The Great Kubuntu Adventure

Media time

2009-07-08T21:08:00.000-07:00

Today I wanted to rip a CD to listen to it on my computer but found out Amarok was'nt equipped with that feature. After a bit of research I identified "Sound Juicer" at the app most likely the best to accomplish this task. After installign it ans reading an article I had to install "Restricted Formats" to be able to playback DVD and rip to MP3.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

After some sweet Greek food I installed my gigabit switch to give a bit of kick to transfers from and to my NAS. It never has been an issue for playback on my media center but since I often copy files over a gigabit over there; I wanted to increase performance. Passign from 100Mbs to 1,000Mbs; I'm expecting in the best case scenario to decrease transfer times by 10! Wishful thinking but realisticly should be around 8x to 9x faster.

So I tested with my 100mbs switch with a 4.4 Gb file:
real 10m22.658s
user 0m0.172s
sys 0m30.766s

And same file with the gigabit switch
real 6m42.215s
user 0m0.124s
sys 0m32.230s

Lets juste say a meager 40% improvement is very disappointing. I'll look it up tomorrow to see what's up.

Still using the thing

2009-07-07T14:48:00.000-07:00

After 9 days i'm still using the thing. I've searched tens of forum posts; tried various scripts and configs but nothing works. Apparently I'm not the only one that have issues with hibernating.

One thing I did learn is that you should have a swap partition equal to your ram +10% if your RAMis over 1GiB. Otherwise it should be twice the size of your RAM. I did use the Ubuntu Live CD and gparted to change my swap partition from 2.4Gib to 4.4Gib. After booting back you must edit your /etc/fstab file and update the UUID of the swap partition otherwise it will be unusable. Apparently when resizing the swap partition gparted changes it's UUID.

Widgets/Gadgets call it what you want is now a feature you expect from most modern OS'. In KDE it was loaded by defauilt. With Gnome I've tried both gDesklets and Screenlets. I have to say 3/4 of the gDesklets widgets dotn work. Screenlets look much more profesionnal and they just work.

I also downloaded CompizConfig but havent palyed with it much. Allows some extra visual effects such as cubes rotating when changing workspaces and Mac style buttons for minimized windows.

7 days!

2009-07-05T08:18:00.000-07:00

It's been seven days now and I don't miss windows. I'm not ready to abandon the thing yet since I play quite a few games on my XP partition and do some .NET programming on my Vista partition.

I did re-install Ubuntu and I still installed Amarok and Kontact. My menus are way cleaner now. One thing that's bugging me when Ire-installed Kontact the Icon was not set properly so I have the generic "app box" icon. It's not a big issue but, in my launch bar it displays as a large black box. I'll have to find out how to manually update icons.

Something else I noticed; falsh player was not installed in Firefox and dont event think to have Flash player in Chrome dev build! So i tried to download it from Adobe but got a message saying it was the wrong architecture: 32bit instead of 64bit. So I had to go download it here. From what I had read the package available in Synaptic was the 32bit one with a wrapper so I decided to manually download and install the x64 native package.

Did I mention the Hybernation sucks in Linux. Maybe it's just a setting that's incorrect but I do have to manually power-off the machine when it starts hybernation. Brings me flashbacks of Win95 hibernation that caused BSOD or just froze the machine when waking it up.

Unfortunately after seven days I will have to log in to Vista. To import my MSOutlook contacts; I have to export them to CSV and then import them into Kontact. There were some *SIMPLE* articles that suggested an insane plot of installing mozilla on windows importing contacts in mozilla, exporting to Evolution file type; copying to Linux partition; Importing into Evolution and then from Kontact importing Evolution contacts. Yeah really simple... ok maybe for Linux ;)

Burn Heretic! Burn!!!

2009-07-04T12:24:00.000-07:00

I wasted 5 CD's trying to burn the Ubuntu ISO. I was clearly unimpressed by Brasero and K3B; alto K3B a a much better UI than Brasero IMO; they both wasted blank CD's... Iwas finally abel to sucessfully burn a copy using the lowest speed possible: 8x.

I was able to configure my keyboard as well and It recognised the multimedia keys. I was abel to bind them to Amarok but it did'nt work when working with other apps. Instead I was able to use the "Meta" key (Windows key) and then another shortcut key to skip tracks. Multimedia volume keys are working properly.

I am now planning to re-install Ubuntu; I found a good article describing the partitions, how they are labelled and how to format them. I still dont know if re-installing will be worth it; I really like Amarok and Kontact; which will install a load of KDE libraries...

