Install Ubuntu 7.04

I took time during holiday to install Ubuntu 7.04 (code name Feisty) on my home computer. I thought for people with Unix background like myself, it should be simple exercise. It is not. My home computer is old Pentium IV 2.26 MHz, 768 MB RAM with installed Windows XP SP2 and I decided to install Ubuntu as guest OS on virtual machine using Vmware Workstation. First I used Vmware Workstation to create a machine with 6 GB Hard disk. Since Ubuntu is not on list of Vmware available guest OS, I just selected other Linux as guest OS for my virtual machine. I booted the virtual machine with fresh downloaded Ubuntu 7.04 and followed the instruction on the screen. The first installation got stuck at 69 %, I waited 10 minutes then reboot and try second attempt, that went well until completion. Now I can login using the account/password asked and created by installation program. My first impression is not bad, the screen looks nice on 1024x768 resolution, even sound card works. Pre-installed Firefox 2.0 work smoothly even on virtual machine, Ubuntu accepts an IP address assigned from my ADSL Internet modem automatically thus I got connection to Internet.
1. issue sudo: I want to install some additional software as root however what is password of my well known root?. After few minutes investigation, I recognized that Ubuntu using sudo as mechanism to allow normal account access to root and by default root is locked and no one can neither login as root nor su. To run program using root account, we have type e.g.

 
sudo shutdown -r +15 "quick reboot"

sudo will ask us to enter our password and then run shutdown using root account. I known that sudo mechanism is used also in Mac OSx 10.4 Tiger and it offers certain benefits against traditional root, however I can not change my habit so I unlock root account by enter

sudo passwd 

2. issue apt-get: I want to try ruby so I type in command line terminal

ruby

Ubuntu is intelligent enough to answer that ruby is not installed and offer me that I can install ruby by using

sudo apt-get install ruby

I tried and it works. The apt-get is Ubuntu package manager (now I know that it is from Debian and Ubuntu is rooted from Debian). It does all things: downloads required software including dependencies, installs and configures. If we does not know name of software package, then Synaptic Package Manager is application that offers features such as listing, installing and uninstalling software package. apt-get use configuration on /etc/apt/sources.list, which contains list of ftp servers storing debian distribution package.
After adding new repository into /etc/apt/sources.list, hit 'reload' button to get package information from the new added repository.
3. issue add path: I download and install SUN JDK 1.5.0_11 and want to add JDK 1.5 to PATH so I can type java, javac, etc. I created .bash_profile in home directory and add two following line

export JDK_HOME=~/jdk1.5.0_11
export PATH=~/jdk1.5.0_11/bin:$PATH

and do logout/login, it doesn't work. I tried to put these line to .xssesion, after that I can't login to the system anymore and have to login using failsafe session to remove this .xsession file. Looking at documentation and even googling doesn't help. At the end I realized that I should add these line at the end of .bashrc. Then it works in both cases either I login using X-Desktop or terminal using Windows putty.
4. issue Vmware tools: we can not install Vmware tools using Vmware provided package, the Feisty kernel version simply does not match. However Ubuntu provides its own vmware tool package. Installation is pretty simple, just type

uname -a

to get kernel version, my kernel version is 2.6.20-15 and then invoke apt-get

 
sudo apt-get install vmware-tools-kernel-modules-2.6.20-15

Finally reboot to take effect. To be honest, I have not observed better response from any application as Vmware claimed.
5. issue update time: To keep your clock synchronized, install ntpdate package as follows

sudo apt-get install ntpdate
sudo /etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate
sudo crontab -e 
@hourly /etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate

6. issue missing c-header files: Ubuntu striped down in order to keep installation CD small and installation process fast. The result is default installation does not contain packages that developers normally expect. I got into trouble when I tried to compile a c program, gcc told me that file dlfcn.h is missing. I guested that some lib is missing but can not figure out which package contains the file. After spending time on Google, I found Ubuntu Package Web Site, where I can enter file name and search for package containing that file.