Desktop ko sa Kubuntu 12.10

Yung picture ng babies ko nag cycle sa lahat ng pictures nila na meron dito sa computer ko.

Upgrading to Hardy

I have no plans upgrading my desktop to Hardy Heron, especially with what I experienced the last time I tried upgrading my Kubuntu desktop. But I had just replaced a broken hard drive off a Dell Inspiron laptop. My wife insisted that we install Linux on the thing and since I only had my Gutsy cd, that's what I installed. I then tried to upgrade the installation to Hardy figuring that since it's a fresh install, there should be no problems, and there weren't.

So I am now typing this post from the laptop, playing around with it. It seems ok to me. Time will tell if there will be any inconveniences, but I am happy right now. Learned new things again. :)

Installing a Scanner in Kubuntu

Note: For Linux Newbies like me, who are more familiar with installing drivers in Windows, installing drivers in Linux is difficult, we're not familiar with a lot of the processes involved. This is my personal experience trying to install a scanner driver in Kubuntu Linux.

My wife gave me her old scanner, an Genius Colorpage-Vivid 1200xe, about a month ago. When I got it, I immediately attached the scanner to my old PC to test if I can scan something. It did not work, the program I used, Kooka proclaimed that "no scanner was found" and that "Your system does not provide a SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) installation, which is required by the KDE scan support."

I did a little research at that time and it seemed to me that if I have to install SANE in my system, I would need to bein a better frame of mind lest i again hose my system.

Today after several weeks I tried again. Did some more research, found out that I needed the SANE gt68xx backend for my particular scanner. Fortuitously, while trying to install libsane-extras using adept-manager, I found out that the gt68xx backend is already present. I did not need to install the damn thing, I just needed to get my scanner program to recognize it.

Searched some more, found some advice to also install sane, sane utils and xsane and xsane-common, which I did. Trying to scan with xsane gave me a different error message, "Failed to open device 'gt68xx..." Which, with another couple of google searches led me to believe that I need to download the scanner's windows driver and place the CCD569.fw file in the /usr/share/sane/gt68xx/ folder.

I was able to download the driver and was able to install the driver in wine to extract the CCD569.fw file. Unfortunately, the gt68xx folder was read only so I had to copy the CCD569.fw using the the command line. My first attempts using the command 'sudo copy /folder/file /folder/' gave me the 'command does not exit' reaction from the PC, apparently Linux does not recognize the 'copy' command, I had to go back and google the copy command for linux. Which was cp.

Using the cp command, I was able to copy the CCD file to the gt68xx folder and was able to scan my first picture in Linux



As more people use Linux, the manufacturers will likely include Linux drivers in their cds and installing scanners will be as easy as it is in Windows. But with a little googling around (making sure that the hardware you buy is supported in Linux), most people can already enjoy using their peripherals in Linux

My Desktop

desktop110407
Originally uploaded by roychoco

After installing Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon yesterday, I made a few tweaks to the system.

1. Installed Kubuntu Restricted extras to get MP3 playback and decoding, Java runtime environment, Flash plugin, DVD playback, and LAME (to create compressed audio files).

2. Installed Microsoft core fonts.

3. Installed rar and 7zip support

4. Installed showFoto, the best simple photo editing software I've used

5. Installed Comix viewer for reading Manga

6. Installed wine so I can run some windows applications

7. Installed 7zip, the only windows app I migrated to linux.

Reflecting on the upgrade, there were no radical increase in usability from Feisty to Gutsy. I was carried away with the launch of a new version and should have waited for the next version after Gutsy before upgrading.

Not that there are any problems with Gutsy, it installed easily and recognized all my hardware. But Feisty did that too, and I've already personalized Feisty's settings to my liking. Now I'm starting over with Gutsy, of course if the online upgrade worked, all my settings should have been imported.

Bottom line, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Previous posts here and here

Update: November 5, 2007, 12:19 am

When I did the next post, I used my camera phone to take a picture of the covers of the book and used Bluetooth to transfer the images to my PC. I must say that the Bluetooth application in Gutsy is way better and more user friendly than the one in Fiesty. And it was installed by default. I had to install Bluetooth support in Feisty before I could use it.

