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.

1: The default fonts The default font setup on Kubuntu Karmic is ok. But I wanted some better than ok,   so I install the liberation fonts which has always served me well in the past (especially when I was a gnomie ) It comes as part of the  Kubuntu-restricted-extra package.

You can install as a standalone package by clicking 

It  can always install the package from terminal

Once installed you can change the system fonts by going to System-Settings/Appearance/Fonts and click Adjust all fonts then select Liberation Sans from the list. (I got the best appearance by using size eight)

2: The fonts for gtk application are just way too fugly that it hurts the eyes. Plus they look very out of place from the rest of the KDE UI.  Thankfully I was able to fix this issue by replacing the .fonts.conf in my home directory with  this  one  file rename the .raw.txt file to .fonts.conf and place it you your home directory (remember that a file with a . (dot) in front is hidden in Linux. You can always view all hidden file in KDE with Alt and .(dot) keyboard combination) Once you have done this you can log out and login back for the changes to take effect.  After applying this fix around you would notice a clear difference in the way gtk app fonts are displayed. The Fix makes fonts for gkt application to be very smooth and consistent with the rest of the KDE UI

Before the fix

After the Fix

I will let you be the judge of that.

Hope someone finds this useful.

NB

I have edited the post and used codepad instead of mediafire as the download source, since it more appropriate for this type of thing. Big thanks to Mark who made this suggestion to me

How it all started

Ever since i started a blog i had always wanted a wanted a application which would allow me do my blogging (preferably offline ) without having to use the web browser. One of the reasons for this was because i (as at then) did not have a stable Internet connection and had to go to Internet cafe to do my blogging which wasn’t really convenient. I wanted a way to do my blogging offline and then upload later. Even when i had a stable Internet connection i still prefer to having to use a browser for blogging. Unfortunately for me most of the blogging applications ( Drivel BloGTK KBlogger gnome-blog) i tried on Linux just didn’t cut it, some didn’t work with wordpress and the once that did weren’t powerful enough or were buggy or just too basic.

I gave up and resigned my self to the web for blogging. This was until recently when (I Cant quite remember how it happened) i found about about Bilbo Blogger and Beng. I saw the tool i just needed

Bilbo Blogger

Bilbo Blogger is a free/Open Source Blogging client, focused on simplicity and usability. Its is based on Qt4 (KDE) but should work well on gnome (i haven’t tried it but it should.. just remember i said should)

Here are some Summary of some of its Features

Currently featured:

• A full featured WYSIWYG editor + An HTML editor

• Previewing your post with your blog style! like when you are visiting it at your blog.

• Support for Blogger1.0, MetaWeblog, MovableType (WordPress supports All of these!) and Google GData (used on Blogspot.com blogs) APIs!

• Support for Creating/Modifying/Deleting posts.

• Support for creating drafts and scheduled posts!

• Support for uploading media files to your blog (Just on supported APIs e.g. MetaWeblog and MovableType)

• Support for Fetching your recent blog entries.

• Support for adding Images to post from your system. It will upload them on

• Submitting post to blog (Just on supported APIs e.g. MetaWeblog and MovableType)

• Support for saving local entries before publishing.Saving your writing copy to prevent data loss, at configurable intervals.
• Internal auto spell checker. (KDE spell checker used so most of languages are supported)

Installation

Although as of blog time there were only two binaries available for Linux and one for windows.

Archlinux users Bilbo should be available in the arch community repository ( am not sure about this as i don’t have an arch installation to confirm) but in any case an arch package can be downloaded from here

(K)Ubuntu

To install on ubuntu. You are going to add a third party repository popularly called PPA To your system. This is not hard.

To start open Terminal and copy and paste the following command (you can do this via GUI but when writing a guide some things are better down using commandline copy and paste of cause i would explain every process so at least you know what you are doing)

First we download and add the key for the repository we are about to use and add it to how system.

