Kubuntu 9.04 Beta working on Mini 9

So after grabbing the latest Jaunty Beta of Kubuntu, I loaded it onto my usb flash and booted my mini 9. To my pleasure and slight surprise, both the login screen & desktop were perfectly scaled to the 1024×600 resolution. Did I say perfectly? Yes I did.

Playing with it more, I found the built-in desktop effects of Plasma working well, too. The Cube & wobbly windows performed with no lag, and the system was snappy, even via a flash drive.

The one thing that didn’t fly was the wireless connecting to my WPA2/AES-enabled router. The KNetwork Manager didn’t even have an option for WPA2, just WEP & WPA, basically. No love.

If the final release in a few weeks  corrects this and improves a few other things, I may just bump the 8.10 Netbook Remix to the curb and return the the KDE fold, despite my loathing of KDE4.0 & 4.1.

Jaunty with 4.2 seems very nice.

Jaunty Netbook < 1 month away

With the release of Jaunty on April 23rd, I’m looking forward to what new goodness is in store for netbooks, as I’m still thrilled with my Mini 9. Kubuntu 8.10 is a disaster (IMO) on a netbook, so I’m hoping there are improvements in store.

I’m not so concerned about what 9.04 will do for my desktop workhorse. With an old Athlon XP3200+, 2gigs of ram and a GeForce 6600GT, it suits my needs fine, serving up Compiz, Firefox, Wine-based apps, and Acidrip just fine, along with copius amounts of hard drive space to serve as a media center.

On the contrary, its what Canonical can do on the netbook front that interests me now. Installing a new OS via usb flash is a breeze since I even keep a separate /home on the internal 32gig SSD. In fact, I do it on a whim these days just to see what’s happening with the various DEs at the moment.

To that end, I’ve just downloaded the latest Kubuntu  Jaunty beta to take for a spin via live USB. We’ll see how it does on both desktop and netbook, just for grins.

Netbook Remix to KDE and back again

Alright. So I went ahead & installed KDE on my Mini 9. Rather than do a
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

and have a messy hidden structure in /home if I decide to rip it all out again, I opted to backup /home, and do a clean install of Kubuntu 8.10 on the 32gig SSD. Almost immediately, I decided I didn’t care for it. The GUI just seemed so LARGE on the precious 1200×600 display.

Yes, I could tweak everything until it was nice and accommodating, but the purpose of my netbook is to have hassle-free easy-on-the-eyes mobile computing, and that’s what the Gnome-based Netbook Remix manages very well. As a result, I must admit I didn’t spend much time in KDE this time around, and I promptly formatted & reinstalled Ubuntu 8.10 and the Netbook Remix.

I’ve heard rumblings though, that the KDE folks are developing a KDE Netbook Remix. Now that is something I”m eagerly waiting to try out.

KDE 4.2 released – netbook workable?

After the release of KDE4-only in Intrepid, I found it unuseable for my tastes, even as 4.1. As a result, I switched to Xubuntu 8.10 on my desktop, with my preferred KDE apps installed in order to feel like home. I’ve never been much fan of gnome, and wanted a pretty lightweight DE to run my KDE apps.  This has all been documented before.

Today however, KDE has released 4.2 to much fanfare, calling it  greatly useable for the masses, apparently.

My 1st thought is, “Is is still so much slower than 3.5x?” My desktop hardware is beginning to age, at an AMD AthlonXP 3200+, 2gigs PC3200 RAM, and a GeForce 6600GT 128mb. I don’t do much gaming on the PC anymore, so I haven’t had a need to upgrade in quite some time. I’ve been happy with it.

I’m considering moving back to KDE to test the waters again, because I reallty do like the functionality that KDE provides (Or should I say provided?). Which got me to thinking:

How will KDE 4.2 run on an Atom-powered netbook? I’ve got my trusty Mini 9 loaded up with vanilla Intrepid and the Netbook Remix, with 2gigs of ram no less. Surely it can run KDE, right? Right?!?

Strangely enough, I may have to be a forerunner and try it myself, much like Xubuntu on the netbook a while back.

I’ll let you know how it goes…

Firefox scrolling: One more time…

OK, beating a dead horse, I know.

Out of the blue, my mouse starting acting up again, thinking the “back” button was clicked in Firefox 3 when I scroll up. Did I say “again”?

I was about to pull my hair out, as I live by my trusty scroll wheel. The new xorg.conf in Intrepid doesn’t accept configuration changes. That is to say, you can edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf all you want, and it doesn’t care. Xserver will use its own settings as it sees fit, thank you. This of course makes my previously posted mouse config settings obsolete.

