Ubuntu 7.04/ 7.10 / 8.04/ 8.10 - After Installation Tips.

ekmon1582 · Post by **ekmon1582** » March 21st, 2008, 10:07 am

OK now it's working, for some reason. Oh well, one of the weird things my PC's been doing lately.

earther · Post by **earther** » March 21st, 2008, 11:08 am

That's good news. Every so often a disk won't read when I pop it in. I'll open, try again and it will be fine. Technology . . . arrrgh!

ekmon1582 · Post by **ekmon1582** » March 21st, 2008, 11:11 am

FatJohn · Post by **FatJohn** » April 20th, 2008, 3:56 pm

Time to find your party shoes! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardyReleaseParties :bday:

Frank Lion · Post by **Frank Lion** » April 20th, 2008, 4:56 pm

FatJohn wrote:Time to find your party shoes! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardyReleaseParties

Well, I cannot see me rushing to no parties, but this really is a time for celebration. Just look at how Ubuntu/Kubuntu has come on in the last few years. This is an entire first class Operating System we're talking about here, together with a full range of apps and a highly organised outfit throughout. Well done all, I say.

Grumpus · Post by **Grumpus** » May 2nd, 2008, 5:33 am

Printer Drivers - There's some new drivers for PCL and other printers like Epson in the repository and a development kit for them as well. Search "Epson" or PCL most in the Main.
They may have been there for a while I just noticed them but figured I'd post it for folks who still have some issues.

Frank Lion · Post by **Frank Lion** » May 5th, 2008, 2:59 pm

Well, a totally painless 'upgrade' to Kubuntu 8.04 Hedgehog Hardy for me.

I say 'upgrade' in quotes, because I seem (with some success) to have a different way of doing all software upgrades to most people and it hinges on 5 rules :

1. Never install anything over the top of anything.
2. Never delete, just rename what is not required.
3. Never trust .iso, .disks, img and always additionally do a straight backup copy and paste.
4. Never CUT and paste anything. If the power goes off, as happened once, you can lose what is not already pasted.
5. Never, ever, make the same mistake twice.

So, this upgrade from 7.04 went as follows :

Prior to having just installed a new large Seagate internal hdd (due to the whine of the old WD one, damn rubbish) I .img backedup XP and did a straight copy of the lot onto ext hdd. Then went into the Wubi Kub 704 and straight copied the lot, home and root (lot of good stuff in usr) and also did many screenshots of the apps in the Kicker (Start menu) and shots of all graphic type stuff, so I can recreate anything required. All these were saved, along with the Wubi home, system .disks and .iso to ext hdd.

Then back into XP, copied the home and system kubuntu disks to ext hdd and put into new hdd. Reinstalled XP (all my best graphics apps only work in XP) and just reinstalled various programs and moved stuff back from the straight copy. Nice clean OS now.

As no one has yet given me a reasonable, or any, good reason why a full Ubuntu install is preferable to a Wubi one, I went for the latter, even though the new hdd had been partitioned up for Vista (later), Linux and room to spare. Usual defrag and DskChk before using the latest Wubi installer and all went fine. None of this 'own goal' nonsense of the wrong kernels being used, than can happen if you install over the top. Didn't require anything like full concentration, in fact a small child could have done it, in fact, I should have paid a small child a few bucks to do it for me and got on with something else.

Then...a snag. I had downloaded the Kub with the new KDE 4 on it - dreadful looking thing, lasted a hour. As you may have gathered, this stuff is no 'religion' to me, I couldn't give a damn what I use, I just know that I need to work fast and effectively with any tool I use. I started with Kanotix...that uses KDE and I'm familiar with it, so I still use it.

So, a problem you'd think? Nope, uninstalled Wubi, clean up routine, and run Wubi with Kub 804 and the better, in my view, KDE 3.9 and was fully installed within less than 2 hours - most of that time being just downloading the new iso.

Then just moved stuff across from the straight copy of home and used the screenshots to remember exactly what apps I had and reinstalled them. Totally, utterly straight forward stuff.

Many people seem to think that complicated software needs complicated user solutions and the requirement to fully understand everything. Wrong. All this 'I have very important stuff on my old OS!' twaddle - what? and I don't I suppose, I think I do, you know.

Just use the skills listed above that you all already have and have a fall back position already prepared...I could be back in Kub 704 in less than an hour, if I needed to.

You have nothing to fear but fear itself and the new and better Ubuntu/Kubuntu 8.04 awaits you. Get prepared and go for it.

Frank

FatJohn · Post by **FatJohn** » May 8th, 2008, 2:07 pm

For hours of fun for all ages, try conky. It's a fully customizable system monitor on your desktop. As in the thing in the lower left part of the screenie. It's pretty to watch and some smart person can come up with a useful purpose for it. It's also pretty easy on resources. More screenshots here.

(mind you, the fun is not in watching the data but in configuring conky!

)

Post by **steviex** » May 8th, 2008, 2:19 pm

Conky is available via Synaptic... Just click and go....

FatJohn · Post by **FatJohn** » May 8th, 2008, 2:56 pm

Yeah I know, by configuring I meant deciding what data to display and how to present it.

daihard · Post by **daihard** » May 11th, 2008, 8:24 am

Okay, after so many years of using Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS, I've finally decided to give Ubuntu / Kubuntu a try. Being a KDE user I naturally chose Kubuntu. I retired my old Fedora Core 6 and installed Hardy Heron (8.04).

So far, everything works great. The "apt-get" method is just as easy as, if not easier than, yum. Naming conventions are different and that gets me from time to time, but that's fairly minor.

