Peter's Blog

Comparing Ubuntu's default brown Gnome desktop to the nice blue KDE knoppix desktop I wondered whether Ubuntu could run KDE. I googled and found kubuntu which is the official Ubuntu distribution that defaults to KDE. Looking through the blurb for this it seems that vanilla ubuntu supports KDE and kubuntu is just ubuntu with KDE packages loaded instead of Gnome.

I didn't want to reinstall anything so I had a go at installing KDE via the synaptic package manager. I did this:

• Installed kdebase using synaptic
• In terminal ran

  sudo update-alternatives --all
  

  and chose any kde offerings that were presented
• rebooted system, as this is the easiest way to restart everything.

Next time I connected I got kde new user wizard thing and I was away.

I didn't change to KDE just to change the colour scheme, KDE has more eye candy and just seems more powerful. I will decide whether I want to stick with it, I can always switch back, or even go fluxbox for a fast and minimalist system. I understand the qt licence problems, I'd like to use it on windows but I don't want to pay $$$.

Got Ubuntu running fluxbox desktop manager instead of gnome:

• install fluxbox via dselect or apt:

  sudo apt-get install fluxbox
  

• edit ~/.xsession and add the following:

  exec /usr/bin/fluxbox
  

Installing Ubuntu on work pc. Here are the highlights:

• Had to fit my own CD/RW drive to be able to read CD/RW with Ubuntu install on it. This is because of the ancient CD drives around here. A new CR/RW would cost £19 quid, which is a hell of a lot of money when you have no budget.
• The installation bombed out because it could not automatically detect the network settings (no DHCP). Somehow I was bounced out of the automated install sequence into the manual install sequence. Once there I got stuck on the partitioning bit and could not progress past there. I had to reboot and start from scratch.
• Had problems with I/O errors when installing the base package. Probably due to old hard disk. Could not do full fsck -c because the ubuntu install had somehow hidden /dev/hdd2. Rebooted in puppy linux and fsck -c on that did not do the -c bit (i.e. check all sectors). Rebooted from some linux boot floppies I found and made ext2 partition with -c check. Restarted Ubuntu install and that complained about the strange ext2 format. Reformatted to ext3 in Ubuntu install and everything proceeded, no more IO errors. Monday morning.
• After 3 hours or so of fiddling system boots X but mouse does not work, thinks it's a ps/2 mouse rather than serial mouse on tty1. System very unresponsive (even to keyboard), probably due to having only 96M of ram, not enough for gnome.
• Now running apt to uninstall gnome and install fluxbox which should be much lighter. It is also updating 87 packages and so is taking some time. To get apt to work through firewall I had to add following to ~/.bash_profile and log back in:

  http_proxy="http://192.168.0.12:8080/"
  export http_proxy