Some notes from my most recent reinstallation, moving from Debian to Ubuntu for work. Chromium only supports Ubuntu and getting my Debian install able to compile Chromium was more work than it was worth.

Since I had everything in one partition, I copied my entire home directory and /etc onto a separate disk. While the copy was running, I downloaded a Ubuntu .iso and wrote it to a USB drive using dd:

dd bs=4M if=ubuntu...iso of=/dev/sdc

or so. After the install was complete, the first thing I did was to install google-chrome (using firefox). Getting the keyboard to work is step two. My keyboard post is useful here.

I used a random blog entry to get dwm up and running on ubuntu, using my own code repo/mirror for dwm. I didn’t use the .desktop from the package though, instead I used:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Xsession
Comment=User Xsession
Exec=/etc/X11/Xsession

as /usr/share/xsessions/custom.desktop to get my plain old .xsession working which starts dwm among other things.

Getting st to work with core/bitmap fonts required me to install the xfonts-100dpi, xfonts-75dpi and xfonts-base packages and enable bitmap fonts with fontconfig:

$ rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf
$ ls -s /etc/fonts/conf.{avail,d}/70-yes-bitmaps.conf
$ dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

or so (commands written from memory and not tested). Some guide recommended removing 10-* from conf.d too, but I haven’t done so this far.

It seems to be mostly an affair of moving stuff from my old home directory back from here on.

I can get pass to use my gnupg keys… The problem was that my keys weren’t imported into gpg2.

$ gpg2 --import ~/.gnupg/secring.gpg

fixed it. I suppose this may be a one-off thing.