically within Mplayer: .avi, .divx, .mov, and so on.

Use proprietary 3D drivers

OK, here’s the deal. Open source drivers for your 3D card are provided “out of the box”. No further work is needed and they’re installed by default.
The problem is that these only provide 2D. For optimized 3D graphics (to use the flashy XGL desktop, or to play 3D games), you’re going to need the proprietary drivers. “Proprietary” in this case means closed source. That’s bad. On behalf of the open source community, I ask that you only install these drivers if you absolutely have to. Otherwise just stick with the open source drivers, which will do all you need and are a LOT more stable than the proprietary drivers (you’ll probably kill your Hibernate/Suspend feature by installing the proprietary drivers, for example).
Better still, write to Nvidia or ATI and ask them to release fully open source drivers.
ATI cards:

Open Synaptic and search for xorg-driver-fglrx and fglrx-control. Install both. When installation has finished, open a command-prompt and type sudo aticonfig –initial (note there are two dashes before initial). Reboot your machine.

Nvidia cards:

Open Synaptic and search for and install nvidia-glx. When installation has finished, open a shell window and type sudo nvidia-xconfig. Then reboot.

Test your new 3D configuration, after reboot, by selecting one of the OpenGL screensavers (System -> Preferences -> Screensavers). AntSpotlight is pretty cool. If it runs smoothly then everything has worked.

Installing Flash Player

Ensure you’ve setup Synaptic Package Manager to use the universe and multiverse repositories. Then search for flashplugin-nonfree. There will be an additional confirmation step after download but then Flash should work fine within Firefox. You will have to restart Firefox for it to work after installation.

Turning off touchpad tap-click
My notebook touchpad interprets a tap on the touchpad as a mouse click. This drives me mad. I find it means I misclick accidentally an awful lot. To turn of “tap-to-click”, so that only the left mouse button can be used to click, open the following file in a text editor (using sudo): /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Look for the section headed Section “InputDevice”, below which will be “Driver “synaptics”. Anywhere before the EndSection line beneath, add the line Option “MaxTapTime” “0″. Save the file and then restart X (close all open programs and then Ctrl+Alt+Backspace; if X doesn’t restart, login at the command prompt and type

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart).

Turning off Firefox touchpad back and forward
For some reason, Firefox interprets the horizontal “scroll” feature of my notebook’s touchpad as virtual clicks of the Back or Forward browser buttons, so that I find myself accidentally moving back and forward in my browsing history. To configure the horizontal scroll of the touchpad to actually horizontally scroll a webpage, open Firefox, type about:config in the address box, and use that page’s “Filter” text box to search for mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action. Double-click the line in the results and set the value to 1, rather than 2. The change will be instant and permanent.

Setup a Windows partition for permanent access
My Windows XP partition wasn’t automatically made available under Ubuntu. The solution was the following: type sudo mkdir /windows at the command prompt. Type sudo fdisk -l and look for the line that ends HPFS/NTFS, and then look at the beginning of the line and write down what’s there (ie /dev/hda1). Then load the following file in a text editor using sudo: /etc/fstab. Add a new line at the end of the file that reads:

/dev/hda1 /windows ntfs nls=utf8,umask=0222 0 0

Replace the /dev/hda1 part with what you wrote down earlier. Save the file and then type sudo mount /windows to make your Windows partition available immediately (browse to /windows to see the contents). You’ll find it available all the time, even after you reboot. Remember: the Windows NTFS partition is read only. You can’t write files there.

Add Windows fonts
My notebook dual-boots between Linux and Windows and I like to add all my Windows fonts to my Ubuntu setup, so that certain web pages look like they should and also so Word docs from colleagues read OK.
To install the fonts, follow the step above to make your Windows partition available if it isn’t already. Type the following at the command prompt to open the Windows font directory in Nautilus: nautilus /windows/WINDOWS/Fonts/ (this assumes that your Windows partition is mounted in /windows, as described in the tip above). Click View -> View As List, and then click the Type heading so that the files are arranged via file extension. Scroll down to the TTF files and select all of them (click the first, hold down Shift and then click the last). Then right-click one of the selected files and click Copy, so that they’re copied ready for pasting somewhere else. Click Go -> Location and, in the box, type fonts://. In the new file listing that appears, right-click a blank spot and select Paste. Your Windows fonts should now be available to all Ubuntu applications, including OpenOffice.org.

