Ubuntu 10.04 Lives! Go Back To The Future With Lucid Lynx

Does Oneiric have you down?  Is your hardware not up to snuff?  Well, what are you going to do about it?  Ubuntu 10.04 is almost 2 years old now, but you can teach it the electric slide even if all it know how to do is the funky chicken.  Here is a short and simple guide for bringing Ubuntu 10.04 into 2012.

Fast-forward to 2011 with Backports

First things first.  Enable backports.

Go to ‘System==>Administration==>Software Sources’, click on the ‘Updates’ tab and click ‘Unsupported Updates (Lucid Backports)’.

Hit close and wait while apt refreshes itself.

Now, open up a terminal and…
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Once this finishes, you will likely need to restart your machine.  So, go and do it!  The rest of this guide is a walk in the park.

Firefox; One giant leap forward

Now that your machine is alive again, we need to get an updated browser.  Even with backports enabled, the latest version of Firefox available is version 3.6.  We are going to update it to the most current point release of Firefox 9.  Here we go.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

Google Chrome

Maybe Firefox is not your bag? You could install Chromium from Ubuntu repositories, but considering that the version available in Ubuntu 11.10 is 2 releases behing, you might not be pleased with what’s available in Lucid. To install the completely up-to-date and branded version of Google Chrome, do:

wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | sudo apt-key add -

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list'

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable

Evolution does not evolve.  Get Thunderbird

What about e-mail? You’re not going to use that old version of Novell’s (formerly Ximian’s) Evolution are you? Oh… you are? Well, in case you change your mind, here is how to get the latest Thunderbird release.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-stable

sudo apt-get install thunderbird
Now, what to do about the Open Office installation? Open Office? Yeah, I only remotely remember it. The world of technology moves fast and the open-source world moves faster. I don’t think Oracle ever understood this and that’s why we are going to be install the latest version of Libre Office. Enjoy!

Replace Open Office with Libre Office

First, uninstall Open office

sudo apt-get purge "openoffice*.*"

That that that’s gone, let get everything in order to install LibreOffice.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libreoffice
sudo apt-get install libreoffice-gnome

If you don’t run that last command, you may not be very pleased with Libre Office’s presentation.

The GIMP

The GIMP. Even though we are all hopelessly awaiting the badly needed Gimp 2.8 release, we can still sate ourselves with the most update stable release of this great software.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gimp

Banshee 2.0; Former King Of The Crop

There’s nothing wrong with Rythmbox, but the cover browser in the 2.0 release of Banshee is quite nice to look at, and if you’d like to look at it from your Lucid Lynx install, repeat after me.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:banshee-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install banshee banshee-c* banshee-e*

Deluge

Sure, Lucid comes with a very capable Bittorrent client, but it’s nothing when compared to Deluge.  The latest version is feature packed and once you start using it, you won’t know what you did without it.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:deluge-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install deluge

So, forget about everything else. Ubuntu 10.04 works, and has considerably less foot-print than the last 3 releases. If you’ve got older hardware that you are not yet ready to replace and you feel like Xubuntu or Lubuntu are just a comprimise then 10.04 is for YOU!

Cheers!