My Ubuntu Blog

Two days ago I installed Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Beta on my Acer Travelmate 5730. I often try KDE based distros hoping that I will eventually find something that doesn’t crash often.

Kubuntu 9.10 Beta Karmic Koala is improved in many ways. The new installer Bling is beautiful yet simple. Installation went smooth and finished with in 10 or 15 minutes. After the installation I logged in to a beautiful desktop. This beautiful desktop is KDE 4.3.1 which has many improvements. Well it is improved since the last time I used KDE 4. First of all it uses a new theme “Air” by default instead of Oxygen. Air looks better because it matches the over all look of KDE 4.

Kubuntu boots faster but on my computer it switches to text from boot screen which looked a little ugly. Once logged in, Kubuntu acts like MS Windows it starts loading applications in the taskbar and plays the start up music when everything is loaded. On my computer this sound appears 10 seconds after login. I think that the start up music should be played as soon as the Desktop appears. Otherwise it is a little distracting when I have already started working.

There is this one particularly wonderful improvement that I loved; Dolphin file browser’s file and folder previews, moving the mouse to a file displays a preview of the file in the information bar on the right. There is a scroll bar at the bottom of Dolphin window for zooming in and out. The animations are fantastic.

There are some very useful widgets added with Plasma desktop. I was particularly happy to see the social web applications for microblogging and facebook. However I was unable to use microblogging widget because there appeared a Configure.. button right in the middle of the widget and I was unable to find a way to make it disappear. But I am glad that KDE desktop is thinking about future by bringing the web to the desktop. I personally think that this is a wonderful approach.

In Kubuntu Karmic, OpenOffice feels more like home and so do some other GTK+ applications. Also there are many improvements in KDE applications. Like Amarok is using the latest release candidate, there is DBpedia an application to look for reference. I don’t know why I would use an application instead of web browser to look up at Wikipedia?

Overall I am very impressed with Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Beta. But I would like to warn you that there are two very annoying bugs in this beta version. First of all the new package manager KPackageKit does not work. So you will have to use apt from command line to install updates. Secondly you can not log out and log back in. I am also having problems at start up. During the start up KDM would hang without asking for login details. I can easily restart KDM but its really annoying. Hopefully these issues will get resolved with the final release.

The conclusion is that Kubuntu Karmic Koala is worth trying, it is improved and hopefully it will get better. So if you are like me, a person who wants to try KDE but often failed due to one reason or another, now is the time. Give it a try and file bug reports if you find any.

Google Chrome arrived and I had to log on MS Windows to see how it works. I am so impressed that I don’t really feel like going back to Ubuntu and use Firefox. I have installed Windows Vista, which has Aero theme. I use Chrome and the world is beautiful again.

Honestly, I don’t like Microsoft Windows much. Previously I had trouble getting it configured for my internet, graphics and audio settings. It is just too much work with windows, I thought. But may be I was a little bit too biased towards freedom. I had this feeling that I am a software freedom fighter, I can not use Windows. But I am starting to think differently now.

If I use Windows I have Aero which looks 10 times better than Gnome with compiz and it has Google Chrome which is faster than Firefox and works like a charm.

These new things make me feel good. The graphics aren’t ugly, I have the same visual effects on Ubuntu too but they don’t look that good. Gnome’s interface that I have loved so much, now looks childish and boring. The simplicity has gone to a point where it feels like an insult to the human intelligence.

The windows are too big they take a lot of screen space. The fonts are ugly. Definitely Ubuntu has better support for Urdu Language but Vista is not that bad either. Using Vista I can use the new VLC media player that uses QT and has good looking interface.

I tried searching the Gnome website to see if they have any plans to give me something thats more beautiful than Mac OS X, Vista and KDE4. But I don’t think they have any plans to bring something modern and new for at least a few more decades. I can go for KDE4, and I did. I tried it with opensuse. But it crashed so often and after a week of trial I gave up. I tried KDE4 on ubuntu and the result was the same.

