At first it was painless. Then, yuck. Then everything happy again.

Tips:

• I removed all extra (NTFS) drives prior to installing. Otherwise the installer would sit around trying to re-size the partitions on the NTFS drive(s).
• Slack 3.1.1 is not compatible with Ubuntu 18.04, as of 2018-05-08. The workaround is to install with snap:​ sudo snap install slack --classic
• I like gmusicbrowser, and not parole. To get it to show up in the sound menu, I used xfce4-settings-editor. Find channel ‘xfce4-panel’, and then the plugin for ‘pulseaudio’, then edit the ‘mpris-players’ string to the name of your preferred player.
• I use a bunch of ethernet aliases (ie a bunch of IP addresses on the same interface). In 16.04, you could do this through /etc/network/interfaces, but in 18.04, you have to do it via /etc/netplan/. At first, I tried to do it with vlans, but that does not allow traffic to flow without communicating with a switch/router. So, basically useless for my purposes (testing and debugging devices with various subnets). My default install came with /etc/netplan/01-network-manager-all.yml. I didn’t have much luck creating a different file name. So I just modified the existing file:
  network:

  version: 2
    renderer: NetworkManager
    ethernets:
      eth0:
       dhcp4: no
       dhcp6: no
       addresses: [192.168.1.10/24, 192.168.44.6/24, 192.168.2.10/24, 192.168.221.143/24, 192.168.160.6/24]
      eth1:
       dhcp4: no
       dhcp6: no
       addresses: [10.7.56.252/26]
       gateway4: 10.8.246.193
       nameservers:
         addresses: [8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4, 10.7.132.21, 10.1.184.22]

• I’m not up todate with the times. I’m a bit of a luddite. Whatever. I use openssl to encrypt files, and I have a plugin script for vim that automatically prompts for passwords and does the encrypt/decrypt on write/read actions. However, Ubuntu 16.04 uses openssl 1.0.2 and ubuntu 18.04 uses openssl 1.1.0. They are not compatible. Uggh. However 18.04 has a package openssl1.0.
  So, my workaround looks like:
  • • sudo apt install openssl1.0
    • sudo ln -s /usr/lib/ssl1.0/openssl /usr/bin/openssl1

   

  • Modify my vim script to check for openssl1 in the path, and use it if available

The crux of the openssl difference seems to be in how the key and IV are created from a password. If I use the same Key and IV arguments in both versions, I get compatible/identical results.

I’m sure that the openssl workaround is going to bite me soon. Probably once I upgrade macports at home, to coincide with my recent update to Mac OS High Sierra.

Those are the things that I’ve gotten to so far. I haven’t gotten around to any of the wine stuff or installing Xilinx tools, etc.