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com \ 0xfe0272d55c41c17774052e575646f8b10331274d

Then we add the repository with this command

echo deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/neversfelde/ppa/ubuntu `lsb_release --short --codename` main | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

Then we refresh the system and download bilbo with

sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get install bilbo

Once installed you can find Bilbo on the Internet section of your application Menu

Now i give a brief guide on how to configure Bilbi blogger to your blog

First your start bilbo ( like you don’t know that already hehe) once installed you will find it under the Internet section of your application menu.

The first thing you want to do is to add a blog, (my blog is hosted on wordpress.com hence that is what this guide would be based on. )

Just select Add Blog from under Blog menu

This would open a dialog box, something like this

Type in the URL of your blog then enter your blogs username and password and click the Auto Configure button. In my case it was http://ubuntunigeria.wordpress.com and i clicked the Auto Configure button. Then Bilbo would work its magic and Auto configure the settings for the blog. If all goes well (and it always did in my case) The dialog box would now look like this.

Bilbo has auto configured my blog settings, pulling the Title of the blog, the correct URL. You can go to the Supported features tab and check out the list of features bilbo has support in your blog here is mine

Once your blog is configured and loaded up. you would see a page which looks like this.

So here is the layout of Bilbo Blogger, it always you to use both WYSIWYG, or for code warriors you can always use the HTML editor field. one really cool feature with bilbo is the ability to preview you draft and see how it would look like on the blog page, This for me is one of its killer features

HTML Editor

Normal Preview

Preview with blog style

Other cool features of Bilbo

• It support multiple blogs hence you can setup more than one blog at a time.
• It also allows you to edit previous blog posts ( or delete them)
• If you are working on a blog post, you can always tell it to save locally, like as i was writing this post, i got disconnected, if i was using the web interface i might have lost some of my works or would have to wait for the Internet to get back before i continue. With bilbo i just told it to save my work locally and continued working.
• It also allows you to add tags and post the blog to a category

Bilbo also supports tabs you can edit more than one blog at a time with it just by opening a new tab.

Most importantly i found bilbo to be very stable, its doesn’t slow down on me or crash on me. i never experience on crash with it.

There is just so much to talk about Bilbo you would have to give it a spin to see your self.

I
hope someone finds this useful.

However one thing i have always wish it had was the ability to run in the background so that if i close thunderbird i want it to minimize to the system-tray/notification area and inform me real time when i have a new mail. Thunderbird has a small memory footprint hence am not bothered about it sucking up my system resources. For a very long time i took what life offered and made do with opening thunderbird to check for a new mail and closing it when i am done (i hate having my task manager side of the system panel filed up with running applications). Then one day i was like heck i have had enough and decided out to find a way to get thunderbird to do exactly what i want (run in the system-tray when not needed.) i did some googling and the name firetray came up, turned out it was just want i wanted.

Installation and Configuration

Firetray is an add-on for thunderbird and can be downloaded from here download and save the file to your hard disk. In Mozilla Thunderbird, open Add-ons from the Tools menu.

Click the Install button, and locate/select the file you downloaded and click “OK”.

After this you need to restart Thunderbird for the firetray to start working. You might also want to go through the preference of firetray to configure how you want it to behave, for example by default thunderbird does not minimize to the system-tray when you close it. You can go through the settings and configure it to your taste. Here is how i have configured mine.

Conclusion

I have come to find firetray a very valuable plugin for thunderbird.

It allows me to make Thunderbird run in the background and get out of my way. when they is a new mail, i get notified and it tells me how many unread mail i have in-box

One more cool thing i love about it is how it makes it easy to check for new messages and even send a quick email, By just right clicking on the icon on the system-tray

Ok that is the end of my rant. Hope this helps somebody.

FYI: Firetray can also be added to firefox, sunbird, seamonkey 2 and songbird, allowing to set up custom icon, minimizing to tray instead of closing, control playback using multimedia keys in songbird

Hence i decided to modify my screenshot page so that i can update it with monthly screenshots of my pc

Here is for the month of July 2009

The Theme for this month is KDE 4.3 I recently moved to kubuntu 9.04 from Ubuntu 9.04 and am feeling more at home with KDE 4.3 I Hope to blog a review sometimes in future cheers