~$ cd /etc/kde4/kdm
~$ sudo kate kdmrc

Search for the [Shutdown] section, and make sure the shutdown and reboot lines aren’t commented out with ‘#’ hashes. Add (or uncomment) these commands.

HaltCmd=/sbin/shutdown -h -P now

RebootCmd=/sbin/shutdown -r now

• Inexplicably, several apps were uninstalled including GIMP and Wine. Easily remedied.
• This weird error message proved more difficult to fix:

dpkg: warning: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 20544
package 'handbrake-gtk':
error in Version string 'svn3834ppa1~maverick1':
version number does not start with digit

Very odd because handbrake-gtk wasn’t installed on the system at the time of the upgrade. It was installed via a PPA some months ago, then deleted, and I thought I had wiped all traces of it away… Apparently not.

I tried a bunch of solutions from various forums until I hit on this one which worked:

sudo dpkg --clear-avail && sudo apt-get update

All in all, one of the smoothest upgrades I’ve had with Kubuntu (I always do it during beta; I’m too impatient to wait for the release to mature).  And KDE (now version 4.6.2) just gets more gorgeous with every incarnation.  Be sure to invite your friends over for a look, so they can see what the next version of Windows will be stealing.

Happy hacking.

After about 3 years of running Kubuntu on the family desktop, I’ve switched to openSUSE.  Not a huge change I guess, switching from one flavour of Linux to another.  Certainly the difference isn’t apparent to my wife, beyond some minor cosmetic issues.  Specifically, the big K that used to signify the launch button in the lower left corner of the screen is now a green gecko logo.  But to me, it feels more significant.

I last used openSUSE before it was called such.  I chose SUSE Linux 10.1 as my OS when I returned to graduate school in the fall of 2006.  While I’d been a hardcore Debian user up until that point, I hadn’t had any experience with Debian on laptops.  In order to get up and productive as quickly as possible, I started the first semester with a more polished, corporate OS.  I liked it fine.  It certainly looked more striking than raw Debian, but architecturally it turned out to be much rawer.  The package manager was especially cumbersome.  I coped with this in the short term by switching to the Smart package manager, but this didn’t prevent the dependency problems inherent with an RPM-based system.

I’ve always admired Debian’s APT system.  It’s fast, efficient, solid, and provides sensible options to resolve issues with conflicting software packages.  I’ve never had a system I couldn’t salvage, no matter how difficult I’d made a situation through experimentation or idle tinkering. 

Ultimately, what drove me away from Kubuntu wasn’t its overall function or diminished feature set (in comparison to Ubuntu), but… lingering OpenOffice problems.

For some time, I’ve been bothered with the slowness of the suite on Kubuntu.  I did quite a bit of research and tinkering, but was never able to resolve the insanely slow dialogue boxes, particularly when saving files.  The problem was though to be the KDE 4 integration package.  It made the icons and operability with Kubuntu wonderful, at the expense of making it absolutely painful to use.

I’d heard glowing reports about the new SUSE release, so I back up all the family data on an external firewire drive, and reinstalled from scratch.  It wasn’t perfectly painless.  Finding repositories for those evil but essential proprietary software packages and drivers took some time, as did getting my accelerated video and wireless networking up and going.  In these areas I still have to give a serious advantage to Kubuntu / Ubuntu.  It was more than just lack of familiarity that held me back; Canonical’s products really do a much better job of harnessing hardware that requires proprietary drivers.

Overall though, I’m quite satisfied.  There have been some other changes needed.  In particular, I had to replace the rather lame duck version of KTorrent that openSUSE provides with the fully functioning version from the Packman repositories.  But the most important thing, my office suite, now works perfectly and looks great.

It’s funny what it can take to make a person change.  OpenOffice was my deal breaker.  It makes it easier for me to understand how the desire for Microsoft Office is the deal breaker that prevents many people from switching to Linux.

