This functionality did not come out of the box with Kubuntu 11.04, but a little investigation revealed that it was added when I tried out the latest release of Muon Suite (The awesome Package installer which should replace kpackagekit on the next version of Kubuntu) I must have installed a package called plasma-runner-installer and probably forgot all about it.

In any case it has gone a long way to enhance my workflow on kubuntu. I can now install any package I want right from Krunner without having to open a package manager or Terminal.

Installation

The package is in a 3rd repository and would need to be added.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:echidnaman/qapt-experimental

Once added refresh your software source

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install plasma-runner-installer

I don’t remember doing this, but incase it does not work for you a little post install set-up might be needed. Go to the settings section of krunning and enabling “Installer” Plugin should do the trick.

Now everything is all set up. Simply use the keyboard short cut  “alt + f2″ to start krunner and type the name of the app you require

Hope someone finds this useful

Situation under Natty Narwhal

Things did improve under Natty, at least out of the box I got basic multitouch functionalities like finger scroll, two/three finger tab to right click and middle click respectively. However right and middle click is still missing.

Luckily..

There is a work around which fixes most of remaining issues I have with clickpad on Kubuntu 11.04. This work around provides even better Multitouch, right and Middle Click support.

Basic gist of the WorkAround

So words on the street is that Opensuse has very good clickpad support (probably not unrelated to the fact that some variants of the HP Probook ship with Suse Enterprise Linux) so there is a patch which when applied to the synaptic source package fixes the issue. Hence the fix for this involves some command-line. I will try to make it as easy as possible though usual caveat applies: This fix works for me on the HP Probook 4420s, I do not guarantee it would work for anyone else. In fact it might kill your cat.

Work Around.

Open your favourite Terminal (Konsole for kubuntu)
First create a directory (folder) where the package will be built. for the sake of consistency you can call the “build” and place it on your desktop. all that is done with this command

mkdir $HOME/Desktop/build

Next move into the directory just created and download the opensuse patch.

cd $HOME/Desktop/build && wget http://david.hardeman.nu/synaptics-suse-patches.tar.bz2

Then download the Ubuntu source package for synaptic

apt-get source xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

What the next series of command will do is to move into the directory of the Ubuntu synaptic package just downloaded and from then into a directory named “debian” and another named “patch”, extract the suse synaptic patch and apply it to the Ubuntu synaptic source package. (Honestly its not as confusing as I made it sound. Just follow the commands step by step and you should* be fine)

cd xserver-xorg-input-synaptics*
cd debian
cd patches
tar xfvj ../../../synaptics-suse-patches.tar.bz2
ls -1 2*.patch >> series
cd ../..

Next thing is to build the Ubuntu synaptic package from source, but before that the dependencies needed to get a successful build would first have to be installed

sudo apt-get build-dep xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

Then the actual building of a new synaptic package into a deb for easy installation

dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -rfakeroot

If everything goes fine, 2 .deb files would be created in the root of the “build” directory (created earlier)
Both can be installed with the follow

sudo dpkg -i ../xserver-xorg-input-synaptics_1*.deb
sudo dpkg -i ../xserver-xorg-input-synaptics-dev*

All that is left now is to log out and log in back (Better still restart) and the clickpad should have both multitouch and right click support

Kubuntu users can go to systemsettings –> Input Devices –> Touchpad to tweak the clickpad to suit their taste.

Known issues

• Double tapping the LED to disable touchpad still doesn’t work
• Click and Drag sadly still doesn’t work

The work for better clickpad support is still a work in progress on Linux generally. But you can follow the bug here.

Thanks to David Härdeman for providing the documentation for this patch.

Hope this helps someone

…after I installed Kubuntu 11.04 beta, everything was going smooth, wireless worked out of the box, (unlike 10.10 where I had to install some freedom hating broadcom driver) I had the awesome kde 4.6.2, seating on top what has been tagged the most significant Linux kernel release for desktop users in a long time kernel v2.6.38 (with the magic patch and all). Life was good.

Then it happened!

Trouble started when I wanted to send some files to my phone from laptop via the bluetooth. (You see I happen to be among the unfortunate set of people who have the same button for enabling wireless and bluetooth.) I tried enabling the laptop’s bluetooth when the whole system came to a standstill. I did a forceful shut-down after which my install never saw the light of the day again. Everytime I tried booting the PC, it always got stuck at the boot process. The scary part was even the the Kubuntu 11.04 Livecd stopped Booting at all! Only Kubuntu 10.10 was able to boot (from Livecd).

