Install NodeJS and Angular on Windows 10 WSL2

Let's see how under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2) we can setup NodeJs, Npm and install Angular. So that we can later do our web development projects or trying examples from Angular courses. You can also watch the video on the installation.

We will first enable WSL 2 in order to be able to support and load Linux systems:
launch PowerShell by typing: powershell and with right click run it in administrative mode. Paste the following content which will enable WSL as well as the virtual machine platform:
Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux 
Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName VirtualMachinePlatform
wsl --set-default 2The last line will set the 2nd more performant version of WSL as a default when running OS such as Ubuntu.

Next, we will go to Microsoft's store, download and launch the Ubuntu When launching the application, you might be prompted to restart your computer. Then again try to Launch the ubuntu application by just typing ubuntu. It will ask you to set up a default user and password so you can access the Ubuntu system.

Now it is time to update the local distribution packages with:
sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade

Installing Angular
Since Ubuntu version provided in WSL is not the latest one, we will go to https://github.com/nodesource/distributions
and then install the latest available node version
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_13.x | sudo -E bash - sudo apt-get install -y nodejs


We are ready to install the Angular CLI:
sudo npm i -g @angular/cli
(we install the package globally, so to be able to execute ng command from anywhere inside our system)
Now we can type ng new_project followed by cd new_project and ng serve
You can browse the newly created project under http://localhost:4200

Congratulations!

Install VirtualBox under Ubuntu 19.10

You may have noticed that VirtualBox is having problems to install via the usual apt install method on Ubuntu 19.10. The reason is that it relies on old libraries from Ubuntu 19.04 which conflict with the current ones. When having such problems with compatibility there is also interesting solutions.
Reference: Practical Ubuntu Linux Server for beginners
You can watch the video for more details:

First, uninstall any previous VirtualBox leftovers that you might have with sudo apt remove virtualbox
Just go to https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Testbuilds and download the test build for Linux64-bit
then do: chmod +x file.run (where the file is the downloaded file)
and just run: sudo ./file.run

And that's it, the installer will run and you'll have the newest version of VirtualBox under Ubuntu 19.10 running.

Notes:
- Please also check the version of your kernel (uname -r), for now, Virtualbox supports kernel 5.3, so playing on anything above this version will also not allow Virtualbox modules to be compiled into the kernel and run.
- Your further virtual machines will reside inside the /root/ directory
- In order to remove the VirtualBox, you can run ./file.run uninstall

Congratulations!

Optimize Ubuntu for speed and performance

Here are some ways to optimize your Ubuntu system to take fewer resources and to be more performant. If you are interested there is a complete course on ubuntu administration.

You can take a look at the video:

I advise you at first to take a look at Conky as a hardware monitoring application
sudo apt install conky-all
and then run conky
From there just monitor which resources are fully utilized such as Disks, CPU, and Memory. This way you can really understand if you need to buy new hardware.

2. Use Lubuntu
sudo apt install lubuntu-desktop
you will be amazed by the performance gains.

3. Clean up your system using bleachbit
https://www.bleachbit.org/download

4. Tab wrangler - this addon to Firefox or Chrome will stop any inactive tabs, thus freeing up precious memory

5. Services:
systemd-analyze blame - will output all the services loading at bootup and which are taking most of the time. Feel free to disable with systemctl disable service_name those that you don't want.
You can inspect why certain service takes too long by typing:
systemctl status udisks2
and then
systemd-analyze critical-chain udisks2.service
(here we are inspecting the udisks2.service)
journalctl -b | grep udisks2
will show you even more detailed information about a particular service
Additional:
- You can also disable package indexing with sudo apt-get purge apt-xapian-index
- If you are not using thin clients, or have servers that need internet access for boot/configuration  you can also do:
sudo systemctl disable NetworkManager-wait-online.service
- Do check if UUID's listed in blkid and /etc/fstab match up and edit /etc/fstab to match accordingly.

Extra note: Install kernel modification such as Xanmod, which optimizes the performance to be suited for Desktop users:
echo 'deb http://deb.xanmod.org releases main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xanmod-kernel.list && wget -qO - https://dl.xanmod.org/gpg.key | sudo apt-key add - 
sudo apt update && sudo apt install linux-xanmod
I am really impressed by the performance of this kernel mod.

Congratulations and enjoy the course.