The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu Studio 8.04

This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu Studio 8.04 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

I want to say first that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

To fully replace a Windows desktop, I want the Ubuntu Studio desktop to have the following software installed:

Graphics:

The GIMP - free software replacement for Adobe Photoshop
F-Spot - full-featured personal photo management application for the GNOME desktop
Google Picasa - application for organizing and editing digital photos

Internet:

Firefox
Opera
Flash Player 9
FileZilla - multithreaded FTP client
Thunderbird - email and news client
Evolution - combines e-mail, calendar, address book, and task list management functions
aMule - P2P file sharing application
BitTornado - Bittorrent client
Azureus - Java Bittorrent client
Pidgin - multi-platform instant messaging client
Skype
Google Earth
Xchat IRC - IRC client

Office:

OpenOffice Writer - replacement for Microsoft Word
OpenOffice Calc - replacement for Microsoft Excel
Adobe Reader
GnuCash - double-entry book-keeping personal finance system, similar to Quicken
Scribus - open source desktop publishing (DTP) application

Sound & Video:

Amarok - audio player
Audacity - free, open source, cross platform digital audio editor
Banshee - audio player, can encode/decode various formats and synchronize music with Apple iPods
MPlayer - media player (video/audio), supports WMA
Rhythmbox Music Player - audio player, similar to Apple's iTunes, with support for iPods
gtkPod - software similar to Apple's iTunes, supports iPod, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, iPod photo, and iPod mini
XMMS - audio player similar to Winamp
dvd::rip - full featured DVD copy program
Kino - free digital video editor
Sound Juicer CD Extractor - CD ripping tool, supports various audio codecs
VLC Media Player - media player (video/audio)
Helix Player - media player, similar to the Real Player
Totem - media player (video/audio)
Xine - media player, supports various formats; can play DVDs
Brasero - CD/DVD burning program
K3B - CD/DVD burning program
Multimedia Codecs

Programming:

KompoZer - WYSIWYG HTML editor, similar to Macromedia Dreamweaver, but not as feature-rich (yet)
Bluefish - text editor, suitable for many programming and markup languages
Quanta Plus - web development environment, including a WYSIWYG editor

Other:

VMware Server - lets you run your old Windows desktop as a virtual machine under your Linux desktop, so you don't have to entirely abandon Windows
TrueType fonts
Java
Read-/Write support for NTFS partitions

Lots of our desired applications are available in the Ubuntu repositories, and some of these applications have been contributed by the Ubuntu community.

I will use the username falko in this tutorial. Please replace it with your own username.

2 Installing The Base System

The installation of the base system is easy as 1-2-3 because the Ubuntu Studio installer doesn't offer a lot of options to choose from, so you cannot go wrong.

Download the Ubuntu Studio iso image from http://ubuntustudio.org/downloads, burn it onto a DVD, and boot your computer from it. Select your language:

Then select Install Ubuntu Studio:

Choose your language again (?):

Then select your location:

Choose a keyboard layout (you will be asked to press a few keys, and the installer will try to detect your keyboard layout based on the keys you pressed):

The installer checks the installation CD, your hardware, and configures the network with DHCP if there is a DHCP server in the network:

You can accept the default hostname or specify your own one:

Now you have to partition your hard disk. For simplicity's sake I will create one big partition (with the mount point /) and a little swap partition so I select Guided - use entire disk (of course, the partitioning is totally up to you - if you like, you can create more than just one big partition, and you can also use LVM):