So, after more searching I’ve finally found a bug on Launchpad that describes the situation perfectly, and also includes a working fix. While I certainly don’t take credit for the fix, it has a simple solution:

sudo rmmod psmouse && sudo modprobe psmouse rate=100 proto=imps

And a permanent fix, add the following to /etc/modprobe.d/options:

#Fix mouse for KVM
options psmouse proto=imps

Hopefully this is finally put to rest. Now, the inability to edit xorg.conf is a whole ‘nother pet peeve…

Xubuntu running

So I got pretty tired of KDE4 pretty quickly, and didn’t really care for the performance hit due to *teh new shiny*. I originally went back to Kubuntu 8.04 with KDE 3.5x for a while, but then my insatiable urge to have the latest & greatest distro overtook me, & I went looking for options.

I settled on running a nice lightweight Xubuntu 8.10, and then diligently installed my favorite KDE apps:
AmaroK
K3B
KAudioCreator
and a few others. After some tweaking, I’ve found a nice system. Moderately lightweight XFCE, with my needed components. I’m hoping to keep this moderately aging system running ilke a champ for a while longer, and hopefully become adjusted to XFCE enough to put it on a Mini 9 later on.

I knew going in that Xubuntu (like Gnome) has a simpler menu system and not as many buttons & checks to mark as I’m accustomed to coming from KDE. The 1st obstacle I ran across was the inadequate system menu interface, which doesn’t *really* let you edit the menu much at all. In my 1st day in Xubuntu, I found the following, which helped immensely, as my previous menu settings from my previous OS installs left duplicate entries littered all over the menu, especially in “Other”, including all of my Wine- apps not in the Wine submenu:

http://xubuntu.wordpress.com
http://xfce.wikia.com

I’ll post more thoughts as I continue down this road, but I’m moderately impressed so far.

Kubuntu 8.10 KDE4 now running

Against my own preferences, I couldn’t stand not having the latest & greatest version of Ubuntu on my system. So I installed Kubuntu 8.10 on top of 8.04.1, KDE3 version. I originally was going to do a clean install as usual, but every time I tried th Live Installer, the partitioner would freeze at 50%, and nothing would happen. So, I took the plunge & did an in-place upgrade, risking my system & being forced onto KDE4.

Not bad. I haven’t run into any showstoppers, and my in-place upgrade went well. Since KDE4 doesn’t use any of my color scheme preferences from KDE3, I’ll be spending some time getting the GUI set up for my tastes.

I must admit, I’m impressed with the new effects built into KWin. I’ve got wobbly windows without Compiz 🙂 I’ll post more impressions in the coming weeks as I use the system more.

Intrepid Ibex tomorrow

Well you al likely know that 8.10 drops tomorrow. I’ll probably torrent it for a bit, and then install the Kubuntu image. I love getting a fresh new OS version every 6 months. W00t!

Flash 10 released, with deb

It looks like Adobe has gotten their stuff together. Flash 10 has been RTMed, and they even released an Ubuntu 8.04+ packaged deb for download.

It works. Very well. Get it. The Dell website works correctly now, making me want the Mini 9 even more now.

‘Nuff said..

GParted to the rescue

I told myself I wouldn’t do it. I needed more space at /home, so I was going to move XP to a separate, smaller drive by itself, so I could use the entire 320gig drive for Kubuntu, with 15 gigs at /, 1 gig swap, and the rest for /home. I’ve been tediously ripping all my my movies & CDs to avi & MP3 for streaming from my media system, and was running dangerously low. XP was taking over 100 gigs which I needed back.

So my plan was to order a new 500 gig drive from newegg (done), and wait til Intrepid released before doing any significant changes, since I’d be reloading the OS anyway.

I didn’t wait.

I installed the new drive, and formatted it as ext3, and deleted the XP partitions. Suddenly Ubuntu wouldn’t boot, since the 1st partition (XP) was no longer there, and I received a big fat Grub 5 error, if I recall correctly).
“OK, I’ll just reinstall / and point it to /home and move along as normal, just on Hardy again….” I thought I’d be smart & use Gparted to resize /home to take up the extra space from the deleted XP partitions.
Apparently however, during the fsck portion of the partition move/resize something got borked up in /home. When I installed the OS to / again, verytime th system booted it detected an “unclean shutdown” and forced a new fsck which would fail and error out a 91%.

After much trial & tribulation, along with having over 150 gigs of music & movies on the line, I was able to use a Live CD to move the data (including my /home directory) to the new 500gig Western Digital, format the entire 320gig original drive and recreate the 3 needed partitions:
/, /home & swap.

I then copied my /home data back to the 320gig, and reinstalled the OS. Whrn I logged in, none of my settings were saved, and I received lots of permissions issues in /laire/.kde. a quick

sudo chmod -R laire:laire /home/laire

solved that. After a reboot (probably a restart of X would be sufficient), all of my settings were loaded up perfectly. I then  proceeded to reinstall all of my favorite & needed apps, using my previous entries on this page to get my Creative Zen running, Liquid Weather, etc. Boy, this pag has come in handy…

I’m curious how Kubuntu 8.10 will go with the switch to KDE4 (I believe). I’m hoping it grows on me.