Ubuntu Tutorials

I generally don’t jump on the meme bandwagon but I thought this one might be of interest to some of you.  My old co-worker, Clint Savage, jumped on a meme regarding “What’s the first thing you do after installing <distro>?”

I’d be very interested in what my reader-base does after first installing Ubuntu.  Perhaps you’ll discuss it in the Ubuntu Tutorials Forum?

In any case, this is the first command I run after installing Ubuntu:

sudo aptitude install htop nautilus-open-terminal ubuntu-restricted-extras vim-full gnome-do gnome-do-plugins

Did I miss anything?

I just realized I’ve never blogged about a really cool tool that I’m sure you’ll be impressed with.  If you’ve used top, or use top to ever try to get an idea of what is running on your machine you’ll really like htop.

From the package description:

Htop is an ncurses-based process viewer similar to top, but it allows to scroll the list vertically and horizontally to see all processes and their full command lines.  Tasks related to proccesses (killing, renicing) can be done without entering their PIDs.

Yeah, that’s right.  You can actually see the whole process including options and arguments.  You can scroll down off the current page to see what else is running.  It also looks a lot prettier, and I know how much you like your pretty applications.

Installation

Installing htop is as easy as you might guess:

sudo aptitude install htop

That’s it.  Then run htop and get a better view of what is running on your machine.  I would add a section here on how to use it, but its so simple I don’t think I need to.  All the shortcut keys are listed at the bottom.

Tomorrow I’ll show you how to bypass the F10 limitation when used with gnome-terminal.  ..you’ll see what I mean when you try to use it.