Ubuntu for Lenovo Thinkpad X61

I have got a X61 and now I want to use Ubuntu on it.

A partition of 40 GB was made for /home, and 15 GB for /, and 300 MB for /boot
(peculiarly, my lab PC which runs Ubuntu 8.03 gets a lot of stuff in /boot and the tiny space of 100 MB is used up, and the update manager refuses to work!!)

** The system is in English.

** Enable Chinese input

I have previously installed scim-chinese, but this won't help.

I followed this link, and its quite easy: go to System > Administration > Language support, and select Chinese. Ubuntu will download a lot of stuff. After that, select "allow input complex characters". Finally select OK. Log-out will be required.

http://www.blog.highub.com/linux/ubuntu-install-chinese-input/

现在我可以输入中文了 :-)
(Now I can input Chinese!)


** Adjust bash prompt appearance

Edit ~/.bashrc, around line 55, make following replacement:

old: PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '
new: PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}[\u@\h \W]\$ '

I have no ideas what that's about -_-||


** Personalize Vim

Vim is my favorite unix software...

$ sudo apt-get install vim

And I created a .vimrc file with following contents:
set hls
set nonumber
set ts=4
" use indent of 4 spaces, and have them copied all around
set shiftwidth=4
set shiftround
set expandtab
set autoindent
syntax on

A more comprehensive (and old) .vimrc sample file is here:
http://www.stripey.com/vim/vimrc.html


** Personal data for Firefox

The personal data on my lab PC was built into a tarball, and transfered to X61.
Original contents in ~/.mozilla/firefox/ were back-upped and deleted, where my personal data was used to make the replacement.

And Firefox happily accepts my personal data and new configurations.


** Install following goodies (and problems)

$ sudo apt-get install dia
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
dia: Depends: dia-common (= 0.96.1-5ubuntu2) but 0.96.1-7ubuntu1 is to be installed
Depends: dia-libs (= 0.96.1-5ubuntu2) but 0.96.1-7ubuntu1 is to be installed
E: Broken packages

I'm using Chinese version of sources.list (locates at /etc/apt/), and I changed it to a "western" version I found online.

$ sudo apt-get update
## finishing update
$ sudo apt-get install dia

Then Dia 0.96.1 was installed successfully.