checklist for setting up a computer for someone else

[habilis]

Besides games and google earth, what other applications are 3D?

~

If there's 256-512MB ram on a Xubuntu system, can/should Open Office be installed?

[D-cat]

1. Well, there's Blender and other similar 3D art and animation studio type or CAD related software, um, Sweet Home 3D (though I'm not convinced that uses accelerated graphics anyway)... not a heck of a lot. Even in games there's not much that involves real 3D rendering (mostly the driving, flying, and other simulation types), and the game developers are sure to put it in the description when it does.

2. Again, it depends on the intended use. If the person needs to save Microsoft formats for all types spreadsheets and databases and stuff, then go with OpenOffice. Otherwise, there's other faster office type apps, and for a word processor AbiWord loads over twice as fast with a lot less resources and itself loads and saves many formats (incl. doc).

There's really no master list. If you want an idea of the alternatives, you can look at included application lists of other light-weight distros to get an idea of what other people think is appropriate for a given machine. I'm making the note though that each user is different, so the intended use of a machine is as important as its specs; there's no one distro, no one applications list, that's going to be ideal for any given situation. That's why these custom builds exist. The best I can suggest is to try it out and determine for yourself if an app's performance on this machine would be acceptable for the intended user. Assuming it's not a surprise present, get their input. If you really have no way of knowing but plenty of disk space, may install both heavy and light versions of apps so the user can choose what they need for a given task (like, primarily use the light-weight, but if it fails for compatibility or whatever on something, then load the heavyweight)..

There isn't really a quick way out of building a custom system, especially on limited hardware. I recently spent two weeks on a 128MB RAM limited system as a birthday present for two kids. Since I'm not going to be around while they're using it, I probably spent about half that time on a "About_This_Computer.txt" documentation explaining what's different from what they're used to and in general what app is for what task.

Another thing I personally do when (I think) I'm done with a machine is back it up. I usually partition so there's a separate /home mount, and this is one of the reasons. I make an image backup of the MBR and the root (/) partition (from a live cd, I used SystemRescueCD on this low RAM system), and I do an archive backup (I use DAR) of the /home partition. This can make restoring an accidentally damaged system so much easier. Using an image backup on the mbr and / ensures you can restore the bootability of a system and its services as you gave it to them without wiping a user's personal files, while the separate archive backup of /home accomplishes a similar task with the user's default settings; they can be reset/restored without removing the personal data. Of course, anything that was set up or installed since the backup will have to be set up again, but you are efficiently returned to this snapshot, saving you between hours and days of work. You may consider doing an archive backup of /etc as well, so that a single botched setup file doesn't force you to overwrite the whole partition to restore this one file.

[Kieren]

ubuntu-restricted-extras will take care of things like java, flash, mp3 support. Other things I tend to install are:

ntp to make sure the clock is always correct

Media players such as mplayer and vlc

pidgin for instant messaging as it's my favorite but there are lot of others available

k3b for burning CDs but again this is just the application I like and there are others available

songbird for an mp3 player

[habilis]

Thanks for the in-depth responses D-cat. Theres plenty of concepts there that I can consider and apply.

As for the last paragraph, I'm not very knowledgeable on partitioning, but I'll have to learn.

What about security? I've seen several different views on this. I install Firestarter, but I'm not sure how to set it up adequately.

I've seen people write that you don't need any anti-virus programs, but what about defense against hacking etc? Most of the articles I find either say 'do nothing', or they list dozens of expert-level programs and measures to use.

[habilis]

Thanks for the suggestions Kieren. Do you know if ntp uses a lot of system resources?

I read this page:
https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/serverguide/C/NTP.html

Which version do you recommend for a desktop system, ntpdate, or ntpd?

[Kieren]

I just install the ntp package; no configuration required:

sudo apt-get install ntp

[D-cat]

Once you install the ntp package, ntpd should be installed automatically.

ntpdate has depreciated, a single manual run of

sudo sntp pool.ntp.org

should set the clock right and it's good to go from there... though I've had some weird things happen before with the attempts to compensate for the clock drift. If the clock fails to set right the first time (like some ridiculous amount "error"), try

sudo sntp -r pool.ntp.org

If you're at all paranoid, sudo hwclock --systohc after you've finally got the system clock correct will stick it to the hardware clock (this is normally done on shutdown anyway). Now you're done worrying about the clock.

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K3B is a KDE program. It's an excellent CD burning application, but should be avoided if you're building on a low RAM system. I'd suggest GraveMan for a CD Burning app in a low spec system... this of course is assuming that the machine even has a CD burner.

AFA MP3 player, I don't know anything about songbird (other than it looks like a gtk version of Amarok; a lot of features and a lot of resources)... going with what I know on a low spec system, I'd suggest xmms (NOT xmms2) or either of its successors that may be available to you: Beep Media Player or Audacious. The advantages to these players are that they are based on the look and feel of WinAmp (and can even load WinAmp2 skins) so they are familiar to most users, and they use little resources in their playback; you can run it in the background or minimized while doing other tasks and not have to worry about skipping and resource limitations. It, like WinAmp, is plugin based, so it's not hard to add support for other media formats or effects.

I'd include VLC as well for the shoutcast discovery support and the fact that it can play almost any video format in existence, but I think we already covered that.

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Ubuntu based systems come wide open. Wild viruses don't exist for Linux, though there is a concept for an attack vector involving features of the KDE and Gnome desktops. I think most malware authors consider it not worth the trouble to even try. If this computer will be sharing files in a Windows based network, then you can consider install clamav. (Native windows file sharing also requires Samba, but that's a whole 'nother topic)

From the malicious hacker angle, the biggest thing is not using an obvious user name and password. If there's no reason to access the machine from remote, then don't have any remote services installed (like sshd).

To set up the firewall, the new Ubuntu comes with ufw (uncomplicated firewall). You can install it if not included in your version. This is a gui frontend to manage iptables (which comes built-in with Linux kernels by default) and build yourself a firewall as strong or open as you need.

[habilis]

Any thoughts on security? (as mentioned in post #14 above)

[Kieren]

Most security questions have been answered in a sticky:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/lin...-security.html

[D-cat]

If there's a router between the user and the internet, then it's probably a moot point. Most routers have a firewall built in and locked tight by default.