Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala screenshot…

I have taken a long and winding road since my last post, but have landed (for now) with Kubuntu 9.10. I had worked through the pain of setting up Arch Linux with KDEmod repositories and all, but could not seem to get past a dysfunctional Akonadi server, which would pester me every time I wanted to open Kmail or Korganizer or Kontact. So now, all is working very nicely with Kubuntu Karmic.

I did have an issue with installation… the live CD installation would stop every time with “scanning disks” at 47%, and simply would not proceed. I got around that by downloading the Alternate Install CD.

Here is a screenshot:

Kubuntu 9.10 screenshot using "Elegance" plasma theme and Quicklauncher taskbar widget

A conundrum…

Need coffee to clear brain fog, but too sleepy to make the roffee kite!

Kmail links open two Firefox tabs…

Off and on with different distros I have noticed a strange behavior in Kmail and/or Firefox. Clicking on a link in a Kmail email will open Firefox (as it should), but with two identical tabs. That is, it opens the same page twice, simultaneously, in seperate tabs.

XiniX, over at the KDE Community forums, steered me toward the solution. In this file:

/home/username/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals

In the “General” subsection I changed

BrowserApplication[$e]=!firefox-3.5 %u

to

BrowserApplication[$e]=!firefox-3.5

and suddenly, no more double tabs!

XiniX… you da man! Thanks!

An unexpected benefit of blogging…

When I began this blog I imagined that by sharing my Linux experiences I might be helping others. What I have discovered is that I also am helping myself. By recording specific instructions and commands, it is like keeping a notebook for future reference, except one step better, since I can do a quick search for specific info, and copy/paste commands. I think they call that a serendipity.

Sabayon 4.2 KDE was a mistake…

Sabayon 4.2 is a very beautiful Linux distribution, which is what attracted me to give it a try. Additionally, their packages are pretty close to the bleeding edge, which is what I generally prefer. Once I had it set up, I was quite happy with it, except for one thing… it is Gentoo based. I simply can’t get my head wrapped around the package management terminology and procedures, being so accustomed to apt-get and Synaptic with most of the Debian based distros I have used.

After several weeks of “wrassling” with it, I managed yesterday to bork the installation by allowing it to do a kernel update without doing the proper nvidia update that goes along with it. When I rebooted, it just gave me the black screen and a blinking white cursor in the top left corner. I did manage to figure my way out of that dilemma for a little while. (Ctrl-Alt-F1 got me to a terminal session, where I could login with my username and password, and use equo to install the nvidia driver).

However, once back on the desktop, I made the mistake of saying yes when the “equo update && equo world –ask” command wanted to clean up “unneeded” packages. Basically it removed practically all of KDE, and rebooting left the machine in an unusable, unfixable (by me) state.

Oh well. Back to Mint 7 again.

Starting Dolphin in superuser mode…

I’ve gone round and round trying to find a way to open Dolphin as root, or superuser, in order to copy files into write-protected folders. For instance, I want to copy terrain files I’ve downloaded for FlightGear into /user/share/games/FlightGear/Scenery/Terrain. Because this folder belongs to root, I have been unable, until now, to copy anything into it.

Thanks to Bolick on the OpenSuse forums, I now know how to do this with the following command.

kdesu dbus-launch dolphin

Thanks, man!

Terminal vs. GUI for moving large number of files…

I recently learned that my daughter had a very large pile of family images  from 2004/2005 stored on her external hard drive that were not in my collection. She allowed me to copy them onto my computer. My collection went from 14,000+ to almost 24,000! I’m already enjoying “new” memories, as I have my screensaver set to random image slideshow mode.

I discovered, however, that Dolphin does not deal well with folders containing thousands of images. Every click, every selection, every move seems to take an extraordinarily long time, especially if you forget to disable “preview.” Because of this, I decided to move the images in my 2004 and 2005 folders into “2004-Q1, 2004-Q2, etc.”, to reduce the number of files Dolphin has to think about at one time.

To do this in Dolphin using  drag and drop, you have to select the images from January to March, drag them over into the new folder, and WAIT for 10 or 20 minutes while it thinks, crunches numbers and filenames, or whatever it is doing.

To do this in Dolphin using the terminal panel (View>Panels>Terminal, or simply press F4) did the same thing in less than a second, using the following command (assuming I have clicked in the source folder in Dolphin’s GUI, as that will “cd” me into it down in the terminal panel):

mv * /home/les/Pictures/JPGs/2004-Q4

This was, of course, after I had already moved out the images from Q1-Q3 using the GUI.

Question: With my image file names like this: 4 digit year-two digit month-two digit day (e.g. 2004-09-23), how might I have structured this command to move the files from January to March into folder /home/les/Pictures/JPGs/2004-Q1?

Fedora 11 refuses to install on my new motherboard/cpu combo…

I recently bought an ASRock K10n78m motherboard with an AMD 7750 cpu, but was unable to make F11 preview or final install, either from the LiveCD or the DVD installation media. Bummer! From the Live CD, pressing the Install to Hard Drive icon just didn’t do anything. It never started Anaconda, the installation program. With the DVD installation disc, it would always hang during some part of the installation… several times at “searching for storage devices.” It’s a shame, because I really wanted to be running Fedora 11 now. Instead, I’ll just be happy (for a while) with Mint 7.

Anyone having troubles with Firefox on Ubuntu 9.04?

I have been experiencing regular screen freeze-ups every time I attempt to install a new plug-in or add-on to Firefox with Compiz-Fusion installed and running. This happens with Firefox 3.0.10 or with Firefox 3.5 (Shiretoko) The cpu goes to 100%, and the entire screen becomes unresponsive, including all taskbars, window closer buttons, everything. The mouse cursor will move, but you can’t do anything with it! This means rebooting with the power button every time.

As a workaround, I installed “Compiz Fusion Icon,” which toggles between Metacity and Compiz window managers. Unfortunately, you have to remember to use it BEFORE you try to install a Firefox extension! I wonder if this is related to npviewer.bin. Just a wild guess, since there’s no way to open System Monitor while the screen is frozen up!

Using Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD to wipe a hard drive…

I have an old 120 gb hard drive I am going to put into a new build. The motherboard, cpu, and memory will be arriving tomorrow, according to the UPS tracking site. Here’s what I am doing to wipe all old data from the drive:

1) Installed old hard drive in place of my new one on this current system.

2) Rebooted with the Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD

3) Opened up a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal)

4) Entered this command:
sudo shred -vfz -n 6 /dev/sda

5) Opened up Firefox to write this post

6) Power off the monitor and let this run all night! (Update: I started this at around 3:30pm on Tuesday afternoon. It did 6 passes of writing random stuff plus a 7th pass of writing all zeros, finishing up at around 8:30 am on Wednesday morning. Total of 17 hours for a 120 gb drive.)

While it was doing its thing I was able to surf the Internet, check web-mail, etc.