Ubuntu Tweaks

Ubuntu ISO images

Ubuntu lists all popular downloads at Ubuntu Releases. And they list almost all the CD-Images here.

Ubuntu for older PCs

It's difficult to use older Ubuntu Operating Systems (those without updates) for PCs running with low memory and CPU power.

The solution is to install using the Alternate CDs provided at Ubuntu Releases (for example, Ubuntu-12.04.2 Alternate i386).

If you still running out of resources, you can use Gnome Classic panel instead of Unity, by installing gnome-panel (using sudo apt-get install gnome-panel).

After installing, restart the PC. Then you can switch from default Unity to Gnome Classic by clicking small Ubuntu icon alongside your user name.

Ubuntu Post-installation Steps

Making Pidgin icon stay on system tray

1. Go to Pidgin Preferences and set Show System Tray Icon to Always
2. Open up a Linux shell and execute gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['all']"
3. Reload Pidgin
4. Right-click Pidgin icon on system tray and tick Blink on New Messages to alert yourself on new messages (better disable Libnotify Popups from Plugins menu)

Disable Global Menus

All applications have used one global menu by default, instead of each application having its own menu bar and for Firefox before version 22.

1. Open up super-user Linux shell and execute sudo apt-get autoremove --purge appmenu-gtk appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-qt firefox-globalmenu
2. For Firefox version 23 and later; enter about:config in the address bar, search for use_unity_menubar setting, double-click on the item to set the value to false, close Firefox
3. Restart PC

PHP and MySQL

PHP-My-Admin Configuration on Ubuntu (12.04)

1. Install PHP-My-Admin using sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin and the installation location is /usr/share/phpmyadmin.
2. The general configuration steps mentioned in PMA Quick Installation Wiki will not work 100% as Ubuntu expects the required file at /var/lib/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php.
3. Copy a sample using cp -p /usr/share/phpmyadmin/config.sample.inc.php /var/lib/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php
4. Change the permissions and ownership using sudo chgrp www-data /var/lib/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php and sudo chmod 640 /var/lib/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php
5. If you need your development environment with empty root password for MySQL, change the value of $cfg['Servers'][$i]['AllowNoPassword'] to true inside newly copied /var/lib/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php
6. Enjoy