Ubuntu community

GWC Community Off-Topic/Other
#41

That’s not really KDE’s fault. Using both GNOME and KDE on the same user account is NEVER a good idea. While both environments use freedesktop.org standards, the interoperability between them is still not very good, so using them on the same account will lead to KDE taking over some stuff once you return to using GNOME, or GNOME taking over some stuff when you return to using KDE. You’re better off creating a separate user account on which to try KDE.

Aside from that, Ubuntu’s implementation of KDE is by far the worst of any distro I’ve used. Kubuntu isn’t very good, either. Don’t take my word for it-- read the reviews. Do yourself a favor and create a virtual machine in VirtualBox and install OpenSUSE or Mandriva on it. Both distros are more focused towards KDE and will give you a better idea of what it is capable of.

Many distros still have KDE 4.3 however, including OpenSUSE which I use at work. Remember, I didn’t find KDE4 to be usable until 4.4 came out (though OpenSUSE’s implementation of KDE 4.3 is pretty awesome). 4.4 brought a lot of nice features. One that I really like is that KDE’s notification system will now intercept notification messages from GNOME-based apps and show them in KDE’s notification system. This is awesome, because GNOME notifications look pretty bad in KDE, and KDE 4.4 makes them look like any other KDE notification. On the other hand, GNOME doesn’t really pay attention to KDE notifications, it may not even show them.

#42

Is the speed performance a lot better in those distros? Because since I have a 5 year old computer and Kubuntu already seems a bit slow responsing to clicks, putting it in the virtualbox will not do it much justice either.

it took a bit of tweaking, but i was able to get back my mouse pointer control only after removing oxygen pointer by brute force, no other way worked… the text rendering took even more effort. Just putting back the original font.conf didn’t do the trick. i had to remove everything i install for kubuntu and add additional lines to the font.conf just to get it to look like it did before. By the way, since the font.conf is under /etc/fonts would a separate account really save the font render from being changed? Actually I am not sure it was font.conf that was changed anyway. I did do a sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config, so i wonder what really went on with the text rendering. oh well, live and learn.

#43

Was compositing turned on in KDE? Compositing can make things run pretty slow if you’re A) not using both a video card and a driver that supports 3D acceleration or B) if you’ve just plain got a slow computer. Or both.

How much RAM do you have in your computer? I like giving at least 512MB or so to the virtual machine (I usually give a full 1GB), so keep in mind that when the VM is running, the host machine will not be able to use whatever RAM you’ve given to the VM.

As far as the fonts.conf issue, I dunno. I never had that problem in Fedora, nor in Arch. My wife was still using GNOME while I was using KDE and the fonts played nicely on both. Seems like this is just an issue with Ubuntu’s notoriously horrible implementation of KDE.

#44

I have an old ATI card (well from 5 years ago) that is no longer supported in the proprietary drivers. It runs Compiz and most games just fine, but the 0 A.D. demo drives my computer to a crawl.

I have 1.5 GB of RAM. On startup without running browsers less 400 KB is used. I dunno, might still have a hard time running VMs.

About OpenSUSE and Mandriva… I am not sure I am ready for the .deb to .RPM change yet. Do you have to build your own packages a lot more often with distros that runs on RPM?

What are the benefits to RPM by the way? What I know is that RPM doesn’t yet allow interactive configurations. I am thinking about switching to Fedora, because I hear people suggesting it a lot. Though I am not sure exactly what I’ll gain from the switch.

#45

Turn of compiz and give your VM 512MB. It won’t be optimal, but you should still have the juice to at least test it out.

It really depends on the distribution and what their package managers put in the repos. Both Fedora and OpenSUSE have large online communities and independent repos for some of the non-FLOSS stuff. Not really sure about Mandriva as I haven’t used it. Both Fedora and OpenSUSE do not distribute non-free software, it’s just a matter of philosophy. It won’t be as simple as enabling the multiverse or partner repos in Ubuntu, but it’s not that hard, either.

Here’s a good Fedora setup guide, which tells you how to enable non-free repos. The guy that made this guide probably has a Fedora 13 guide as well, now.

I don’t know the benefits, to be honest. I’m personally a much bigger fan of the Arch Build System (naturally) than either DEB or RPM.

#46

but if you use Arch and say you want to install a some big program like openoffice, wouldn’t it take forever to build?

#47

Arch has packages and repositories. They just use a different build system, with packages being in tar.gz (or tar.xz) archives. So you don’t have to build OpenOffice or Chromium or whatever, you can just install it from the repository.

#48

This is awesome

http://liveusb.info/dotclear/

It allows you to create a multiboot thumb drive.

I am going to create one to try out other distros.

#49

Pretty cool. I rolled my own multi-boot thumb drive using grub and chainloading, more of a manual process than what that app offers. It has SystemRescueCD, a minimalist rescue distribution with lots of diagnostic tools, as well as the LiveCD/install images for Arch Linux and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

#50

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/07/portable-linux-apps-run-your-favourite.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+d0od+(Omg!+Ubuntu!)

hmm… could this be the future mode of application distrobution for linux?

i mean pack it up in a executable that will run on any linux distro, and once it is installed, you can then upgrade the software from the native distro package manager…

#51

Interesting, kind of taking an OS X approach. Though you’d still need to either A) make separate 32 and 64-bit versions, or B) put both in the same package. Again, much the way that Mac OS X does things.

Of course, you’d still run into issues with support for various things not being compiled into the kernel, depending on the distro or whether or not the user has compiled their own kernel. And you’d also start bloating the hell out of your filesystem, with tons of copies of the same libraries.

#52

they can put those libraries in places where the original libraries would be if it was install from the package manager. that way multiple programs will be installing the library to the same location, making it just one copy of the library. actually if the installed software needs to be upgradeable from the package manager, they would have to work like that to keep the dependency upgraded.

#53

I just don’t see that working. There are things like differences in the version of the compiler used to build the libraries that could break certain apps. I also do not like the idea of apps overwriting libraries installed by other apps.

It may work in the context of a single distribution, where you can have a decent amount of control over how things work. But I don’t see it working in the way you’re describing across a large number of distributions. Which, let’s be honest, is the main reason for doing something like this.

It has the potential to work, I guess, but only if all needed libraries are distributed with each app. The bloat is the price you pay for the convenience, I guess.

#54

i don’t see it as a bad thing. I am sure as this concept progresses, some mechanism can fix this problem. At the worst all these single file packages can create their own shared library folder, that way there will only be one copy of duplicated libraries.

#55

my custom plymouth theme

//youtu.be/JNGZ1uvU-P8

originally an xsplash from

http://www.online-blogger.net/2009/12/01/14-xsplash-themes-for-ubuntu-karmic-koala/

since it no longer works with lucid and plymouth, i thought i try writing my own plymouth script.

#56

Looks kinda cool. I prefer to see startup messages though, so I don’t use Plymouth, XSplash, FBSplash, etc.

#57

Plymouth scripts can actually display startup messages. i think the default ubuntu plymouth script puts at least the fsck messages, and the hd or external drive load failure through. and it’s done so it a very eye pleasing manner that mixes with the graphical part of plymouth.

i am also trying to get that part to work.

i always get repeated ir6 too busy messages, so i am not sure if i really want to see a bunch of that on screen.

#58

I dunno, I guess I’m too old-fashioned. I don’t much care for a pretty boot screen, I prefer things the way they looked when I started using linux back in 1999 or so.

#59

the beauty of linux is you can get it to look anyway you want to. just not easily these days, at least not as easy as when i started using linux.

#60

I find it to be much the opposite. It’s never been easier to customize how things look and run.