Developers at Gnome should think about improving their simplicity. Give me an intelligent user interface that is smarter than me. Give me better fonts. Don’t fill my screen with thick windows, fat buttons, and king size Icons. The KDE folks if they read it, please make it available for Ubuntu and make rock solid. Every body hates to see the crash handler poping up now and then. and I want VLC with QT ASAP.

Please bring me back to the free world. Please bring something exciting and modern.
BTW, after finishing this post I am going to try KDE for windows and see how it works. It might be unstable like hell but I want to do try it anyways.

Note: I haven’t completely switched to Windows yet. I am just jealous.

Just a few days ago the KDE 4.0 was announced. It seems that everyone was already excited about KDE 4.0. People using Kubuntu 7.10 Gutsy can try KDE 4.0. Ubuntu Geek has an explained version of the same intstructions here. Tombuntu has ten tips for KDE 4.0 Beginners and patchshorts writes about 5 Things to hate about KDE 4.0.

I am not trying KDE 4.0 yet, I think it is still in development phase and since I am not an advanced KDE user I might find it difficult to use. Reading about KDE 4 at OpenSuse website and Kubuntu I feel that I might run into problem if I try to install it. DistroWatch weekly scares me further away in the featured story titled “Distributions and KDE 4:

KDE 4 is the start of something amazing and this is possibly the best definition of the current release – it’s here, it’s available, but it’s nowhere near ready for the prime time. It’s a decent start, though. So let’s give the KDE developers a round of applause for the courage to try something new and extraordinary, something that will eventually mature into a stable and reliable desktop environment we can all be proud to use on our computers.

Right now I have Kubuntu 7.10 and I am trying to get familiar with the K environment. I hope that KDE4 will be available with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron which is a long term support release. It will be much safer and enjoyable to try KDE 4.0 then or may be I should wait till the release of KDE 4.1.

I just read about the new version of KDE. I prefer Gnome, but there are so many KDE features that appeal me. Now it feels like KDE is getting improved. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu has announced that there next long term support version will be Gnome only, and Kubuntu will not be supported for long term. The reason behind the decission is the developer focus on KDE4. It is changing fast so it is not possible to offer long term support for it.

I often try to install KDE and try to develop a taste for it. But each time I end up frustrated with one thing or the other. Many of my friends are KDE fans and they think that Gnome is for grandmother and children. I want to discover why KDE is so great to them. Right now I think Gnome is the best, but I would be happier if the new KDE changes my opinion, as this will give me more choice and I will be enjoying different Desktop environments whenever I am bored with the one I am using at that time.

Recently my internet service provider gifted me a webcam. It is a Creative Vista Webcam and came with an installation disk for Windows. I wanted to see how it works on my Ubuntu Linux. When I plugged it in Ubuntu didn’t recognize it. I had to download drivers for it. Ubuntu’s community documentation’s Webcam page helped a lot. The EasyCam utility recognized my webcam but didn’t offer a driver for it. So I tried manual driver installation.

Rastageeks provides a hacked driver for webcams. My webcam was listed on the Working Webcams webpage. The installation instructions were simple, and since I was familiar with adding third party repositories I had no trouble installing the debian packages. Running the module assistant installed the driver on my computer and now I was able to see it working in Ekiga.

But I don’t use Ekiga, I use Yahoo! Messenger, so it has to work with Yahoo. We have Pidgin (Gaim) installed by default in Ubuntu. But it does not support Yahoo webcams. I have seen webcams working on Gyachi but I didn’t like its cluttered interface. So I decided to try Kopete. KDE Wiki has a very helpful Kopete Webcam Support page. From there I found out that I need to download libjasper-runtime package to see my webcam working. Jasper Runtime package is called libjasper-runtime and is available from Ubuntu Archives so it was much easier to download and install it. After that I ran Kopete and by clicking on Settings > Configure > Devices I was able to see my webcam working. Fantastic!