Switch Gedit font from large to readable
For some reason the Gedit text editor is configured by default to use a large font that makes reading any kind of text file difficult. To change the font, click Edit -> Preferences, click the Fonts & Colors tab, and then choose a new font in the Editor Font dropdown list. Alternatively click Use Default Theme Font, which will switch the font to Sans.

Use a different font with GNOME terminal
Click Edit -> Profiles, click Default in the list, and click the Edit button. Remove the check in the Use The System Terminal Font box and select a different font by clicking the dropdown list.

Make the Wastebin and Computer icons appear on the desktop
Ubuntu encourages a clean desktop policy that makes the desktop look superb at first glance, but just doesn’t work for me. I want my Trash icon on the desktop, and an icon for my Home directory too. To bring this about, open a command-prompt and type gconf-editor. In the folder view on the left of the window, navigate to apps/nautilus/desktop. On the right of the program window, ensure there are checks in the trash_icon_visible, home_icon_visible and computer_icon_visible boxes. Take a look at your desktop and the results should be instant.

Get rid of the gloomy wallpaper
Ubuntu’s wallpaper is designed to reflect a humanist metaphor. Although I appreciate the thought that went into it, I’m afraid to say I don’t like it. It’s the visual equivalent of a headache. There are two alternatives provided but both are fairly dark and, well, gloomy. To get the officially prescribed GNOME wallpaper, that features some neat nature-based images with nice bright colors, type the following into your browser:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/desktop/2.14/2.14.1/sources/gnome-backgrounds-2.14.0.tar.bz2.

Download the file and then double-click to open it in File Roller. Click the Extract button. Click the Extract In Folder dropdown list and click Other. Navigate to your /home folder, click the Create Folder button, and type .wallpaper. This will create a hidden folder in your /home directory. Then click the Open button, and then the Extract button in the parent window. Close File Roller, right-click a blank spot on the desktop, select Change Desktop Background, and click the Add Wallpaper button. In the file listing on the right of the dialog, right-click in a blank spot, and select Open Location. Type .wallpaper. Then delve into the folders to choose the wallpaper you want. My favorite, and one that causes people who see my desktop to comment positively, is GreenMeadow. It’s in the nature folder.

Configure power saving so that it works
My notebook will hibernate pretty well but won’t suspend without crashing. So to configure the notebook to hibernate when it’s not been used for a while, or when I close the screen, I used the System -> Preferences -> Power Management applet. Click the dropdown list next to When Laptop Lid is Closed and make the change, and then click the General tab and select Hibernate in the two entries under the General heading.

Turn off OpenOffice.org’s ugly font rendering
I find OpenOffice.org isn’t too hot when displaying fonts because its uses its own clumsy antialiasing system. In short. to me the fonts look ugly. You might disagree but to turn off font antialiasing only for OpenOffice.org, open any OO.org application and click Tools -> Options, click View in the list on the left, and remove the check from Screen Font Anti-aliasing. Then click the OK button.

Force OpenOffice.org to save Word documents
The sad fact of life is that I work with colleagues who run Windows and Microsoft Office. Therefore I work with Word .doc files nearly all the time. To force OpenOffice.org to automatically save Word files, rather than OpenDocument files, click Tools -> Options in OO.org Writer, click Load/Save on the left of the dialog, and then click the General heading just beneath. On the right of the dialog box, click the Always Save As dropdown list and make a selection. The Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP option is probably best for the broadest compatibility. By clicking the Document Type dropdown list, and selecting Spreadsheet or Presentation, you can also select to save in Excel or PowerPoint formats too by making the relevant choices in the Always Save As dropdown list.
In the long-term, I’m working on converting my colleagues to OpenOffice.org.