Can't check DMA mode. Permission denied or no such device: "/dev/dvd"

Odd, considering that Amarok, K9copy and K3B were having absolutely no problems finding and using discs. And there was the clue: in K3B’s configuration screen the drive was identified asscd0. So, I checked from the command line:

me@kubuntu-desktop:~$ ls -l /dev/dvd*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2008-04-14 19:58 /dev/dvd1 -> scd0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2008-04-14 19:58 /dev/dvdrw1 -> scd0

And sure enough, there was no symbolic link between scd0 and /dev/dvd. Simple enough to fix though:

me@kubuntu-desktop:~$ sudo ln -s scd0 /dev/dvd
me@kubuntu-desktop:~$ ls -l /dev/dvd*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2008-04-15 00:03 /dev/dvd -> scd0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2008-04-14 19:58 /dev/dvd1 -> scd0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2008-04-14 19:58 /dev/dvdrw1 -> scd0

All fixed. But for good measure, I checked the cdrom situation. Same issue:

me@kubuntu-desktop:~$ ls -l /dev/cd*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2008-04-14 19:58 /dev/cdrom1 -> scd0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2008-04-14 19:58 /dev/cdrw1 -> scd0

So, for good measure (even though I hadn’t come across any problems):

me@kubuntu-desktop:~$ sudo ln -s scd0 /dev/cdrom
me@kubuntu-desktop:~$ ls -l /dev/cd*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2008-04-15 00:04 /dev/cdrom -> scd0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2008-04-14 19:58 /dev/cdrom1 -> scd0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2008-04-14 19:58 /dev/cdrw1 -> scd0

Now, with all roads leading to Rome, I fired Kaffeine back up again and enjoyed my movie.

No, it’s just that I’m not usually among the first to jump on these bandwagons. Perhaps it’s Dell’s seemingly genuine intent to listen to their users that’s chipped away at my cynicism. But damn you anyway Michael Dell. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that you removed that Precision M90 Ubuntu laptop from your user page. Do you still have it, or did it get whistled off to the Dell Outlet store?

In any event, one of my first tasks on Brainstorm was to query for “KDE” and “Kubuntu” ideas, but I found only one: Idea #478 – Support kubuntu and kde the way you support ubuntu and gnome. Fine. It’s about as well-expressed an idea as I could have hoped for, and a good candidate for merging the duplicate questions into. But what’s been interesting is watching the early resistance from GNOME users, not so much in the comments, but in the bouncing score. While I don’t have the time to check in often, it’s gone from zero to 18 to zero in just the short time I’ve been observing. Currently, it sits at 34. I wonder where it will be when I finish typing this?

Why the resistance? KDE is an excellent desktop. While it may not be the Ubuntu default, it’s still undeniably popular, having won LinuxQuestions.org’s Desktop Environment of the Year for the seventh consecutive year in a row. The same survey saw K3B, Amarok and Konqueror win resounding victories against their non-KDE counterparts.

Is there fear about a scarcity of resources? Will more attention to Kubuntu development necessarily manifest itself in neglect towards Ubuntu? I don’t know about you, but I’m observing an increasing plateau in the Ubuntu development curve. Certainly Canonical is continuing to add new features and polish with each development cycle, but it’s nothing like the vertical takeoff we observed with the early versions starting from Warty Warthog. Current developers are not expending themselves the way that they once needed to. Was the initial effort that exhausting, or is it merely the fact that it’s more fun to enjoy the ride once the balloon is launched, than look around for the next challenge?

Critics may say that given GNOME’s popularity within Ubuntu, working to provide more functionality, fit and finish for the minority of Kubuntu users isn’t a worthwhile investment. However, given KDE’s popularity overall, I would argue that Canonical’s neglect of Kubuntu is responsible for its relative lack of users. It’s always lagged behind in development — fewer added features, more bugs, questionable package inclusions, and the removal/hiding of good programs (Kcontrol, Konqueror) for poor ones (System Settings, Dolphin 3).

Not to slag Jonathan Riddell — he’s doing as well as one guy can — but Kubuntu has always been more suited to the type of user who doesn’t mind a lot of tweaking after the fact. People who want a desktop that ‘just works’ are forced to go the GNOME route, whether it’s their preference or not.

In Brainstorm, Kubuntu users finally have an invitation to vent their frustration at having a Cinderella distribution relegated to the role of ugly stepsister. Will Canonical respond?

