Elyse in Precise

So, the last time that I wrote here, I talked about showing how Elyse looks like with Precise Pangolin. Here is a screen shot of her:

Lovely, isn't it?

Of course what you are seeing is not the ``stock'' installation---there were some things that I had to tweak to make sure that things worked out the way I want them to be. Now that I am a little more cognitively associated (wasn't so on Saturday due to the massive amounts of crashing that I had to do due to my horrendous sleep habits from the previous week), let me try to catalogue some of the changes that I did with the stock installation of Xubuntu 12.04.

• The installation uses 3 partitions---Ext2 for the O/S itself, Ext4 for /home/*, and one swap partition that is 2GiB, about half the amount of RAM Elyse has.
• The usual stuff that I like to have (i.e. C/C++, python, LaTeX, vim) are also installed. One new addition: explicit installation of numpy and scipy.
• Altered ~/.config/Terminal/terminalrc to undo the fubared colour scheme that came on default for the console---I like my default ANSI colours thankyouverymuch. If I remember correctly, all I did was just to delete the lines containing the special palette colours that were set up.
• Added the PPA for Skype(Enable the ``Canonical Partners'' repository and use that one instead since the PPA for Skype is broken) and Chrome and possibly Dropbox.
• Oh, remap the keyboard's caps lock key by editing /etc/default/keyboardto read as

  XKBMODEL="pc105"
  XKBLAYOUT="us"
  XKBVARIANT=""
  XKBOPTIONS="ctrl:nocaps"

  Yes, it does a little more than remapping the caps lock key to control, but sure.
• Oh, if it is not obvious enough, set the terminal font to GNU unifont. I used to like really tiny fonts to see more, but then I realise that having a wider variety of viewable glyphs was more useful than reading too many things on screen. In fact, this is partly the reason why I update Eileen to the newest version of PuTTy---it allows the use of ``proportional width'' fonts for the terminal. This means that a pan-unicode font like GNU Unifont that has both single and double-width characters is usable.

So yeah, those were the ``special'' things that I did on the default installation to make it less annoying, but other than that, there were half a dozen other small tweaks that aren't really worth mentioning, so I won't.

Alright, till the next post.

[Ed: Since the post I realised that the PPA for Skype was unnecessary. Enabling the ``Canonical Partners'' repository and then doing sudo apt-get install skype works as expected.]