Handy applets for notebooks: wifi strength and CPU speed control
I like to see the strength of my wifi connection, and also when any data is being transmitted, so I use the Network Monitor applet. Right-click a blank spot on the taskbar and select Add to Panel. Scroll down the window to the System & Hardware heading and click Network Monitor. Select it and click Add. A new icon should appear near the system tray. The four bars on the right indicate wifi signal strength.
If you’ve got a compatible notebook, such as one containing an AMD chip or an Intel Mobile Pentium 4 chip, you might also be interested in the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor, under the same heading in the Add to Panel dialog box. However, out of the box this isn’t configured to work properly. To make it work, open a shell and type sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets. Read and evaluate the warning about security and hit Enter and then agree to install cpufreq-selector with SUID root. Reboot the system. From then on, you can right-click the CPU-freq applet and select the speed you want the chip to run at. The Ubuntu Blog has an excellent write-up about this, which I advise you to read: http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/11/04/enabling-cpu-frequency-scaling/.

Installing Bon Echo (Firefox test release)
Bon Echo is the codename given to the testing release of Firefox 2. It’s extremely quick and, from what I can tell, very stable. It’s worth installing. You’ll find it by clicking the “Bon Echo Alpha 2″ link at the top of the following web page:

http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=8406.

Click the relevant link under the “Builds are available for testing” heading on the page that appears next to download the files.
When the file’s downloaded, unpack the archive using the following command (which assumes the file has downloaded to the desktop):

tar zxf ~/Desktop/bonecho-alpha2.tar.gz.

Then move the directory to your home directory and hide it using the following command:

mv firefox ~/.bonecho.

Bon Echo will automatically pick-up on your bookmarks but it won’t pick-up your plugins, like Flash or Totem, so type the following to make the plugins work with Bon Echo:

ln -s /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/* ~/.bonecho/plugins/.

Then, to run Bon Echo whenever you want, create a desktop shortcut: right-click the desktop, select Create Launcher, type Bon Echo in the Name field, and .bonecho/firefox in the Command line. Click the No Icon button and the choose a relevant icon, and then click OK to create the launcher. And then be wowed by the speed of the next-gen Firefox release! (Also Google autocomplete in the search box and spell-checking in text fields on web pages!).

Sound on my weird notebook
My notebook is possibly the most Linux-incompatible machine that’s ever been made. Here’s a tip: Don’t buy an Asus A6R. It’s one of the worst notebooks I’ve ever owned.
Sound didn’t work straight off. The notebook has an IXP SB400 AC’97 Audio Controller, according to Ubuntu’s Device Manager. If you’ve got the same sound card, and want to get it working, you need to do two things.

1. Double-click the speaker icon in Ubuntu’s system tray and click Edit -> Preferences in the Volume Control window that appears. In the list, look for the Master Surround entry, and put a checkbox in it. Then look for External Amplifier and put a check in it. Click the Close button then click the Switches tab in the Volume Control window. Remove the check against External Amplifier.
2. Then click the Playback tab and click the Speaker icon beneath the Master Surround slider, so that it’s no longer muted. Then adjust the slider. Playback some audio and you should find everything now works. Basically, the Master Surround slider is now your volume slider. Weird, but true. To make the system tray applet use the Master Surround to control the volume, right-click the system tray speaker icon, select Preferences, and select Master Surround in the list.

MP3s: Install XMMS, the old-school MP3 player

XMMS: XMMS is an old-school Winamp-like MP3 player. I prefer it to the iTunes-like Rhythmbox because it’s smaller and simpler. It can be installed via Synaptic by simply searching for and installing XMMS. To configure MP3s to play automatically within it, right-click any MP3, select Properties, then click the Open With tab. If XMMS isn’t already in the list, click the Add button and find XMMS in the list. Click Add. Then in the Open With dialog box, ensure the radio button next to XMMS Music Player is selected. Then click Close. You can add a Ubuntu-style skin by downloading

http://anka.org/henrik/humanxmms/files/HumanXMMS-latest.tgz.

You can install this by first starting XMMS if you haven’t already (this creates a necessary directory in your /home folder), and then copying the file you downloaded to the hidden .xmms folder:

cp ~/Desktop/HumanXMMS-latest.tgz ~/.xmms/Skins/.

Then right-click on the XMMS title-bar, select Options -> Skins Browser. In the directories box, ensure /home//.xmms/Skins is selected and then select HumanXMMS in the list above.
Rhythmbox:

If you are interested in using Rythmbox for MP3 playback, install the gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 package using Synaptic.

