[conspire] (forw) Re: Night of the Living CABAL, Saturday, Nov. 14, 4-8pm

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander <paulz at ieee.org>:

> I just did a fresh install of Kubuntu.   Firefox is standard part of the
> install.  I can't seem to find Chrome or Chromium.   Well I do have a M$
> machine with chrome if all else fails.

$ sudo snap install chromium

or, equivalently:

$ sudo apt install chromium-browser

(See "NOTE", below.)


Canonical _do_ provide a .deb packaage, but with the wrinkle that this
is a 'SNAP' package, which is a kind of containerised delivery vehicle
where the application is delivered with a self-contained set of support
libs.  This is sort of a Microsoft-like way of avoiding the work of
providing a fully native package, and SNAP packages, among other
disadvantages, take up significantly more disk space and RAM, and are
slower to start (because they don't leverage system libs, but rather
have their own special-snowflake set.

Canonical may not, by law, package the Google Chrome browser (without
special permission from Google, Inc.), because it's a proorietary
extension of the Chromium base browser code.

So, if you _insist_ on installing a proprietary Web browser on an
open-source operating system, you can do so by fetching a binary x86_64
.deb directly from Google, Inc.:

$ cd /tmp
$ wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
$ sudo apt-get install ./google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

NOTE:  BTW, I didn't know any of the above before a couple of minutes
ago.  I Web-searched for the current release of *buntu, and then
searched for that plus 'chromium' and 'chrome'.


> A couple comments on the install.  You might recall some years ago we
> had a lot of "fun" trying to do a dual boot with EUFI.   This is the
> same machine.  So long ago, I had set the bios to default to legacy boot
> which then selected Debian. 
> 
> I also partitioned the hard drive to have /home in it's own partition
> and most of my personal data files in yet another partition.  The
> thinking was that when I did a re-install, I had a good chance that my
> personal stuff would be there and not have to be restored.
> 
> Well it didn't work that way.  In 2020 ubuntu insists on having a EUFI
> boot partition.

Numerous online articles claim this is _not_ the case with *buntu 20.04
LTS 'Focal Fossa'.  Examples: 
https://www.ubuntubuzz.com/2020/05/step-by-step-to-install-ubuntu-2004.html
https://linuxconfig.org/install-ubuntu-from-usb-20-04-focal-fossa

I haven't tested, because my own preferred way of avoiding *buntu
problems is to avoid *buntu.

> The only other awkward part related to workspaces.   All
> previous Linux distros I have used defaulted to more than one, typically
> 4.  Well Kubuntu only had 1 and therefore I couldn't find the selector
> for the others and then I had a mental block on the keyword (workspace)
> for which I needed to search.  

In case you haven't yet found the answer, looks like this is it:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1243305/cannot-find-workspaces-in-ubuntu-20-04
Quoting:

  In 20.04, there are two kinds of workspaces. Dynamic and static.

  Dynamic workspaces are created as needed, and disappear when empty.

  Many users find static workspaces a little easier to use. To enable
  them, start Tweaks (gnome-tweaks). If you don't have Tweaks installed,
  go to the Software app and install it, or in the terminal type:

  sudo apt-get update

  sudo apt-get install gnome-tweaks

  Start Tweaks, then click on Workspaces, select Static Workspaces, and
  define a number of desired workspaces (I have 4).

  Workspaces are viewed/managed by hitting the Super key. Look in the
  Keyboard Shortcuts settings panel to view all of the keys that can be
  used to manipulate workspaces.



> Overall the launcher was reasonably intuitive.  Discover is the first
> GUI based installer I found easier than the traditional apt-get command
> line.

For clarification, the 'Discover' to which you refer is yet another
graphical front end for apt-get, this one part of the KDE Plasma desktop
suite.  The GNOME equivalent-du-jour is blandly named 'GNOME Software'.

There are also other things available in *buntu named 'disccover',
notably a hardware autorecognition tool.