Searching for Answers

The most frustrating part of my Nasty Natty experience (pun intended) was trying to determine the root cause. How to explain how an OS installs fine, then crashes and not only does it become unable to boot, even attempts to do a clean install also hits a dead then. Here were a list of my suspicions

Corrupt system Memory (I know from experience that the best way to test if a system has bad memory is to load in a Live cd, this was ruled out by the fact that I was able to load on Kubuntu 10.10 on Live cd without issues)

Then I thought maybe a bad system Bios (I really wanted to pursue this option and upgrade the system BIOS via windows. Thankfully windows won’t install, complained about some partition issues)

I also considered a badly burnt media (but checked its integrity and it was said to be ok)

Kde 4.6 bug? (Xubuntu 11.04 had the same problem) kernel bug? hmmm

Light Bulb Moment…

Came while talking to a friend about the problem on irc and he suggested it was most like kernel problem probably some bad module. This got me thinking, I remembered the last thing I was doing (or wanted to do) when all this started was enabling bluetooth (shares the same button as the wireless)

I then decided to go into the system BIOS and disable the wireless / bluetooth radio. Fired the LiveCD of Xubuntu 11.04 and Voilà Xubuntu booted successfully, no hangs or freeze. But also no wireless.

Work Around

After I was able to get Xubuntu to successfully boot. I proceeded to install it. (for testing purpose I enabled the wireless radio from Bios and had the issue the freshly install Xubuntu 11.04 freeze at login screen (again) disabled it and everything worked fine (But no wireless)

Here is what I now did to fix the issue on my laptop. I did not have this issue on 10.10 mostly because that version of Kubuntu did not ship with the opensource broadcom drivers. I had to use the binary only driver from broadcom, hence the idea was to revert back to that setup.

first I installed the broadcom-sta-common (It provide a binary only closed source driver for broadcom)

sudo apt-get install broadcom-sta-common


Once installed, I edited the following file /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf

NB its always a good thing to backup before making any change to config file.
backup with this command

cp /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf-orig

In case things gets jammed up and you want to revert, you can easily do so with

cp /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf-orig /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf

kdesudo kate /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf


NB gnome user should use gtksudo gedit in place of kdesudo kate (and if you are like me, you can use ever reliable vim )

Anyway I blacklisted the brcm80211 open source broadcom driver by adding this line to, /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf blacklist brcm80211 Before the last line. When done, everything looked like this

# wl module from Broadcom conflicts with ssb
# We must blacklist the following modules:
blacklist b44
blacklist b43legacy
blacklist b43
blacklist ssb
blacklist brcm80211
install wl /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install wl $CMDLINE_OPTS

I saved the file and then edited this file /etc/modules (again backup before editing)

cp /etc/modules /etc/modules-orig

By adding the module for the closed source (freedom hating but stable) broadcom driver so it is loaded at every system boot

I added lw to the end of /etc/modules so the file looks like this

# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored.

lp
lw

Saved the file, exited, and rebooted this time with the wireless on to test if the issue as been fixed. The laptop rebooted fine, no issue, but still no wireless. Then I started the Kubuntu additional driver tool or kdesudo jockey-kde (from commandline on Kubuntu) or gtksudo jockey (from commandline on Ubuntu) which searched and informed me I needed to activate some proprietary drivers to make the wireless card work properly. I enabled them, It did its magic and voilà the wireless card came on. I was able to enable and disable it without the system kernel panicing.

I rebooted my laptop and there was no problem at all, everything worked just like it did on 10.10.
I explained the same step to some dude on irc having similar problem and my solution worked for him so I decided to share in case anyone is having such problems.

I hope someone finds this useful.

Pastebin Plasma Widget from Bobby Adesuyan on Vimeo.

The Pastebin plasmoid is part of the standard set of plasmoid shipped with Kde 4.5

if you are on U|K|Xubuntu 11.04 there is a better workaround were both right / middle click and multitouch works and works way better than this. Although I don’t know if same would work on Ubuntu 10.10.

One thing admire about Macbooks is their Multitouch enabled Touchpads which allows for advanced gestures like pinch to zoom, double tapping to right click, Two finger scroll etc.  I recently bought a new laptop which did not ship with the traditional laptop touchpad but with something called a clickpad.