Some useful extra packages to install
None in the list below are installed by default because the Ubuntu team (quite rightly) wanted to keep things simple and not overwhelm the user. All can be installed using Synaptic, however, and all are superb packages. See tip above about enabling the universe/multiverse repositories first:

Package name Description
gftp

Graphical FTP client

firestarter

Firewall configuration tool (actually lets you configure the iptables firewall that’s built into the kernel, but you get the idea)

liferea

RSS feed reader

nvu

WYSIWYG HTML editor (I used it to craft this *cough* beautiful site)

sbackup

Graphical backup tool; lives on System -> Administration menu after install. Look for Simple Backup Configuration and Simple Backup Restore.

Add SSH server component
If you use SSH to remotely connect to your Ubuntu machine, you’ll need to install some extra software. The SSH client and server components and split in Ubuntu, and only the client is installed by default. To add the server component, simply search for and install openssh-server in Synaptic. Configuration and setup is automatic (hey, this is Ubuntu, remember?). This will obviously open a port on your machine that might present a security risk; Ubuntu is otherwise completely closed, which is why the server component isn’t installed by default.

Send/Receive files using Bluetooth
I’ve got a Bluetooth-equipped camera phone and I like to transfer pictures to my PC using Bluetooth. The Ubuntu kernel has Bluetooth support built-in but to transfer files you’ll need to use Synaptic to install an extra package. Ensure that the Universe and Multiverse repositories are setup and then use Synaptic to search for and install the following: gnome-bluetooth.
Receiving files:

Click Applications -> Accessories -> Bluetooth File Sharing. This will start a background system-tray service and will make your computer ready to receive files. Simply use your mobile phone to “detect” the computer and send files.

Sending files:

Slightly more tricky. Right-click the desktop and create a new shortcut. Click Create Launcher. In the Name box, type Bluetooth Send. In the command box, type gnome-obex-send. Click the No Icon button and select a relevant icon from the list. Then click OK to create the shortcut. From now on, whenever you want to send a file to a Bluetooth-enabled device, simply drag and drop it on the new shortcut icon. Following this your phone will be detected (you might have to click the Refresh button) and it should be obvious what to do to send the file.

Use one, rather than two, desktop panels
For some reason Ubuntu likes you to have two screen-hogging panels—one at the top of the screen, and one at the bottom. Some people like this, some hate it.
To quickly combine them into one panel at the bottom (that’s “quickly” as in “quick and dirty”), right-click a blank spot on the top panel and select Add To Panel. In the dialog box that appears, look under the Desktop & Windows heading and select Window List. Then click the Add button and then close. Click and drag the Window List handle to move it closer to the quick-launch icons. Then delete the bottom panel by right-clicking in a blank spot on it, and selecting Delete Panel. Then, to shift the top panel to the bottom of the screen, click and hold in a blank spot and simply drag it to the bottom.

Use a Windows-like Start button
Don’t bite my hand off for this tip! A Start-like button saves a lot of space on the panel. Don’t worry. You’re not cloning the Windows experience. It just makes sense for some people who have smaller screens and don’t want the Applications/Places/System menu.
Right-click the Applications/Places/System menu and click Remove from Panel. Then right-click a blank spot on the panel and select Add to Panel. In the dialog that appears, select Main Menu under the Utilities heading. Then click the Add button, and then Close. You can shift icons around on the panel by right-clicking them and selecting Move (you might have to uncheck Lock to Panel first). Note that, in order to put the new Start-like icon at the very left of the panel, you’ll have to shift the two quick-launch icons out of the way by moving them.

Fine-tune Ubuntu’s font display/rendering
I’m a stickler when it comes font rendering and have to tweak, tweak, tweak until I’m happy. Ubuntu has two possible font-rendering modes: using bytecode hinting, which it refers to as “Native” rendering, and using auto-hinting. In addition, you can turn sub-pixel rendering on and off. I think turning it off makes the fonts look cleaner.
To configure all of this, open a command-prompt and type sudo dpkg-reconfigire fontconfig. Then work through the options. Don’t forget that you’ll need to restart the X server to see the results (Ctrl+Alt+Backspace).