Greg Back

Ubuntu Default Folders

I recently switched my primary machine from Windows 7 to Ubuntu. I'd always used an Ubuntu VM for development. Now I just have a Windows 7 VM for Windows-only applications, and do the majority of my work in Ubuntu. I'm fairly comfortable on the command line, but extremely dislike capital letters in file paths. So the Ubuntu defaults ("Documents", "Downloads", etc.) just weren't doing it for me. Fortunately, I found a blog post which explained which file sets these names ($HOME/.config/user-dirs.dirs).

My complete configuration is shown below.

# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update
# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you're
# interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run
# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped
# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an
# absolute path. No other format is supported.
#
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/dl"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/docs"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/pics"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/videos"

Building Git from scratch

This is running on Ubuntu 12.04, using the most recent versions as of 2013-02-02.

Install git:

$ wget http://git-core.googlecode.com/files/git-1.8.1.2.tar.gz
$ tar xf git-1.8.1.2.tar.gz
$ cd git-1.8.1.2/
$ sudo apt-get install libcurl4-gnutls-dev libexpat1-dev gettext libz-dev
$ make …

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