Well yesterday, my son’s old CRT monitor finally decided to quit working. We don’t have the cash at the moment to run out and get a new monitor, so my husband was kind enough to give him his monitor. It was decided that my hubby could use the laptop for what he does. So I formatted it, then installed & Setup Kubuntu for him. He’s pretty happy with it. That left us with one computer that had no monitor, so I decided to bring it into the living room and make good use of it.

This computer is a Gateway GM5478, it originally came with windows vista and has always had a few bugs that made it not work well with Linux, also dual screen doesn’t scale in linux. The one other issue that kept me from making it a mythbox is that the t.v. tuner(an AVerMedia M791) that came with the system is not supported by linux. So knowing all that I decided to put Vista back on it for our purposes.

I finally figured out how to make apt:// urls work in firefox kubuntu. apt:// urls allow you to install software at the click of link in your browser. The fix was actually rather simple, just run the following command in your terminal.
sudo apt-get install apturl firefox-3.5-gnome-support
After running the command head over to allmyapps and test it by trying to install one of the programs they have listed.

So I installed Kubuntu 9.10 RC and it is definitely beautiful. The font’s look quite nice, and everything just feels smooth. I didn’t have any of the sound issues which occurred with jaunty so all my sound was working out of the box! As far as differences go, here are a few improvments:

1. In 9.04 firefox and other GTK applications, just looked like GTK applications, however in 9.10 even firefox looks beautiful, I’m assuming that means that gtk-qtcurve has been updated in some manner.
2. Speaking of firefox, Kubuntu Karmic now sports a new Firefox installer and it did make things a whole lot easier.
3. Kopete now supports facebook which in my opinion is a plus
4. Karmic feels faster and I suppose that’s because I’m now using the ext4 file system which is the default setting.

Overall I would have to say that Kubuntu Karmic just feels nicer, It’s not clunky or resource consuming and my overall feeling of it is one of comfort.

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.

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

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.

It’s been crazy few weeks, my hubby is still looking for a job of course nothing yet. It sucks having to cut expenses but we’re doing th best we can. The one that I can still enjoy is Playing with My Ubuntu. So that’s what I’ve been doing.

I installed KDE 4.3, and I must say kde is really shaping up though I still think kde is much better when installed along side gnome in ubuntu. I hear there are much better kde distro’s than kubuntu but I’m not in the mood to go looking right now. I do have my Desktop looking rather sharp right now and I’m quite satisfied with it. The one thing I had trouble with is that I can’t install Quanta for some reason. Some of dependencies seem to have gone haywire in the kde upgrade.

Who knows… Anyway here’s my desktop.

I have several websites that I reference regularly while playing Guild War. Firefox is a great browser and I love it to death, but being on Linux, and loving to customize stuff I decided to install Epiphany and now I have it set up as my Guild wars browser. It works great as it’s light weight and doesn’t add much extra pull to the system while running my game. I made the home page the Official Guild Wars Wiki, as I use it constantly. and the only bookmarks (Outside of google) are several other Guild Wars websites which I placed as bookmarks on my toolbar. I just love customization!

Well My monitor started going south, It started getting these lines on it at the top of the screen. I figured out it was the monitor and not my video card when I took a screenshot and they didn’t appear in it. It was an old CRT a 17 inch gateway evo700. Well yesterday the hubby says he’s going to walmart to buy the new underworld movie, but instead comes back with a brand new 20 inch acer LCD widescreen! This is my first experience with an LCD screen up until now all my monitors had been CRT, because well they seemed to last a good long while and so we would buy computers but no monitors, because we already had them. I’m totally blown away by the difference between the CRT and the LCD it’s amazing! It’s kinda strange getting used to a widescreen, but I’m loving it!