Tag: Kubuntu

Categories
College Life Linux/BSD Software

Yet another new beginning

Howdy all, it’s a yet-another-distro-hop post!

I had Debian/Kubuntu for more than a semester now. For the past few weeks I was on Kubuntu Hardy. Drastic changes (as expected) were taking place everyday. A couple of days ago X started crashing whenever I played a h264 video using mplayer. It was quite random. The same video would play again, randomly. Decided to resurrect my FreeBSD installation and headed over to boot it. Didn’t happen. Hardy’s grub recognised my (hd0,1,a) as jfs o_o. I even reinstalled FreeBSD (it’s always a breeze). Didn’t work. I redid it with the FreeBSD’s bootloader overwriting Kubuntu’s grub. I could boot into FreeBSD now. Fine. Let’s go back to Hardy and check newsgroups now (using KNode, keeps my unread items, read items in shape). Didn’t work. Couldn’t boot into Kubuntu now. Oh, and, I had made this terrible mistake of installing Kubuntu on JFS partitions (fsck.jfs latest version dates back to 2006). So I dug through my old CDs to get a live image so I could chroot into Kubuntu and restore the grub. First, I tried the ‘Ubuntu Server 6.06 (i386)’ CD, it couldn’t chroot into my amd64 installation >_>. Next was the Fedora rescue CD. For some reason it couldn’t mount the JFS partition (methinks it was missing JFS support in kernel). Next up was the ‘OpenSUSE 10.3 (x86_64)’ DVD. Although I could see from ‘dmesg’ that it recognised the partition as JFS, it failed to mount it.

I assumed my Kubuntu root partition was a goner and started off with a fresh OpenSUSE installation. I chose ‘minimal graphical environment’ thinking that the installation time would be small. For some reason the network didn’t work after installation. I redid it but this time chose KDE as the default desktop (and XFS root partition). Smooth. Installation is just a smooth ride. It installed most packages I would have manually installed on Kubuntu (like Adobe Flash plugin, good-looking monospace fonts, interesting console-utilities…).

OpenSUSE 10.3 has an annoying proxy related bug. Something to do with the format of the /root/.culrc file. The installation sets up:
# Changed by YaST2 module proxy 09/04/08
--proxy-user "proxyuser:proxypass"
--proxy "http://172.31.1.227:3128/"

which is supposed to look like:
# Changed by YaST2 module proxy 09/04/08
# Fixing a most-annoying-bug for 10.3
--proxy-user = "proxyuser:proxypass"
--proxy = "http://172.31.1.227:3128/"

Once this was fixed, I proceeded to disable my installation DVD as a software source and added the suse-oss, suse-non-oss and suse-update repositories using zypper. All that was left now was a zypper refresh && zypper update and a reboot. The first update was a fix for zypper (which takes care of reading the /root/.culrc properly). The subsequent updates take place after the reboot (see screenshot).

If somebody knows the equivalent of Debian/Kubuntu’s following few steps for OpenSUSE please let me know:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config, selecting the option that enables sub-pixel font-rendering and applying as a default throughout the system. Thanks!

OpenSUSE 10.3, with a working update-manager

Categories
College Life LAN Linux/BSD Software

Getting Kopete to work* on KDE 3.x

To work* – My work environment’s network is a LAN shared by about 2000 users. We don’t have the neat NAT’ed type connections or transparent proxy setups other universities in the rest of the world enjoy. Our access to the remaining world is through a HTTP caching proxy which supports connect-over-http.

Step 1:
$ sudo aptitude install tor dante-client

Step 2:
$ sudo vim /etc/tor/torrc

Have the following text inside it:

SocksPort 9050 # what port to open for local application connections
SocksListenAddress 127.0.0.1 # accept connections only from localhost

HttpProxy 172.31.1.233:3128
HttpProxyAuthenticator username:password

HttpsProxy 172.31.1.233:3128
HttpsProxyAuthenticator username:password

Step 3:
$ sudo vim /etc/dante.conf

Add the following:

route {
from: 0.0.0.0/0 to: 0.0.0.0/0 via: 127.0.0.1 port = 9050
protocol: tcp udp # server supports tcp and udp.
proxyprotocol: socks_v4 socks_v5 # server supports socks v4 and v5.
method: none #username # we are willing to authenticate via
# method "none", not "username".
}

You might want to allow from: 127.0.0.1/8 alone.

Step 4:
$ sudo invoke-rc.d tor restart

Step 5: Go to KDE’s Control Centre and enable SOCKS (select Dante) under Network Settings > Proxy

Step 6: Configure Kopete – use the ip of talk.google.com

Step 7: Get cursed for those extra-spaces Kopete sends by Pidgin users 😛

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 😐