The Good News

Clickpads are the latest innovations from Synaptic (Not the package Manager Gui ) It replaces the traditional touchpad which is convention with most laptops.  It is  (From what I read)  suppose to bring better gesture support and (Mac like) multitouch. Unlike tranditional Touchpads which has 3 physical button, built with single touch in mind. The clickpad is just one Click Button which has been mapped into Zones (i.e there is the right and left click zone etc)

Naturally this should mean that all the awesome gesture support I have always admired about Macs is finally available for my laptop?

The Bad News

Well not Quite. Support the for clickpad on Ubuntu is still a bit flaky (to say the least). Not only are advanced features like enhanced gesture support and multitouch not available out of the box on Ubuntu. Other basic features like right clicking, horizontal scrolling, click and drag etc can be quite a hassle. On Ubuntu 10.04 some of the basic features have been fixed (although multitouch support is still lacking).

Same thing can not be said of Ubuntu 10.10 because there was a regression which make it impossible to right click using the touchpad. Already a bug has been filled concerning the issue and I wrote about a work around which works quite well.

Ray of Hope

It came yesterday when I stumbled on this bug report . Some (Awesome) dude created a package which brings basic Multitouch support for Clickpad on *buntu 10.10 . According to him

“the attached dkms package should provide multitouch support for a family of synaptics touchpads. Install and reboot. Please report both success and failure here. Thanks!”

source
And from feed backs there seems to be more success than failures.

Installation, configuration and Caveats

Installation

is very easy, Just download the deb package here and download click to install. Once installed, Reboot

Configuration

If everything goes well, Out of the box you should get basic multitouch goodness like two finger tapping to right click. To get more you have go a step further.

Kubuntu users

should head over to Systemsettings  > Input Devices > Touchpad Go to the “Scrolling” section and enable “Vertical Two Finger Scrolling” (There are other options there like “Horizontal Two Finger Scrolling” which I did not enable cause I am not really sure what it does, if you do please let me know how it goes :p) Then head over to the next Tab called “Tapping” what I did was to enable tabbing, then I went on to map Two fingers tapping to the Left click action menu and mapped three fingers tapping to the Middle key Again there are couple of options that can be set but I choose to limit myself by what I felt I needed.

Ubuntu users

Go to System > Preferences > Mouse > Touchpad and select “Two-finger scrolling”.

When all is set and done I logged out (rebooted? I can’t remember) and Voilà! I am able to use basic Multitouch support like two finger scrolling, three fingers to right click, three fingers to middle click. And my work flow? It increased by 50% percent (well more or less)

Caveat

While I hate to be a kill joy, I have to say that Ubuntu support for Clickpad even with this patch installed is not yet Nirvana. There are still some draw backs and advance gestures support like pinch to zoom are still not yet supported. Here is a list of what works and what doesn’t

What works

• Two Finger Scrolling
• Two fingers tapping to right click
• Three Fingers Tapping to Left click

NB There are lots of configuration (at least on Kubuntu) I only enabled the ones which made sense to me and which I was certain I needed hence this should not be seen as a conclusive list of which gestures are supported.

What doesn’t work

• Pinch to Zoom: Simply does not work period
• Traditional Right click: there is a regression with Ubuntu 10.10 which make it impossible to right click using the clickpad. I wrote about a work around this bug a while back Unfortunately the fix for the clickpad right click issue is not compatible with the patch that enabled multitouch. Hence the user has to pick which they are comfortable with. Either you still with the Traditional (single touch) Touchpad where right and left click are supported. Or you go with the Multitouch Clickpad where right | middle click is not supported (At least the traditional way)

I choose to stick with the latter .As many users most have noticed, the right click support in my work around is quite flaky, and pretty annoying sometimes. I have been using the Multitouch package now for 2 days and the difference is clear, while it might not be as smooth as the Mac experience (Yet), Its a generation better than the situation in my previous workaround. Just remember that this is a work in progress and Work is been done to bring an even better support to the next version of Ubuntu 11.04. It is important to subscribe to this bug report and follow its progress. With all the activities and work going into clickpad and multitouch on Linux both upstream and downstream, the only way is up

NB:

If you applied the patch (which enables right | middle click for clickpad) in my previous post. You need to remove it for the multitouch patch to work. You can remove the pmouse patch by doing the following

sudo dkms uninstall -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic
sudo dkms remove -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic --all

Reboot (not sure if that is necessary but its not bad to play it safe), and then install the Multitouch patch.

Hope someone finds this useful.

