Skip to content

Ubuntu Notes

General Linux admin notes are here.

Raspberry Pi Installation

Download Ubuntu MATE 16.04.2 LTS for Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 systems from here

Open the downloaded file with Keka.

Ubuntu desktop requires you to initially login with a keyboard and monitor to setup the system.

Once logged in, you should use sudo raspi-config to:

  • enable SSH
  • turn off GUI on init
  • turn off splash screen on init
  • expand the filesystem

Cleanup installed packages

View all the packages installed by default with: 

sudo apt list --installed

Remove unnecessary packages with: 

sudo apt-get remove --purge vlc* youtube-* yelp-* libreoffice* thunderbird* 
sudo apt-get remove --purge transmission* scratch* firefox* rhythmbox* python-minecraftpi

sudo apt-get clean

sudo apt-get autoremove

Add developer packages

Add developer packages with: 

sudo apt-get install git

Install ROS

Install ros-kinetic-desktop following the instructions here.

Disable Wifi on Ubuntu

To disable wifi, use this /etc/network/interfaces:

# interfaces(5) file used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8)
# Include files from /etc/network/interfaces.d:
source-directory /etc/network/interfaces.d

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

In the event that wlan0 is still appearing with an ip address in iwconfig, see here.

Enable Wifi on Ubuntu

If the wifi choices are stippled, try this:

  • Run: sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
  • Edit file /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and change managed=false to managed=true
  • Run: sudo killall NetworkManager

To manage wifi connection via a config file, add this to /etc/network/interfaces: 

auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

If a device is not managed in /etc/network/interfaces, then it will be avialable via the GUI.

Virtual Box Desktop Installation

After installing Desktop, click on Additional Drivers in Software & Updates and add machine-specific drivers.

Under the VirtualBox Networking options, set "Attached to:" to "Bridged Adapter"

To get hostname to reference network address rather than localhost, remove host name from /etc/hosts/

After downloading the Ubuntu distro, convert it from a .img.xz file to a .img file with: 

brew install xz
xz -d file-to-extract.xz

Mac boot disk installation

A good video on the process is here.

A description of how to enable wifi on a Mac is here.