Surprised but not impressed yet

2009-07-03T20:41:00.000-07:00

Still doing good today! I was wondering how the OS would react to inserting my Memory Stick Pro Duo (god I hate Sony's proprietary hardware) into my internal media card reader... Unexpectedly it worked like a charm! No drivers to install no nothing: it even launched a pop-up asking me if I wanted to open the folder or view the files with some software! Just like in windows ;p

I also had a test today with Kontact. I had to plan something in August. Inserting my pay days reccuring was just as easy as anyone would expect from some respectable scheduling tool. The thing I had planned was for a Monday... So I figured that thay might be an holiday. With the help of markthisdate.com I was able to easily import all Canadian holidays in a few clicks. When I tried to download the file Using Konqueror; I had an error message saying "The file could not be found" That was odd because I had no trouble at all using Google Chrome. Konqueror is now on my "Dislike list". Tested with Firefox and downloaded fine as well.

What are the next steps? I might try to configure my keyboard to use the media buttons to control Amarok. I might also try to uninstall completely KDE... But I'm afraid tio screw-up something. Did I mention I really like Amarok: the on screen display is a nice feature; event the app's icon is cool!

Print-o-phobia

2009-07-02T20:52:00.000-07:00

Today I did'nt do much... I actually ENJOYED using my computer instead of fumbling around in settings.

Well, I did setup my printer. I was expecting to fumble around with commands and have to mount/un-mount the printer... But I was wrong and glad I was! I plugged-in my Lexmark E220 printer in the USB port and MAGIC! Auto-installed! Wow almost as easy as on windows ;p It did have to download the driver from the internet and ask me if I wanted to use that driver.

No such luck with my Konika Minolta Magicolor 2400w. Well It's a battle on windows to have it work half of the time with the propreitary software crashing the print spooler all the time. With Linux, I did find drivers over the net but had to install some "foomatic filter" of some kind. Downloaded that as well but I think it needs to be compiled. Tried to "make" it but I guess I'm not there yet. I'll fumble with thta tomorrow.

I remember that my colleague used to recompile his disto to optimize for his processor; I wonder if I can get there in my three days left to my trial week...

I'm still holding, I do use Vista at work but I never even got tempted to boot in Vista at home. I think it might be a sign...

Slowly getting stuff done

2009-07-01T11:21:00.000-07:00

I got twin-view working properly this morning. After some research and a few failed attempts at copying and pasting I simply had to add a few lines to the "Device" section my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file:
Option "TwinView" "True"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf"
Option "UseEdidFreqs" "True"
Option "MetaModes" "1280x1024,1280x1024; 1024x768,1024x768"
Option "UseDisplayDevice" "DFP"

I did get GNOME to be the default desktop manager. I wasen't careful in editing my /etc/X11/default-display-manager file:
To use GNOME:/usr/sbin/gdm
To use KDE:/usr/bin/kdm

NO MORE VI !!! Man I hate VI; Kate's much nicer; but I was glad to have it to edit those nasty config files under the root account. Just got one more trick up my sleeve. Instead of doing su and then vi; I use this command instead:
gksudo gedit xorg.conf

Gnomes and Goblyns...

2009-06-30T23:11:00.000-07:00

After talking with one of my colleagues did a bit more reading and installed GNOME in parallel with KDE. Man I love GNOME! So much more intuitive to me. OK taskbar's on top but it dosen't affect me too much ;) I think I'll still use Amarok and Kontact but GNOME's a keeper!

Here are the commands I used:
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install ubuntu-desktop

Baby Steps...

2009-06-29T22:46:00.000-07:00

I know I would encounter some challenges. But now I see that what is a question of seconds to do inside windows took me two hours to understand and do under Linux. All my music os on a NAS drive. Even if I was able to use Dolphin and browse the NAS; I had to install the samba protocol (or helper program not sure of the right wording here) and mount it under my home. That's the article I based myself on to learn how to do it.

To install samba:
sudo apt-get install smbfs smbclient

To mount the NAS:
cd /home/username
mkdir Volume_1
sudo mount -t smbfs //192.168.x.x/Volume_1 /home/username/Volume_1

Line to add to the /etc/fstab file:
//192.168.x.x/Volume_1 /home/username/Volume_1 smbfs auto 0 0

To install winbind (allowing to use computernames instead of IP adresses:
sudo apt-get install winbind

To activate winbind edit the /etc/nsswitch.conf file so it looks something like that:
hosts: files dns mdns wins

My first deception was to think dual monitors would work right out of the box... No way! Well I can do it using NVidia's Video driver but, I have to set Twinview every single time I log in. Oh and editing the xorg.conf file failed miserably.

Man I hate VI.... Good thing I had a concept of the root user and vi to make changes to automatically mount my NAS at boot time. Man Linux world just loves typing too much!

The Plunge

2009-06-28T23:36:00.000-07:00

So i've finally decided myself to give a real try with Linux. I chose Kubuntu because it was recommended to me about a year ago to ease my transition from the windows environment.

My chalenge is to work ony in a Linux environment for at least a whole week. If I need something to do something and I dont know how; I'll have to find out. No switching at all to windows...

Downloading and installing Kubuntu was quite easy. It did not work in a virtual machine as I first tried but I just resized my XP partition and installed on the unformatted chunk.