In this post, I’ll be talking about the personalization steps covering the differences between Michaels’s text and the steps to do the same in Xubuntu. As I stated in the last post, I’m building a new OSINT Investigations VM based on Michael Bazzel’s book. In the previous post, I covered the differences between his book and my choice of using Xubuntu instead of Ubuntu.

The first difference this time is in changing the background. Right-click the desktop and select “Desktop Settings.” To turn off the background image, set the “Style” drop-down to none. This will disable the pictures. The solid color option is the same.

It will take a little more work to disable the background on the login and lock screen. Go up to the mouse icon, known as Whisker Menu, and search for LightDM GTK+ Greeter. This will open a window similar to the background window. Change the background to “solid color.” Pick your color. Unclick “use user wallpaper if available.” Not unchecking that box will use whatever last wallpaper you had before you disabled it on the lock screen. Click the save button.

“Notifications” is found under Whisker Menu > Settings. The options are not there to disable notifications. There are some options to remove the software, but I’m not too fond of that idea. Instead, I have set the notifications to “do not disturb.” “Urgent” notifications will still show up.

A different option is to disable Xfce4-notifyd settings under the applications tab. You can disable other applications there too.

There was no option for Privacy, “Usage and History”, or problem reporting. Searching for options online says to either install new programs not previously installed or remove other installed programs.

To disable crash reporting open the terminal, sudo nano /etc/default/apport
then change enabled=1 to enabled=0

The screen blank was under Power Management, in settings, under Display. Slide the button down to Never. I set the top slider to off.

The Ubuntu-web-launchers was not installed by default.

The terminal emulator is already under the favorites section in the Whisker Menu.

Personally, I don’t use the software updater and prefer to use “sudo apt update” and “sudo apt upgrade” in the terminal to do updates.

The snapshot sections shouldn’t need any changes.