One thing I don't like about Kubuntu so far is that they have tweaked KDE in such a way that all the customization options are not as easily accessible as the vanilla KDE. I find this particularly odd because KDE is popular for its customizability. What's in hiding those great options? Well at least I know how to bring them back alive. :-)

One question... Frank Lion suggests that we not mess with xorg.conf. If that's the case, how do you go about assigning correct actions to mouse buttons? That's traditionally been done by changing the "mouse" entry in xorg.conf. Any pointers?

Thanks!
Dai

Frank Lion · Post by **Frank Lion** » May 11th, 2008, 10:56 am

daihard wrote:So far, everything works great. The "apt-get" method is just as easy as, if not easier than, yum. Naming conventions are different and that gets me from time to time, but that's fairly minor.

Try to make full use of Kicker>System>Adept Manager, I've honestly only had to use apt-get a few times.

daihard wrote:One thing I don't like about Kubuntu so far is that they have tweaked KDE in such a way that all the customization options are not as easily accessible as the vanilla KDE. I find this particularly odd because KDE is popular for its customizability. What's in hiding those great options? Well at least I know how to bring them back alive.

I thought that odd as well, but as the screenshot below shows, you can configure it all pretty well as you want.

daihard wrote:One question... Frank Lion suggests that we not mess with xorg.conf. If that's the case, how do you go about assigning correct actions to mouse buttons? That's traditionally been done by changing the "mouse" entry in xorg.conf. Any pointers?

Well, that was more as a caution to new users, to try and get across how much havoc you can inflict on yourself by editing xorg.conf and fstab. Also, as a reminder to old, existing users to advise people to use the provided new GUI and not keep giving the slightly 'dangerous' and 'old fashioned' advice of editing these for every problem, as was happening.

That doesn't apply in your case as you've edited it before and know how to use the Recovery Console if it goes wrong at all. However, you should find a GUI way to do it here :
http://img292.imageshack.us/img292/5364 ... t28ym6.png

If not, just edit via sudo kate, as you have done before. When I first used Kubuntu, no way could I get fstab right via the System>Disks and Filesystems GUI and just manually edited fstab. Recently I changed internal hdd and partitioned away and it messed up fstab and, now that I'm more used to it, I found that I could do the whole thing, safely, via the GUI all along!

Put a few Fedora wallpapers on it, dai, and you'll soon feel at home. But yeah, there is a small learning curve to go through, even when you've been using Linux as long as you have.

daihard · Post by **daihard** » May 11th, 2008, 9:23 pm

Frank Lion wrote:Try to make full use of Kicker>System>Adept Manager, I've honestly only had to use apt-get a few times.

Just fiddled with Adept. Looks like a nice, easy-to-use GUI frontend. I will still probably keep using apt-get as my main package management tool, but I'm sure Adept will come in handy in many situations, such when you don't know the exact names of the packages you need.

Frank Lion wrote:I thought that odd as well, but as the screenshot below shows, you can configure it all pretty well as you want.

That's amazing. Just amazing. I've seen nice colour schemes like that on KDE-Look.org, but your entire desktop theme is very well integrated together - not just the colour. Really cool stuff.

Frank Lion wrote:If not, just edit via sudo kate, as you have done before. When I first used Kubuntu, no way could I get fstab right via the System>Disks and Filesystems GUI and just manually edited fstab. Recently I changed internal hdd and partitioned away and it messed up fstab and, now that I'm more used to it, I found that I could do the whole thing, safely, via the GUI all along!

I resorted to hand-editing xorg.conf this time. The exact configuration I copied from my old FC6 box worked beautifully here. The xorg.conf file itself tells you how to run the dpkg command to bring back the initially configured xorg.conf if something went wrong. Very nice.

Frank Lion wrote:Put a few Fedora wallpapers on it, dai, and you'll soon feel at home. But yeah, there is a small learning curve to go through, even when you've been using Linux as long as you have.

Thanks for all your advice, Frank. Kubuntu is definitely growing on me.

tqft · Post by **tqft** » May 12th, 2008, 1:50 am

(for me in the future or anyone who needs it)

From here
http://www.uluga.ubuntuforums.org/showt ... p?t=515003

speaker-test -Dplug:surround51 -c6 -l1 -twav

They are other standard tests (xx51 -cX is for a 5.1 channel sound setup - see the link)

You hear a voice (when your setup is good) announcing which speaker it should be.

If anyone knows what sound modules you need to be able to listen to HD digital TV please speak up.

I can get sound on the SD digital channels - but not the HD ones (using vlc).

daihard · Post by **daihard** » May 21st, 2008, 12:23 pm

A little tip to get "ls -l" to display timestamp just like it does on Red Hat / Fedora...

Code: Select all

export newline='
'
alias ls='ls --color=auto --time-style=+"%b %e  %Y$newline%b %e %R"'

Place the lines above in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_aliases.

The output from "ls -l" now is...

Code: Select all

[daihard-exp:/home/dtoyama]$ ls -l
total 84
drwxr-xr-x  3 dtoyama dtoyama  4096 May 14 22:30 backup
drwxr-xr-x  2 dtoyama dtoyama  4096 May 18 16:47 bin
drwxr-xr-x  3 dtoyama dtoyama  4096 May 17 11:47 data
lrwxrwxrwx  1 dtoyama dtoyama    12 May 13 23:32 data_x2 -> /mnt/x2/data
drwxr-xr-x  2 dtoyama dtoyama  4096 May 10 02:09 Desktop
lrwxrwxrwx  1 dtoyama dtoyama    22 May 11 23:46 docs -> /mnt/priv/dtoyama/docs
drwxr-xr-x  2 dtoyama dtoyama  4096 May 20 17:12 downloads
.....

Non-recent files show the year after the date, whereas recent files show the time after the data. That's how "ls -l" works on Red Hat / Fedora, and I wanted that on my Kubuntu.

Ubuntu 7.04/ 7.10 / 8.04/ 8.10 - After Installation Tips.

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