[conspire] "OK, I've just installed Ubuntu for the first time, and it's the 6.06 LTS Desktop. Now what?"

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Daniel Gimpelevich (daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us):

> Go to the following URL with Firefox:
> 
> http://linuxmafia.com/isos/dapper/fresh-ubuntu-dapper
> 
> Save the file to your desktop and close Firefox. Right-click the file and
> click Properties. Click the Permissions tab and check all three Execute
> checkboxes. Close the window. Double-click the file and click the "Run in
> Terminal" button. Enter your password when prompted, and wait for the
> window to disappear. Enjoy!

Nice little script.

It might be worth mentioning that this pulls down and registers some
package-signing key onto i386 Ubuntu, then installs your custom
sources.list for Dapper Drake, a bunch of software-compiling tools, Sun
JVM 1.5.x, Macromedia Flash, some GNOME multimedia apps, Microsoft Web
Fonts aka MS TrueType Core Fonts, and some scripts/whatever to implement
freedesktop.org's XDG[1] menu scheme.

Too much GNOME and proprietary gunk there for me, but many will like it.

Script referred to includes:

 sudo rm sources.list

I realise that hacking such little one-off scripts quickly reaches
diminishing returns.  However, in the name of not burning bridges, you
might want to do:

 sudo if [ -f sources.list ]; then mv sources.list sources.list-$(date -I); fi;

(I readily confess to a mania for ISO-8601 sortable date format[2], but
you're less likely to clobber something valuable than with renaming to
*.bak, etc., not to mention with "rm".)

[1] http://www.redhat.com/archives/xdg-list/2003-March/msg00041.html

[2] "Yanks and Europeans, we are the big-endians.  You will be assimilated."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601