I was pleased with the picture quality. It was much better than Windows, and what I saw on Yahoo! messenger installed on my Windows PC. But unfortunately Kopete does not support Yahoo Public Chatrooms. So I had to try Gyachi again. While trying to Install Gyachi, I came across more dependency issues. But these were no big issues, I simply had to install two packages libgpgme11 and libmcrypt4. Finally getting Gyachi installed, this is what I got:

I browsed the forums to find out a solution, I read about adjusting brightness, contrast and colors. I did that too, but nothing worked. I am still unable to use the web cam in Yahoo chat rooms.

Recently I realized that the Disks utility was showing 8.6 GiB consumed on my Ubuntu partition (I have Xubuntu installed on another partition and have one FAT partition). I decided to free up some disk space by deleting temporary files. I found that there is no tool in Dapper to automate this process. There is a tool for KDE called ‘Kleansweep‘ and also there is a feature specification on launchpad to integrate a similar tool in Ubuntu. But right now Dapper users should do it manually relying on Google and their own instincts to decide what is safe to delete and what could break their system’s stability.

To free up disk space we need to delete unnecessary files. But where are these files and how do I know that it is safe to delete them? I have found that it is safe to delete files in /home/username/.thumbnails/normal and /home/username/.thumbnails/fail folder.

It is also safe to delete the downloaded packages in /var/cache/apt/archives I personally don’t like to delete these files. Infact I even copy and paste these files to a separate partition on my hard disk. Why? Because these files are the downloaded packages we install using apt (apt-get or synaptic). If we uninstall a package and then later decide to reinstall it we will have to download it again which consumes time and bandwidth. But if you are not like one of those people who install and uninstall software on a daily basis without need or reason then it is safe to delete these files.

You can also free up disk space by emptying browser cache, saved chat files, old log files, etc.

Have we cleaned all unnecessary files? I don’t think so. I really think that there should be an easy to use application to do this job.

Firefox is great but since I visit several websites that Firefox is unable to render properly I have no choice but to find an alternative. I am starting to hate Firefox and forcing myself to love Konqueror and Galeon but still whenever I am using Firefox I feel like using a familiar application. Like when I want to create bookmark folders or search the web I know how to do it in Firefox quickly. I am still unable to get full control on either Konqueror or Galeon.

Galeon renders pages just as good as Firefox. But I don’t like its simplistic approach. I can not customize it as much as I can do with Firefox and Konqueror. So the main competition is between Firefox and Konqueror.

There are many features in Firefox that I miss in Konqueror:

• Konqueror is not among the Gmail supported browsers. Many web applications such as writely, gmail and others (that I haven’t discovered yet) do not work with Konqueror. It has a ‘change browser identification’ feature which changes the browser identity to anything you want. Like mozilla, Internet explorer, etc. I tried this feature with Gmail, the default CSS view loaded but page didn’t appear as it does in Firefox. mail snippets were running over timestamps and it didn’t look pretty.
• In Firefox I place items on the file menu bar I can not do this in Konqueror.
• Ctrl+F opens a find utility in both browsers. Firefox opens it at the bottom above the status bar which I find more usable than Konqueror’s popup.

Features where Konqueror beats Firefox:

• I thught that Firefox has made it incredibly easy to search the web but Konqueror has amazed me with its built in search shortcuts. One can extend firefox by installing extensions and adding search engines but Konqueror is clearly way a head.
• Though I can not place items on the file menu but Konqueror makes it easy to hide the file menu and then display it again.
• Clicking on feed icon in the status bar adds the feed for the page to Akregator default KDE news aggregator. I find it more usable than firefox’s live bookmarks. What I don’t like in both browsers is that they do not show the feed URL in a way so that a user can copy the url and paste it somewhere else manually.

A web browser is perhaps the most crucial software that an end user wants. If I am going to use Konqueror then it would be better for me to use Kubuntu since it integrates well into KDE. But what about the cool web 2.0 applications? I don’t want to miss anything so I just want to stay on the safe side. I am quite confused in this situation.