Recently though I have been given Clementine and amarok a fare share of play on my desktop (even though the later is still the star player (pun intended). However it seems all that might change. I was  reading a blog post about the monochomization of the notification area icon of clementine in the latest development build, so I decided to give it a go to see how that would fit in with kde 4.5 systemtray icon which are also monochrome. I did not notice any different in the systemtray icon ( which was still the same ole draining orange icon. sigh) But I got an unexpected surprise inform  some new features. Here are some of the new features and improvements I noticed while using the development branch of Clementine.

Lyrics Support ..  

…which by default uses lyric.wikia.com as backend (very configuration in fact from the  settings there are tons of lyrics backends to choose from)

Better Integration with lastfm (yay!)

Beside basic integrations like scrobbling, and loving tracks. It add cool features like displaying cool stats about the track you are listening to like how many times you have scrobbled that particular song to lastfm and how many times the song has been scrobbled as a whole, and how many others are listening to same track.   

The Artist info tab (Part of the redesigned sidebar) Displays Artist Pictures, Tags,  Similar artist and Biography which uses wikipedia as default (although lastfm, aol, myspace etc are also supported)

Though I am still discovering the latest Clementine which in turn is still under heavy development, I can not help but feel this is what Amarok 2x should have been design wise. I really feel Amarok could do without many of the clutter and buttons, even then its still one of the best Music players on Linux. I would not advise you give it a go if a stable music player is what you need because the current stable release is quite good. However if you (like me) don’t mind living on the edge then head over here on how you can get the latest development version

K|X|Ubuntu user can simply add the Clementine development PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:me-davidsansome/clementine-dev
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install clementine

From what I have seen so far, the next stable release of Clementine is making strong strides to becoming the Most Valuable Player on my Desktop. The Tight Integration with Lastfm and Kiss design wins it for me.

N.B

For those who have not heard about  Clementine, it  is a multiplatform music player, inspired by Amarok 1.4, focusing on a fast and easy-to-use interface for searching and playing your music. It has packages for Linux, Windows and Mac. (On its way to world domination)

Features

• Search and play your local music library.
• Listen to internet radio from Last.fm, SomaFM and Magnatune.
• Tabbed playlists, import and export M3U, XSPF, PLS and ASX.
• Visualisations from projectM.
• Transcode music into MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC or AAC.
• Edit tags on MP3 and OGG files, organise your music.
• Download missing album cover art from Last.fm.
• Cross-platform – works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Native desktop notifications on Linux (libnotify) and Mac OS X (Growl).
• Remote control using a Wii Remote, MPRIS or the command-line.
• Copy music to your iPod, iPhone, MTP or mass-storage USB player.
• Queue manager.

There is a Post on how to enable Multitouch support using a patch not supported with this work around, you might want to take a look first.

I got my self a new laptop recently. The old one was well getting old and starting to lose it, so when I got an offer I could not refuse, I sold it and didn’t look back. I settle for the HP Probook 4420s which turned out to be the best notebook in terms of performance, under the hood awesomeness, and build (Hopefully a review would come later. )

The first thing I did after unboxing my laptop was to install Kubuntu 10.04 which installed and ran smoothly with everything working out of the box. When the beta version of Kubuntu 10.10 was released, I decided to give it a go but noticed that I was unable to rightclick with the laptop’s clickpad.

Clickpad

Clickpads are the latest innovations from Synaptic (Not the package Manager Gui ) It replaces the traditional touchpad which is convention with most laptops.  It is  (From what I read)  suppose to bring better gesture support and multi touch. Unlike tranditional Touchpads which has 3 physical button, built with single touch in mind. The clickpad is just one Click Button which has been mapped into Zones (i.e there is the right and left click zone etc)

Ubuntu Support

Support the for clickpad on Ubuntu is still a bit flaky.  Not only are advanced features like enhanced gesture support and multitouch not available out of the box on Ubuntu. Other basic features like right clicking, horizontal scrolling, click and drag etc can be quite a hassle.  On Ubuntu 10.04 some of the basic features have been fixed (although multitouch support is still lacking).

Same thing can not be said of Ubuntu 10.10 because there was a regression which make it impossible to right click using the touchpad.  Already a bug has been filled concerning the issue which should hopefully be fixed during the Maverick release circle.

