I just finished installing Kubuntu 9.10 and it’s absolutely amazing.I didn’t have any of the issues that occurred when I installed Jaunty, my sound worked great right out of the box!

Aside from not having any sound issues, the new notifier is great, even my gtk apps have kde style pop-ups. I even found a new extension for Thunderbird witch uses libnotify. In jaunty, firefox and other gtk apps looked like gtk apps, however even firefox looks very beautiful in kubuntu karmic. I’m assuming the that means gtk-qtcurve has been updated in some manner. Speaking of firefox; kubuntu karmic now has a nice installer for it, that really made things easier. kopete now surpports facebook which in my opinion is a plus. Karmic is faster, I suppose that’s because I’m now using the ext4 file system instead of ext3. Overall I would say Kubuntu karmic just feels nicer. It’s not clunky or resource consuming. The over feeling you get is one of comfort. The only downside I found was for an application and can’t be laid at kubuntu’s feet. The new version of amarok has removed the shoutcast plugin due to some licensing problems.

Well I couldn’t wait anymore with the release of Of Kubuntu 9.10 RC I decided to try an upgrade. Currently the upgrade is running (downloading packages). Before I attempted the upgrade I backed everything and burned a copy of the RC to disk. So worse case scenario I have to re-install so we’ll see I guess how it goes.

Well I spent last night adding another bill to our long list of medical bills we can’t pay by paying a visit to the emergency room. Lately My legs have been itching a lot due to dry skin, well it turns out that I have what they call Cellulitis It’s a bacterial skin infection. Cellutitis is pretty common and they gave me some antibiotics to treat it. But I really had to wonder about the doctor. Actually he was a Physicians assistant whatever that means, he wanted to keep me overnight for my heart arrhythmia that my cardiologist told me I would probably have for the rest of my life. Well I already hate hospitals, and I have no medical insurance to speak of since Mark got laid off . The state told us we make to much money for me to get medical assistance of any kind. So I told that doctor that I was leaving, and not staying. So they gave me the antibiotics and I left AMA (against medical advice). So here I am. My legs look better already, aside from the itching, I’m applying cortaid, but it still itches, and I’m doing my best to ignore it.

So we decided to get rid of cable as a way to save money on bills, and so far, I have no complaints. In fact I would say I watch more television programming now, than I did before. Here

I found a decent story on the history of copyright over at arstechnica, it’s quite an interesting read. Seems big money has always been afraid of new tech..

I decided to switch to wordpress from joomla, as it seems more productive and not as clunky for a blog. Joomla has it’s merits, but for a blog I don’t think it’s the best way to go.

Communicate with your children, I don’t mean wait until they are twelve or thirteen years old to start having conversations with them. Communication starts early & children will appreciate this. My oldest is going on sixteen and I have always been open with him on various subjects.

When he was six or seven years old he asked me how babies we’re made. I told him the basic facts of sex. Nothing extreme and I didn’t mention that some people have sex simply for pleasure. I told him the cold hard biological facts. This was fine, it quashed his curiosity for a few more years and answered his question. It also let him know that He could talk to me about anything.

Fast forward a few years to when he’s fourteen years old. At fourteen my son was(and still is) very much into girls. But I knew their we’re things about sex he didn’t understand. I remember all too well what it was like at fourteen, all your friends are talking about it, and some of them are even doing it. I as parent who wants her child to be aware, decided it was time to have a talk again.

I sat down with him and we discussed things such as the consequences of having a sexual relationship, the good the bad and the ugly. Everything was laid out on the table from sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy to oral sex and masturbation.

Some parent’s might ask

After having installed KDE 4.3 on my Ubuntu installation and really enjoying using it, I decided I wanted the full Ubuntu/KDE experience. So I decided to wipe my Ubuntu installation and install Kubuntu 9.04. It turns out the switch wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. There we’re definitely a few stumbling blocks along the way.

First I couldn’t get tomboy notes to work. I’m aware that KDE offers Basket Notepad but I really prefer Tomboy. I love the wiki style and simplicity of it. I could install it fine but attempting to launch gave me errors. I never did quite figure out what the issues was but I knew it was very important for me to get it working as all my installation notes we’re in tomboy which I sync to dropbox so I can have them available to me anywhere (this is really handy as tomboy also has a windows version so I can run them back and forth). Well after much googleing I discovered it’s some kind of issue that won’t let tomboy run with out gnome. Well I thought, at the very least I can install ubuntu in virtualbox and access my notes this way. So that’s what I proceeded to do. Well I decided to have a look at the article on how to forge entitled The Perfect Desktop – Kubuntu 9.04 This article is very thorough and allowed me to get everything I needed on kubuntu without the primary use of my notes.

