Categories
College Life Linux/BSD Software

Go KDE 4! Go!

I’ve finally fallen in love with KDE. Finally.

The first live CDs I ever tried were the Knoppix ones and I never really used it much to love KDE. And then came the other distro days (then Mandrake, SuSE, and so on) where I didn’t stay with Linux long enough. Then came the Gentoo days where I never really enjoyed my KDE experience owing to slow startup times of a few multimedia apps. I’ve been using GNOME for a long time until the day KDE 4 RC 2 came out.

KDE apps are on a totally different level compared to GNOME apps as far as my experience goes (and my experience goes with apps such as K3b vs. Brasero, digiKam vs. <nothing-yet>, and so on). You’ll notice powerful, feature-rich apps in KDE that aren’t written by Novell’s Mono addicts if you’re not comfortable with Mono apps.

Listening to music started getting a lot more enjoyable with amaroK and even to this day Amarok is the only one. A screenshot of Amarok-2 preview. Look nowhere else for a music player.

Amarok 2 Pre Alpha

Categories
Linux/BSD Software

The right-way(tm) to convert an ubuntu-desktop to a kubuntu-desktop?

Playing with distros at every whim is all I’ve been doing for quite some time now. I’ve been changing DEs too (GNOME -> KDE4 — failing which — -> KDE 3.5.8 :P).
Although my current laptop compile OO.o in about 4 hours compared to my previous AMD desktop which took about 7 hours, I still fear having to enable/disable numerous USE flags to get a decent KDE. Not to mention those feelings of regret of having chosen the monolithic ebuilds over the split ones or vice versa ~_~

Well, let’s get to the topic here: “Converting an ubuntu installation to kubuntu”

1. If you’ve just installed Ubuntu do not upgrade even if there are updates available.
2. Press Ctrl+Alt+F1 – get outside of X.
3. Run invoke-rc.d gdm stop
4 Run sudo tasksel and uncheck Ubuntu-desktop
5 Run sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade now
6 And finally, sudo aptitude install kubuntu-desktop

That should do the trick, which unfortunately didn’t work completely with me.
Possible reasons could be that I was doing this 2 months after the Ubuntu 7.10 release and network-manager-kde errored out on reconfiguring which depended on reconfiguring dhcdbd. Some weird thing. Just run step 6. again and again 😐

Categories
College Life Entertainment Gymkhana LAN Linux/BSD Software

Been a while again!

So, I’ve been away from blogging for a while now. Several things have happened around me during this period.

Formation of the SSCVC:

We called for what might have been the first informal Anime-club meet at the campus. Most of were present (bheekling was asleep) and presented our idea for forming a formal club under the Students’ Gymkhana. We hadn’t thought of a name yet and we hadn’t met people either. The following weekend, we arranged for a show in the hall1 TV room. We were a little late and some people had turned back. But then, we went and called some people to come and watch :D. We screened the first two episodes of “NHK ni youkoso” and “GITS: GIG 1”. (Lord Vash’s wide-screen and , BigBong’s laptop were used). We couldn’t bear it anymore and basilisk and I decided to meet Amitabha Mukherjee (a prof. in the CSE dept., who we reportedly heard from Nishant Singh that he was into anime(!), which turned out to be false). He pointed us to Satyaki Roy’s direction >_>. Next stop was Suchitra Mathur ;). Bheekling got us appointment and LordVash, himself and I met her. She was interested with the plan and all that and we still hadn’t come up with the name. I remembered Genshiken and how it was about an anime club. I quickly googled to get its full-form. It was the SSMVC – Society for Study of Modern Visual Culture. In a day, we met with Satyaki and he suggested that we change it to SSCVC – Society for Study of Contemporary Visual Culture. Woah! We still haven’t put out our proposal for the club yet. Hopefully the iitk-animesociety should help us out here 😉

Revamp of my data:

I have two hard-disks. Started off with a Samsung 160GB SATA disk three years ago. It had a warranty of period of one year as compared to Seagate and I yet went with it :\. Something I soon realised was that Samsung and LG were these two Korean companies that dumped junk in India for a while (only recently have they set up their own plants in the country and get decent products). Another thing being – to not buy computer products such as hard-disks, motherboards or CPUs in Kanpur (and maybe in the whole of UP!) . One – I have personally come across cases where a dealer takes screwed up disks from you, refurnishes them and sell them to someone else. Same is the case with mobos and CPUs. A model of RAM you bought at one time won’t be available a few months later (suppose you have 512MB and wanted another identical stick – tough luck).

Some time ago (during the summers, I think), I had repartitioned my data and set up ZFS via FUSE on linux. Wasn’t production ready and very shaky at times. Couldn’t share my whole data on DC++. During the past few days, basilisk had tried to install Gentoo and ended up cleaning up his 250Gb harddisk with Ubuntu :P. I transferred all my Anime, Movie and TV onto his disk, the Music went into a confidential location. Set up four partitions on my reliable ATA Seagate disk, one Boot, one Root (20GB), one Swap and one large Home. The other unreliable disk is one big reisrefs partition 🙂 Removed my FreeBSD and that extended partition windows had created. I had played around with FreeBSD too to get good ZFS performance before I removed it. Updated to 7.0-CURRENT and zpool segfaulted at zpool import :\ Considering the hassles I’d have to go through if I had stuck with FreeBSD amd64, I decided to stay with Linux itself. If at all I need to experiment with any of those at a later point of time, they’ll be on a different hardware :X! (Notes: don’t ask me how I went to 7.0-CURRENT from within the campus)

Food:

Yes, I’ve been eating mostly in the canteen or at the gate. I spent a lot of money. Just for food. (I payed off my earlier debts too)

Classes(!):

I haven’t been to classes for a couple of weeks. It’s a bad thing. It suddenly turned cold here and you feel like staying in your bed like nothing else’s important. Exams are coming soon – 8th Oct.! I have to do whatever has to be done. This sucks 😐 For now, I should try not to waste time on anything else (:P).