Walk  Around

The Good news is there is a walk around this issue for those who won’t mind getting their hands dirty with messing around with the command-line. The walk around involves using a psmouse patch submitted by Paul which fixes the issue. (At least for me)

For this walk around some packages would have to be installed namely the build-essential package and the dkms packages. Build-essentials helps install basic tools needed for compiling packages from source, while the dkms  ”is a framework designed to allow individual kernel modules to be upgraded without changing the whole kernel. It is also very easy to rebuild modules as you upgrade kernels. framework designed to allow individual kernel modules to be upgraded without changing the whole kernel. It is also very easy to rebuild modules as you upgrade kernels.” which in English means whatever module we patch  would not need to be repatched should the system’s kernel be upgraded. (At least that’s the idea)

sudo apt-get install dkms build-essential

The fix involves patching the psmouse module using the paul’s archive which is the mouse source directory for   linux 2.6.35-22-generic (The version of Linux Kernal which shipped with Ubuntu 10.10 as at blog time)

First download the archive file from here

save the downloaded file to your desktop

Open a terminal (Application/Accessories/Terminal –  Kubuntu users should go /System/Konsole)

Move to the Directory where the archive was saved (In this case the desktop) and extract the content of the archive

cd $HOME/Desktop && tar xvf  psmouse-2.6.35-22-generic-patched.tar.bz2.tar

The name of the package as changed since writing this post the new command which reflects the change is

cd $HOME/Desktop && tar jxvf psmouse-2.6.35-22-generic-patched.tar.bz2


Move the extracted folder to /usr/src which is under the root directory hence the command would have to be executed with sudo

sudo mv psmouse-2.6.35-22-generic /usr/src

Move into the /usr/src directory

cd /usr/src

Then install the psmouse module with the following commands running them one after the other

sudo dkms add -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

sudo dkms build -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

sudo dkms install -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

Once installed reboot for the module to be loaded.

If you are still having issues with right clicks. This command would help check if the psmodule is installed

sudo dkms status -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

The output should be something like this

psmouse, 2.6.35-22-generic, 2.6.35-22-generic, i686: installed

If it is not installed. It can always be rebuilt with the following command

sudo dkms build -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

sudo dkms install -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

In case you followed this guide and it did not work for you, or Ubuntu releases an official fix for the issue (in which case you would have to remove the changes made following this guide to prevent conflicts) or for some reason you would like to revert the changes made following this guide. simply do

sudo dkms uninstall -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

sudo dkms remove -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic --all

Following this guide does not lead to the nirvana of clickpad awesomeness (at least not for me). There are still some issues with Jumpy mouse which also affect windows 7. However it does make the clickpad much more useful under Ubuntu even then I would suggest that for serious work it won’t hurt to have a mouse handy

NB You can track the bug concerning this issue here

Thanks to Paul and Tob who really helped with the patch which fixes this issue.

I hope someone finds this useful.

Network Manager

Kubuntu uses the plasma-widget-networkmanagement which is just ok for basic network management tasks but when it  gets real complicated, you might want something much more robust and stable. The kde 4 frontend to network manager is still under heavy development and currently is not on per with the gnome network manager in area of features and stability. It is for this reason that I prefer the gnome frontend to network manager. More so since it require very minimal gnome dependencies to run.  (Its a matter of choice really)

Install Gnome Network manager

To prevent conflicts I removed the kde frontend for network manager before installing the gnome version.

sudo aptitude purge network-manager-kde -y ; sudo aptitude install network-manager-gnome

Once installation is complete add nm-applet to your autostart session. Systemsettings -> Advanced Tab -> Autostart Click Add program and paste nm-applet in the dialogbox that comes up Once you have done this the gnome network manager would become the default network manager for Kubuntu upon restart.

Passive Notification

I find the default kde notification quite annoying. It tends draws much attention to itself which always distracts from what I am doing and when you have multiple notifications it then stacks them on top of each other in a way which simply pisses me off!!!
I prefer the passive notification which uses transparent notification which allows click through and really does not get in my way. Although it comes at a cost of not being about to Interact with notification elements like upgrade or click to vew an IM. I think I can live with that.

My Walk Round: Colibri

What is Colibri Colibri provides an alternative to KDE4 Plasma notifications. What I like about Colibri

• Colibri notifications look lighter and are completely passive: they do not provide any buttons. You may or may not like this. Since they are completely passive
• They smoothly fade away when you mouse over them, allowing you to interact with any window behind them.
• They also do not stack each others: if multiple notifications happen, they will be shown one at a time.

Thankfully Colibri is now available in the Lucid repository

sudo aptitude install colibri

Once installed the following setup still need be done because colibri  would not start to work immediately.

1. Right Click on  systemtray and select “systemtray settings” uncheck “Application notification”
2. Add colibri to  startup session (Following the same process as with nm-applet)
3. Go to system settings —> Desktop (Under the Generation Tab) —> “Colibri Notifications”   select which area of your screen you want Notifications to be Displayed apply.
4. Thats all

NB: You may need to logout and login again for Colibri to take effect. If all goes well your Notification should look like this.                                    