After following the guide and picking the software I wanted (I didn’t install all the software mentioned as I use alternatives to some of them) I then went to google to search for a way to test my browser plugins. This is when I noticed I had no sound in my browser. Flash, totem and mplayer remained silent. So off to google again. Many hours and much googleing later I discovered the reason for my sound issues was that Kubuntu does not install pulseaudio by default. So I needed to install it. So I followed the instructions found in this post. But for some reason I still had no sound. This drove me completely insane, at this point I was highly frustrated. Well somewhere in the mirad of google pages I came across a post and the reply to that post was that this person had discovered that their PCM volume was turned down and when they turned it up they had sound. So I checked my PCM volume using the mixer option available when clicking on the volume in the system tray and sure enough it was turned all the way down. Now I had sound in my browser. Flash, Mplayer totem they all worked!

Supposedly they are working on these sound issues and most of them should be fixed with the release of Karmic Koala in October. I really hope so as this is a bit complicated for anyone to fix.

I updated my KDE to 4.3 which is far supieror to the KDE that ships with Kubuntu Jaunty. The widgets are great and I love using them, also I noticed that the networking widget, which refused to work under kde installed on top of ubuntu, now worked perfectly under Kubuntu. Also I no longer have annoying sounds when using gtk applications under kde this was the most annoying thing about using kde ontop of ubuntu.

I almost forgot to mention that after following the Perfect Desktop article, my tomboy notes began working. So I have it installed now and running as well. From the error I was receiving when attempting to launch it through the terminal, I know it was some kind of Mono error, though I can’t be sure what as I don’t know anything about programming.

After having installed KDE 4.3 on my ubuntu installation and really enjoying using it, I decided I wanted the full Ubuntu/KDE experience. So I decided to wipe my Ubuntu installation and install Kubuntu 9.04. It turns out the switch wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. There we’re definitely a few stumbling blocks along the way.

First I couldn’t get tomboy notes to work. I’m aware that KDE offers Basket Notepad but I really prefer Tomboy. I love the wiki style and simplicity of it. I could install it fine but attempting to launch gave me errors. I never did quite figure out what the issues was but I knew it was very important for me to get it working as all my installation notes we’re in tomboy which I sync to dropbox so I can have available to me anywhere (this is really handy as tomboy also has a windows version so I can run them back and forth). Well after much goggling I discovered it’s some kind of issue that won’t let tomboy run with out gnome. Well I thought, at the very least I can install ubuntu in virtualbox and access my notes this way. So that’s what I proceeded to do. Well I decided to have a look at the article on how to forge entitled The Perfect Desktop – Kubuntu 9.04 This article is very thorough and allowed me to get everything I needed on kubuntu without the primary use of my notes.

After following the guide and picking the software I wanted (I didn’t install all the software mentioned as I use alternatives to some of them) I then went to google to search for a way to test my browser plugins. This is when I noticed I had no sound in my browser. Flash, totem and mplayer remained silent. So off to google again. Many hours and much goggling later I discovered the reason for my sound issues was that Kubuntu does not install pulseaudio by default. So I needed to install it. So I followed the instructions found in this post. But for some reason I still had no sound. This drove me completely insane, at this point I was highly frustrated. Well somewhere in the mirad of google pages I came across a post and the reply to that post was that this person had discovered that their PCM volume was turned down and when they turned it up they had sound. So I checked my PCM volume using the mixer option available when clicking on the volume in the system tray and sure enough it was turned all the way down. Now I had sound in my browser. Flash, Mplayer totem they all worked!

Supposedly they are working on these sound issues and most of them should be fixed with the release of Karmic Koala in October. I really hope so as this is a bit complicated for anyone to fix.

I updated my KDE to 4.3 which is far superior to the KDE that ships with Kubuntu Jaunty. The widgets are great and I love using them, also I noticed that the networking widget, which refused to work under kde installed on top of ubuntu, now worked perfectly under Kubuntu. Also I no longer have annoying sounds when using gtk applications under kde this was the most annoying thing about using kde ontop of ubuntu.

I almost forgot to mention that after following the Perfect Desktop article, my tomboy notes began working. So I have installed now and running as well. From the error I was recieveing when attempting to launch it through the terminal, I know it was some kind of Mono error, though I can’t be sure what as I don’t know anything about programming.

I’m running Neverwinter Nights 2 with wine on my new rig

• Systemax PC
• CPU: AMD Athlon 64×2 4400
• RAM: 3 GB DDR2 800 (PC2-6400)
• Display: Nvidia Geforce 7600 GS

I installed using the 7 Disk PC/CD version in order to get it working I had to use winetricks I installed the following with winetricks:

• DirectX9 (not d3dx9 but the actual DirectX9)
• dotnet20
• vcrun2005
• vcrun2005sp1

in order to update to the latest version I ran

/home/angel/.wine/drive_c/windows/regedit.exe

and changed the value of

HKey_Local_Machine>Software>Obsidian>NWN2>Neverwinter>NWUpdate

from 0 to 1

The only issue I had was that the game only recognized a resolution of 1024×768 so I had to edit

/home/angel/Neverwinter Nights 2/nwn2.ini

manually and put in my 1600×900 resolution. All this info I found at The Wine Appdb.

I hope this information helps other people.