OS installation

From Smith family

Server setup
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Installation of the operating systems is straightforward. The server has Ubuntu Server edition installed and the desktop machine has Kubuntu (no reason for selecting KDE, other than it's what I'm used to).

For both setups, I don't bother doing anything complicated with disk partitioning. I have the recommended size partition for swap, and allocated a couple of GB each for /var and /tmp, and everything else just goes into one large partition.

The installation scripts for the server should ask if you want to install a standard LAMP server; you do. The server needs the additional packages build-essentials (for basic software development) and openssh-server (as the server will be run as a headless box). Other necessary packages will be mentioned with the relevant setup.

Install proprietary graphics card driver

I have a NVidia GeForce G210 video card. The proprietary video card driver uses the card's GPU for better graphics; the open source one makes KDE hang all too often. This means you need to install the proprietary driver as soon as the OS is installed on the desktop machine.

To check that the card is supported, do:

root@desktop:~# lspci | grep -i nvidia
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GT218 [GeForce G210] (rev a2)

note the code at the start of the line, and use that to find the PCI ID of the card:

root@desktop:~# lspci -n | grep 02:00
02:00.0 0300: 10de:0a60 (rev a2)

and check that the PCI ID you get is in the list of supported products (Mine's 10de:0a60; the GeForce 6600 on the old machine was 10de:00f2).

Installing the driver is easy. Go to KMenu -> System -> Hardware Drivers Manager (in Kubuntu 10.04, it's K -> Applications -> System -> Hardware Drivers) and check the box to enable the restricted drivers for the NVIDIA card. Adept will then download the right package for you. Restart X (Rebooting the machine is probably easier) and all should be fine.

Full details are at the Nvidia driver how to on the Ubuntu documentation site.