Make Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) a complete system after fresh install

Though Ubuntu is not my OS of choice (well at least for now), it is the distro i recommend for linux beginners. However, the system after fresh install is far from perfect. Default system fonts are rather large (and ugly), no flash, no capable of playing mp3, mkv, avi… Since all these features are not there out-of-the-box in a fresh system, it must be easily added so that users, especially beginners do not have to spend hours hunting solutions for these rather common problems.

Now that an LTS (Long Term Support) version of Ubuntu has been released, I spend some time to make Ubuntu 10.04 become a more efficient system.

The process should be easily employed by a linux beginner, so i think the best solution is to write a bash script to automatically run some commands to get what i want.

The script would do the following tasks:

• Move window buttons to the right.
• Make the system fonts more shiny and more readable. In this script, i set all fonts to size 9, except for title bar that is 8. Also, the default fonts of choice are droid fonts (they’re fonts on Google’s Android phones) which i think are the best free fonts collection out there. I set sub-pixel mode (useful for lcd screen) then i set font hinting to full level, these last two settings make firefox fonts much more readable.
• Add computer icon to desktop, also remove volume icons from it.
• Choose oslosl as default repo. This is one of the best repo for linux distributions i know. Also enable canonical’s partner repo.
• Choose whether to upgrade the system to latest packages or not (default set to not).
• Install Microsort core fonts (for web).
• Install Adobe Flash Player.
• Install some codecs for playing multimedia out-of-the-box.
• Install some additional useful packages: unrar, p7zip, tree, curl, hwinfo.

Well, that’s all. I will update the script if something useful for an everyday system that i forget to add right now.

Here is the script: ubuntu_after_install.sh

Download the script, then run it:

sh /path/to/ubuntu_after_install.sh

OR

UPGRADE=1 sh /path/to/ubuntu_after_install.sh

(will also upgrade packages to latest versions, longer to complete).

A screenshot to get the idea how it will look like

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