Well I decided to finally bite the bullet and do an installation of Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) 64-bit Version. First of all (as expected) one would download the .iso file from Ubuntu’s Web Site, then proceed to burn it to a CD, or put it on a USB bootable drive using a tool like unetbootin. Once the media is on the bootable media, proceed with the installation. If you have existing LVs (as I did) which you don’t want to touch, ensure they are set to “do not use”, as you can always mount these afterwords.
Once the installation is done, the first thing noted was that DHCP wasn’t running out of the gate. This was simply a matter of typing the following to fix it up:
sudo echo "auto eth0" >> /etc/network/interfaces
sudo echo "iface eth0 inet dhcp" >> /etc/network/interfaces
To give it an IP right now, just type sudo dhclient eth0. Afterwords one can proceed with installing some regularly used programs.
sudo apt-get install libreoffice-common vlc
As I typically use rtorrent, and I would prefer to get the latest version one could do the following:
sudo apt-get install subversion libtool automake libssl-dev libsigc++-2.0-dev libncurses5-dev libalglib-dev libavahi-glib-dev
Next, go download the script for compiling it and what-not. Save it on your system and give it executable permissions with chmod u+x build.sh. As the script will download multiple directories and what-not it is best to create a scratch directory and put the build script in there. Then it is a matter of running the following commands: (and relax, this will take some time)
./build download
./build build
./build extend
If all went well rtorrent will be compiled and functional on your system. Simply execute ~/bin/rtorrent to start the application up. Additionally, ~/bin is automatically looked for, and added to your path which is part of your .profile. Hence, on next login .profile will be launched, so you can run rtorrent in the future by simply typing rtorrent in a terminal window. Another favorite of mine is irssi (a cli irc program), so let’s grab the latest build of that too. Create a scratch directory and grab the files from the svn. This is accomplished like so:
cd
mkdir irssi
svn co http://svn.irssi.org/repos/irssi/trunk/ irssi
cd irssi
./autogen.sh
make
Irssi is now installed, and can be running by simply typing irssi. If you would like to secure it further, I would recommend placing it inside a chroot jail, or setting up a profile for apparmor for the irssi. If you wish to go the apparmor route, I would suggest you start here.