At least initially, I’m more concerned by the potential backlash from the Ubuntu majority. Am I worrying for nothing? I don’t know.

The score, at least as of this posting, is now down to 29.

Kubuntu is what Ubuntu would look like if he decided to abandon the patent leather shoes and forsake all corduroy and khahki and opt instead for snakeskin cowboy boots, lamé, metallics and sequins.

No, I’m not a fashion expert. But I can Google.

Kubuntu uses the oft-criticized-but-oh-so-kewl-looking KDE desktop. Should you prefer something tasteful and understated [read: dull] fear not — the Kubuntu and Ubuntu releases are identical save for the desktop environments. Thus, like its twin, Kubuntu offers the same features that have made Ubuntu a household name… at least among technically savvy [read: nerdy] households. They share the same bleeding edge features (inherited from their psychotic cousin, twice removed — Debian Sid) with well chosen packages (office software, media players, printer drivers, etc) so that your main hurdle is just installing the software itself. Once it’s loaded, you’re ready to use it. For this, Kubuntu borrows the Debian pre-release of the Debian installer. While text-based [read: boring], it is simple and efficient, and if you intend to install Kubuntu as your only operating system, you can do so by selecting the installer’s default options (i.e. spend most of your time pressing the ‘Enter’ key).

As I write this, I’ve been using Kubuntu for almost a month. As a die-hard fan of Debian, Kubuntu’s main selling point to me is (not surprisingly) how much it looks, feels, and acts like Debian. The first difference is that the root user account is present but disabled (because it has no password). So, you can choose to perform all your administrative tasks by beginning them with the ‘sudo’ command, or you can enable the account with ‘sudo passwd root’ and enter a password for the root account. As a Debian user. I prefer to open a console, type ‘su’ and perform a number of admin tasks in a row, so, I enabled root.

That being done, the system is almost indistinguishable from my main Deban box, except for… the bugs. Debian Sid (upon which Kubuntu is based) is experimental software. If Kubuntu was sold like commercial software (i.e. in a shrink-wrapped box), it would have to be crammed with so many warning labels that all you could read would be: ‘ bu t ‘.

But, this is the price for bleeding edge software: it’s not exhaustively tested. Even so, Kubuntu is remarkably stable… more or less so depending upon your individual computer. Some users have had problems with Konqueror (KDE’s web browser and file manager) crashing and exiting spontaneously. This doesn’t happen on my system. A more serious problem — where the desktop settings (including login theme, wallpaper, taskbar, system tray and other kicker panel settings) are wiped out after the system software is updated — is universal. You can read about it here and here. The Kubuntu bug report is here.

The users on the forums have offered a number of solutions. I was forced to re-create my desktop settings manually, and have tried to apply several of the fixes. This solution, the last one I tried, seems to have re-stabilized my system and even allowed me to continue to keep updating Kubuntu by APT-GET (the Debian software package manager). The community’s gripe is that (at least as of this writing) the developers have not posted a fix themselves, or corrected the problem in a new release. Kubuntu development is in 6 month intervals, with each release given an 18 month lifespan for updates. Some fear that the problems with this release will remain, and that the fix to the core software will not be corrected until Kubuntu 5.10 in October. I don’t know if this is true, but (as a Debian user) I am accustomed to waiting for hours or days, not weeks, for a fix.

I’m giving this release the same rating I gave the previous one. I like it more… because I like Debian, KDE, and the fact that Canonical Ltd. even dared to branch out from Gnome. However, there is a happy medium between the Debian style of releasing (“We will release nothing until we’re convinced it’s 99.99999% stable…”) and an Ubuntu release (“Ooops! it’s April / October again!”).

Ubuntu has climbed to the top of the charts at DistroWatch because of its progressive thinking. It’s sad to think it can be constrained to a calendar. With a larger developer base for Kubuntu, this might work in the future. Perhaps Kubuntu should have remained in pre-release until 5.10.

No… scratch the “Perhaps” from that last sentence.

Too late now, though. And for the record, I’m keeping mine installed.

For now.