Well this is a no brainer really. Go to Canonical and download some version of Ubuntu. I personally these days go with Ubuntu Server, and then build everything out myself.

However if you are new to Linux or simply want a full blown desktop with a graphical interface that feature a mouse and keyboard as inputs and an external display for output, it is highly recommend downloading one of the desktop distributions.

Not much more to say on this point so I will outline some initial programs I always install and may just throw in some best practices to boot.

#1 Best practice during the installation is this: don’t get creative installing your disks and carving them up. You want everything to live in the root filesystem, and let (from this point forward Linux/Ubuntu will be used interchangeably) the operating system set up the disks on initial install to their default values.

In the old days, it was prudent to have separate /usr, /home, /tmp and god knows what other partitions because disks space was expensive, it was easier to maintain and made crucial administration tasks like backup a lot more manageable. In this day and of age cheap hardware, it’s just not the case (for your common home installation anyways). With that being said, there are still valid reasons to have multiple disk partitions. Please let me know in the comments if you would like me to expand on this.

Pretty much just take all the defaults during installation and you can’t go wrong.

The following is just some standard troubleshooting, fun, development, php essentials (so web sites don’t look/act funky) stuff I always install because I always end up needing them in one way or another. Completely optional and in fact you simply may not want to install some (install for sure if you think your gonna wanna follow along in the Apache/WordPress/MySQL installation which will be forthcoming in future posts. This is not a how-to yet. 😉

apt install nmap

apt install fortune fortunes

apt install build-essential

apt install php php-xml php-intl php-bcmath php-apcu php-imagick

apt install inkscape imagemagick

apt install net-tools

apt install mailutils sendmail

apt install locate

apt install tmux screen

And that’s it for this post.

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