Codecs and Multimedia

(k)ubuntu does not come pre-installed with multimedia codecs for popular formats like mp3, AVI, Dvix , Adobe Flash etc due to license restrictions Although it is very easy to install the codecs when you attempt to play an mp3 file for example, you get a popup prompting to install necessary codecs need to play the file. Even then I rather just have all what I need in one go.  Some of the codecs needed for playing popular multimedia codecs are so restricted that there are not included in the Ubuntu Repositories and one would need to add a 3rd party repository. Medibuntu repository  comes with many tools, codecs and applications which can not be shipped in the Ubuntu repository due to license restrictions.  It can be added to your software source with the following command.

echo 'deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ lucid free non-free' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list ; wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

Once added I usually just install just about every Multimedia Codec I would ever need on Kubuntu with the following command.

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg libxine1-ffmpeg ffmpeg kubuntu-restricted-extras libdvdread4 ; sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

Multimedia Apps

I would like to go through some of the multimedia apps I always resort to in my day to day use of kubuntu. For the most part I prefer to stick with Kde/Qt apps due to their integration with the rest of kde. But I always use the best tool for the Job Qt or Gtk doesn’t matter (As long as it is not too tired to gnome or need half of gnome desktop to install)

Audio Encoder

Soundcoverter Like the name suggests soundconverter is a small GTK app which reads anything the GStreamer library can read (Ogg Vorbis, AAC, MP3, FLAC, WAV, AVI, MPEG, MOV, M4A, AC3, DTS, ALAC, MPC, Shorten, APE, SID, MOD, XM, S3M, etc…), and writes WAV, FLAC, MP3, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis files. Its extremely easy to use and IMHO the best Audio Converting app on free desktop.

sudo aptitude install soundconverter

Video Encoder

Winff Winff is a GUI frontend to FFMPEG, it converts any video file supported by FFMPEG and can all do multiple file convert i.e You can for example convert mpeg’s, flv’s, and mov’s, all into avi’s all at once. Just like Soundcoverter winff is very easy to use and also support 3rd party presets for Nokia and Android devices. The only flaw I found with winff progress indicator instead you get a commandline window which displays working of an encoding process in the most geeky way lol

sudo aptitude install winff

DVD Rip

Handbreak is a great app (some will say the best for the job) Personally though I prefer k9copy.  K9copy is a program that allows you to copy DVDs in Linux. It is similar to DVDShrink, and has the following features:

Features

• The video stream is compressed to make the video fiton a 4.7GB recordable DVD  
• DVD Burning
• Creation of ISO images
• Choosing which audio and subtitle tracks are copied.
• Title preview (video only)
• The ability to preserve the original menus.

sudo aptitude install k9copy

Video editor

Video editing is not one of the strongest areas of Linux. However that trend is changing as more applications like openshot and Pitivi get matured and add needed functionality and features. However the best and most feature packed Video editor on Linux today is Kdenlive. The list of its features are so numerous that its better to just check them out yourself

sudo aptitude install kdenlive

Audio Editing

Audacity is a cross platform open source software for recording and editing sounds. While Audacity would not be winning any award in UI design any time soon. It is indeed one of the most powerful open source sound editor out there.  

sudo aptitude install audacity

Internet and Social Networking

Browser

Konqueror the default browser which ships with kde sucks, I wish there was a mild way to put that but really it does. And please don’t get started on Firefox its integration with KDE is just appalling. ReKonq is a decent browser but it crashes a lot and can be unstable. My browser of choice on kde is Chromium. Its faster, lighter and although a gtk app has better integration with kde compared to Firefox.  

sudo aptitude install chromium-browser

Microblogging

I am a heavy microblogger and you would find me on both identica and twitter. When it comes to microblogging on kde it starts and end with Choqok. Really there is nothing more to add here.

sudo aptitude install choqok

Blogging

I am a fan of blogging client which allows me to blog even when am offline and publish my post when connected. Blogilo allows me to do this and much more. You might want to check out a review of the app I did I while back

sudo aptitude install blogilo

IRC Client

Kubuntu ships by default Quassel IRC client. Which is a pretty decent IRC client, but I was never able to find my way round it.  For IRC I use Konversation which I find much easier to use and less cluttered compared to Quassel. Konversation has the following features    

