[Tips for Customizing Ubuntu in Cubic] A few basic things to know. (Please contribute your own tips).

[melodie11]

Hello,

I used to remix using Customizer, which had a cli and an gui interface, but it is not developed anymore.

I have learned on remixing distros since 2009 with PCLinuxOS, at the time, and their home made script. This should really go in a wiki, however I'll put it here for now, (because PJ Singh asked me to to put it here).

1 - People who remix need to make sure there is only one kernel installed, once they have finished setting everything up to their liking, and that any vmlinux.old and initrd-img.old be removed before proceeding to the rebuild stage.

2 - In Ubuntu, there is a snapd and associated packages by default, snap and snapd not supporting to be started with root permissions trigger issues during the update process.

They should be removed from the install before starting to update the ongoing work, along with any package they bring with them (chromium-browser, firefox, thunderbird, for what I know at the moment, possibly some other applications I don't know about).

There are documentations on the web about how to remove snap completely.

3 - I always to a little cleanup in the system before the final version, which is when I have tested one after the other in Virtualbox until I don't find a glitch or a detail to improve anymore. This is how I clean up:

# cd / I go at the root of the system
find . -name "*.old" I look for files ending with '.old'

If they are all files which I am sure they can be removed:
find . -name "*.old -exec rm {} \ ;" This removes them all - be careful to have a space before the '`' sign.

In the log directory:
cd /var/log

Remove all files, but not the directories:
find . -type f -exec rm {} \;

same in '/etc/apt/sources.list.d', there are ".save" files which can be removed, and in '/etc', some ".dpkg-dist" files too.

4 - If unsure which packages / user applications are still installed which you don't want or need you can look which "*.desktop" files are located in '/usr/share/applications', and use the command dpkg -S thisprogram.desktop file (you adapt this with the names of the desktop files you want to check), in what it outputs there will be the name of the package it belongs to. (There might be another more practical command, if someone knows, they are welcome to comment).

[PPPDUD]

A nice thing that I always like to do before finishing the build process is to run sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade && sudo apt autoremove.

[melodie11]

A nice thing that I always like to do before finishing the build process is to run sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade && sudo apt autoremove.

You can also do sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade && sudo apt purge --autoremove

And to gain space, remove a few files which are going to be recreated automatically anyway:

sudo -i  # gain root access
cd /var/cache/apt/
rm pkgcache.bin  srcpkgcache.bin

cd /var/lib/apt/lists
find . type f -exec rm {} \;

cd /var/backups
find . type f -exec rm {} \;

This saves space. You can also do the find command line in /var/log if you want to, and check /var/crash.