customising life

I’ve been using Kubuntu Gutsy for a while and have been keeping up with updates, but now with the final release of Gutsy out I decided to use Adept to dist-upgrade to the final release.

After getting an update of the latest packages, Adept gives you the option to perform the dist-upgrade.

The process is very easy for user to follow, although I did have a message informing me that support from Canonical had run out for some libraries (libgtk1.2).

I was presented with a list of packages that would be installed/updated to complete the upgrade, and I went out to have a coffee (it estimated over an hour for downloading).

The process continued until the Installing the upgrades step, at which point it hung for well over half an hour and I grew impatient and ended it.

Fortunately I was able to use the Full Upgrade option in Adept to install the new updates.

I don’t really have time to install a pre-release version and try again, so I wonder if anyone else has come across this?

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Your NTFS partition may not have been shutdown cleanly. Blame Windows.

After upgrading to Gutsy recently, I was annoyed with a particular, persistant problem, where my PC would continually run fsck (disc checking) on every reboot. Every reboot.

And it would hang at the disc checking stage for what seemed like an eternity. Now I’m not a patient person when it comes to PCs so I used Alt + Sys Rq + e (end all processes, nicely) to cancel the task so the init process could continue. There was nothing in the usual logs; dmesg, /var/log/fsck, etc. No reason as to why it would repeatedly get stuck on boot.

This went on for over two weeks until I decided to find out why this was happening. After starting Kubuntu in recovery mode, I watched the boot process up until the disc check; no problems. Then it tried to mount the local filesystem, which is when I saw the message.

$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)
Failed to mount ‘/dev/sdc1′: Operation not supported
Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Choose one action:
Choice 1: If you have Windows then disconnect the external devices by
clicking on the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ icon in the Windows
taskbar then shutdown Windows cleanly.
Choice 2: If you don’t have Windows then you can use the ‘force’ option for
your own responsibility. For example type on the command line:
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 -o force
Or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file:
/dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 ntfs-3g defaults,force 0 0

Still being impatient, I tried searching for what to do, thinking about reporting a bug, going for broke and using the force option, until I realised it was right there in front of me.

$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)

All I had to do was reboot into Windows and then restart the PC.

Cleanly.

So not using Alt+Ctrl+Del or the restart button, which was no mean feat as my Windows install is plagued and dying a slow painful death. Fortunately the PC did restart and mounting the NTFS partition is now right as rain.

(Again I’m wondering why I even keep it around at all?)

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Kubuntu and Gutsy has been quite interesting to use thus far, although I don’t ever really seem to find time to use my computer for more than reading some RSS feeds, and maybe watch a DVD episode (very occasionally).

My experience of Kubuntu Gutsy (from alpha to RC) is pretty standard fare; doing ordinary day to day stuff. I’ve gotta say that KDE has some great things going for it. I really like the tight integration of the default applications.

My application of the moment is Konqueror. Konqueror seems to be the web-cum-file browser that can do just about anything. Konqueror often gets a lot of stick from people, at least in my mind. But in the short time I’ve been using KDE for real, I’ve been very impressed by what Konqueror can do, and I’m probably not even be scratching the surface.

There have been some disappointments using Konqueror on several websites, notably this one; WordPress, where the MCE editor is next to useless (no visual editor) and viewing the main page ends up with two vertical scrollbars.

Other sites won’t even let me do anything, such as Google Docs, which complains about an unsupported browser.

It’s strange, because I don’t think I’ve ever heard it said or shown, but I’ve always thought that Konqueror was not a standards compliant browser, this without ever having used it. I somehow dreamed up this prejudice believing it was a general opinion, and these experiences I’ve had with WordPress/Google seemed to ‘prove’ it.

It turns out that I am completely wrong. There’s a good website that has an interesting read on this compliance myth among other KDE ones. (I was guilty of several, such as the licenscing of Qt)

If you want to see Konqueror’s standards compliance, you can try the Acid2 test in your browser to confirm this. Just look how bad IE6 is!

On a positive note (and perhaps related to standards compliance) I haven’t had any issues using several banking sites with Konqueror; including ING Direct and Teachers Credit Union.

There is one feature, which I’m totally hooked on at the moment; split views. I simply can’t get enough of these. Here a just a couple of ways you could use the split views.

• Using Konqueror as a picture viewer.



• Viewing PDF files in the integrated viewer, and browsing the filesystem at the same time.



• Using Konqueror to manage a server via FTP, while monitoring the changes in a split view. You can also use the integrated terminal emulator to make changes to say configuration files, etc. Really useful!

You can get the integrated terminal by pressing the key. I did notice some strange behaviour when using the terminal. I found if I navigate using Konqueror (’Up’, ‘Back’, etc) the file I was working on in the terminal was being edited (deleting lines, etc). Something to look out for.

I’ve also read that Konqueror can browse using other secure protocols, such as SSH and SFTP. It can even let you view nicely formatted man and info pages.

I haven’t even begun to look at Konqueror’s ability to use virtual filesystems, integrate with Amarok nor the actions you can configure to happen for certain filetypes. Just go to Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> File Associations!

Have fun!

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The conditions had to be just right.

I tried out Kubuntu in my first days of using GNU/Linux, and absolutely hated it. I thought it was too much, too tacky with the cutsy looking icons, boucning cursor and every application began with a K. GNOME was a much s simpler step for me coming from Windows. This seemed to go against popular ‘opinion’ or at least as I percieved it; that KDE is more like Windows (aysiu has some nice dissections on this topic and many others).

Anyway, it’s almost 2 years since I first used Kubuntu; I’m ready for a second go.

I’ve been going great running Edgy at home, I skipped Feisty due to freezing issues, but now feel like I’m left behind in terms of leading edge developments. Simply stated I’m talking Compiz-Fusion. But I’ll get to that another day.

I’ve been very impressed with several KDE applications I’ve picked up along the way; KTorrent, Yakuake and KDiff3 come to mind.

I’ve also just finished an extensive project at work (for now), which required daily usage of .NET. Now I’m done with that I’m really keen to liberate this machine and turn my other box running Xubuntu into a local network server (for our project files, Bugzilla, Plone and other goodies).

So the conditions were just right to try out Gutsy Tribe 5.

The installation was simple and smooth as I’ve come to expect from installing Ubuntu . The issue had installing Feisty with Ubiquity and partitions didn’t re-appear, although it may have been because I was starting from a fresh partition.

My initial impression of Kubuntu this time, that it is very comprehensive. From applications to settings and the ability to customise, I could see there was many things I could play around with.

The first was installing the NVIDIA drivers so I could get Kubuntu across both of my monitors. The restricted drivers manager handles this easily, and setting up the second monitor in the NVIDIA settings dialog was simple.

The result….

And with a little time and effort (and GNU/Linux experience) I quickly changed those things that irked me most; opening files with a single-click, bouncing cursor and the original theme (it just makes me think of candy that is way tooo sweet!). I think this could be the start of something great.