• Standard IRC features
• SSL server support
• Bookmarking support
• Easy to use graphical user interface
• Multiple servers and channels in one single window
• DCC file transfer
• Multiple identities for different servers
• Text decorations and colors
• OnScreen Display for notifications
• Automatic UTF-8 detection
• Per channel encoding support
• Theme support for nick icons
• Highly configurable

sudo aptitude install konversation

Packge Management

Kubuntu ships with Kpackagekit as package manager. Which is pretty decent but feels very incomplete and can be quite unstable compared to Synaptic. So I just go ahead and install synaptic

sudo aptitude --without-recommends install synaptic

Note: The “–without-recommends” ensure that only the basic needed dependencies are installed with synaptic. I use this options anytime I am installing a gtk app. It helps to slim down the bloat so I get just what I need.

Other Apps I use on Kubuntu

Video Player = Vlc
Note Taking = Zim
Email = Thunderbird

The above applications are very popular and can be easily installed from the package manager.

My Kubuntu Tweaks and Customizations

Here is where I share some of the little tweaks and customization I did to the Out of the Box Kubuntu to make it further meet my everyday use case.

How to make gtk apps running as root not look like A**

One major grip I have with the gtk toolkit is how gtk apps always look like some win95 era app when used outside of a non gtk enviroment. Thankfully the Kubuntu theme have done a good job Integrating it with Qtcurve which helps give gtk apps a kdish look and feel. Unfortunately gtk apps which are run as root aren’t covered and still always look like s**t. Hence if you run synaptic on KDE what you get is a tool that is so ugly it hurts.

My Walk around this was to install the gtk-chtheme package

sudo aptitude install gtk-chtheme

Once installed alt + F2 and run the following from krunner.

kdesudo gtk-chtheme

The way I got it to work was to first select the “Releigh” Then select “QtCurve” you can also choose a fonts. Once done remember to click “ok”

When you start synaptic again it should look much better.

Setting up Window Share

For some reason  the process for setting up a samba network share on Kubuntu is not as straight forward as it is on Ubuntu. Ideally If I want share a folder I should right click on it go to properties –> share tab and click configure sharing. Then the system asks me for my password and tells me it needs to install some packages before it can proceed, I say yes it installs the packages and my Samba share is done. Well the situation is quite different on Kubuntu. When I get to the part where I am suppose to share my folder, it asks me for my password and then nothing happens no error message, no sharing no feedback on what failed, everthing just seems normal except the fact  folder is also not shared.
I did some digging and found that I had to install the following packages

sudo aptitude install samba kdenetwork-filesharing

Once Installed, sharing any Folder via samba becomes a matter of point and click ™.

Repeated Button actions

There is a minor annoyance with the repeated button actions. e.g things using the volume key on your laptop for volume control or the multimedia keys to control amarok always skip two step forward or backwords.
Fortunately the fix to this problem is very easy. Start kde Systemsettings and go to keyboad and mouse under the general tab. You would see the “enable keyboard repeat” already checked. Uncheck it and click apply. Then check it again and click apply. Doing this Surprisingly that solved the problem for me.

Font Setup

Refer to this post I wrote a while back.

Finally

IMHO Kubuntu is the best Kde Distro I have tried. It very close to the kde upstream and provide a solid Ubuntu base for stability. It really not easy getting a compilation of everything I did to customize my Kubuntu to suit my everyday needs, probably left out somethings. If you have some tips or recommendation of your own please share.  I hope someone out there find this useful

Recently I decided to fix things up  between me and kopete so rather than run to its gtk cousin (looking at pidgin) I sort to see if  I could resolve the problem. (after all its free and open source software we are talking about so there has got to be a way around the issue right?)

After a bit of googling I found that I am not alone (which is a good sign cause misery loves company)

From my readings it seem to be a problem with the libkyahoo library which is shipped with kde 4.4.  Some are suggesting that cause is the new stealth feature introduced in kde 4.4  and occurs only when there are many contacts in contacts list.

Fix

Update

Thankfully the issue as been fixed with the recent kde 4.4.3 updates.  Just add the kubuntu ppa to your sources.list and do a full upgrade

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/ppa ; sudo aptitude update ; sudo aptitude full-upgrade

There are 3 ways to fix this issue. The first is the hardest one.  It involves  downloading kopete source code, applying this patch https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=226699#c50 and compiling

The second way is to be patient and wait for the issue to be fixed by Kopete upstream and the fixed applied to kubuntu through the update channels

The third way is to do what I did which is

Step one : Download the version of kopete which is  shipped with kde 4.3.5 from here

Step two : Paste the downloaded deb file into your Desktop (seriously this step is not that important, its mainly for those who just want to copy and paste my command. You can skip it if you know what you are doing)

Step Three: Extract the content of the deb file to your working directory using the following command.

cd ~/Desktop ; dpkg -x kopete_4.3.5-0ubuntu1~karmic1_i386.deb .

NB: What the above command does is to extract the content of kopete_4.3.5-0ubuntu1~karmic1_i386.deb to your Desktop . If you take a look at the desktop directory you would find a directory named usr/  what were are going to do next is extract libkyhoo library from the usr/ directory on your desktop which works fine and use it to replace the one which came with kopete for kde 4.4 (ok enough talk)

Step four:  Remove the libkyahoo library which comes with kde 4.4 and also remove file symlinked to it

sudo rm /usr/lib/libkyahoo.so.1*

Step five: Then copy the libkyahoo from the usr directory on our desktop to /usr/lib/ and create a symbolink

sudo cp usr/lib/libkyahoo.so.1.0.0 /usr/lib/ ; sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libkyahoo.so.1.0.0 /usr/lib/libkyahoo.so.1

Step six: To be sure that all went well when  run the this command

ls -l /usr/lib/ | grep libkyahoo

The output must be like this

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 2010-04-27 10:25 libkyahoo.so.1 -> /usr/lib/libkyahoo.so.1.0.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 505132 2010-04-27 10:25 libkyahoo.so.1.0.0

Now the final test.

Start Kopete and check if you are able to send chats to your yahoo contacts. It worked for me on Kubuntu Lucid RC. I hope it’ll work for you too. I also hope this issue is fixed in kubuntu final release.

So there is how I patched up (no puns intended) my relationship with kopete. (I wish my real life relationship were that easy to patch but that is quite another story)

Hope this helps somebody

Artha is a free cross-platform English thesaurus that works completely off-line and is based on WordNet. It is released under the GNU General Public Licence version

Source

Features

Although a gtk app  it has very little gnome dependencies (So KDE fans dont have to worry -much. Yeah yeah I know its would have been better if written in Qt but then “what can we do”  :(  ) However Artha has tons of features to make anyone (Gnome, Kde, whatever floats your boat) Drool.

• Offline : Unlike most dictionaries which can only be used if you are online. Artha works completely offline. So if you like me are not completely bought up by all this cloud computing craze and live in Africa where Internet sucks. Then Artha is a no brainer for you.  (Even if you are lucky and have highspeed internet Artha is also a no brainer )
• Regular Expressions Search : OK lets say there is a word you  vaguely know or you are unclear as to its meaning or spelling. (Happens to me a lot ) you can speed up/narrow the search using regular expression to locate the particular word they have in mind.
• Suggestions : Say you mispelled a word Artha can give you near matching suggestions (I also love this)
• Relative to Sense Mapping : Artha doesn’t just give you the meaning of words. It so includes words like Synonyms, antonyms. When you Select a relative its corresponding definition is scrolled and highlighted for easy comprehension.

The Awesomest  Feature that rules them all : Yeah I saved best for the last.  For me the feature of Artha which kills every other Dictionary software out there is its support for Notifications.  Here is how it works – Lets say I was going through my RSS reader and I found a word am not familiar with I just need to highlight the word, press the keyboard combination Ctrl+Alt+W (Which can be changed to any key combo that suits you) The meaning of the word gets displayed as a Notification Bubble .

Hence I can easily check the meaning of the word without having to launch the application window.

The notification feature of Artha is supported system wide and works with just about every application which support text highlighting.

Installation

Ubuntu / Debian : Although Artha is available in the Ubuntu / Debian Repository The version there is quite dated. However the latest version has been compiled to .deb and can be downloaded from   here

Fedora (Leonidas/11 or above) :  Artha can be installed with

yum install artha

Note* The version in the Fedora Reposittory is 0.9.1

Other Linuxes : If a binary package is not available for your distribution, you can easy download the source code from here and follow this installation instructions on how to compile from source.

Configuration: After installation, the rest is easy. When you start Artha Its minimizes in the Notification area of your desktop.  From the application window you can easily set you keyboard short cut by clicking on the settings. The default keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+Alt-W.  By default the Notification feature is disabled but can be easily enabled by right clicking on the notification area icon. The rest is easy.


I found Artha to be very useful and goes a long way to enhance my workflow and user experience.  I hope someone find this useful.