Upgrading to Gutsy 2

7:15 pm: I finished backing up my files, and booted up the Kubuntu Gutsy DVD. I am now stuck in step 3 of 6, installing the keyboard layout. Canceled my first attempt after several minutes, will wait longer this time, if it doesn't work, will reboot and try again

10:16 pm: Finished installation about an hour after I started, I tried to update this post but Konqueror kept crashing when I go to blogger to update. So I installed Firefox through the add-remove utility. But my back-up of Firefox's configuration file was in my windows partition, and I did not want to start browsing without my bookmarks and add-ons. Tried to mount the windows hard drive but I forgot that you had to install the "NTFS configuration tool" to be able to mount NTFS partitions. So I installed it, but I also forgot that it's default configuration is for gnome, Seven Capital sins explains the problem and the solution

"The command used in the menu to launch ntfs-config was “gksu ntfs-config”. I replaced that with “kdesu ntfs-config”

After I replaced the command, I was able to mount the drive, copy the Firefox config and update this post.

While copying the Firefox config file, I found out that Dolphin, the new default file manager for does not allow you to show hidden files (update: found out that it actually does allow you to show hidden files), so I reverted to Konqueror as my default file manager Sathya Says explains how to make dolphin your default file manager, you just reverse the process to make Konqueror your default file manager.

I will probably be making other tweaks to Gutsy for the next several days .

First part is here continuation here

Upgrading to Gutsy

I was not doing anything important so I decided to upgrade Kubuntu to Gutsy. I googled how to do it, found this website with instructions and proceeded to upgrade. The upgraded packages started downloading at about 7:00 pm, it's now 10:00 pm and it has only downloaded 35 percent of the required packages (429 out of 1037) so I'm going to sleep and check up on the upgrade tomorrow morning.

Woke up at 5:00 am, downloading was finished and the installation was starting. Installatin was stopped however by a dialogue window that informs me that if I wanted to use MS corefonts for printing I will have to configure Defoma (debian font manager)

I closed the dialogue window and installation continued.

Shortly after that, I get another dialogue window which informs me that it could not install a 'debconf', installation will continue but "debconf may be in a not working state"

Was given the option to report the bug, tried to, when I clicked the button, Kkonqueror seemed to be start but eventually nothing happened. Clicked the button again, same thing happened. Clicked to close the dialogue window, what else can I do?

Another dialogue box this time informing me that /var/cahche/apt/archives/x11......debpackage cannot be installed. I just closed the box.

Another dialogue box that informs me that it could not install x11 common becuase of "dependency problems" and "x11 common will be left unconfigured.

Clicked to report the bug, same thing happened as before, apparently nothing. So I closed the box.

5:11 AM, its configuring libselinux1 and theres 7 hours and 27 minutes to go in the installation.

5:31 am, it's still configuring libselinux1.

5:53 am, still configuring libselinux1. I think it's stuck and there is no option to cancel.

5:57 am, still stuck, will try to restart and see what happens, hopefully, nothing major.

6:01 am, was warned that my system could be unusable if I stopped the upgrade, was given the option to continue the upgrade, picked yes but the system still rebooted. Now I cannot use adept because another process is using it.

6:30 am , apparently, I did make my system unusable. when I restarted, all I get is a blank screen with a blinking cursor. Any help to get out of this mess will be appreciated.

7:36 pm, After some browsing at ubuntu forums, I came to the conclusion that it would be easiest for me to just download a Kubuntu ISO, burn it to disk and install from there. I will have to boot up with my trusty Knoppix cd and burn my files to cd.

Update: October 30, 2007

I'm updating this post using my trusty Knoppix live cd. I've been burning my files to dvd for two days (18 DVDs so far) and it's not yet finished. And I am loathe to just throw out the things I don't use anymore, so I back all of them up and I've accumulated a lot of them. I know, I should have been backing up my files religiously and definitely should have backed them up before attempting the upgrade. But I didn't, so I'm doing it now, whidh is a pain, which is probably why I was not doing it before :).

I have also been distracted with playing Civilization, rediscovered that I had that game installed in my windows partition and have been struggling against the "one more turn" syndrome.

Bottom line, should be finished upgrading by the end of the week.

Update:

Continued here and here

Monopoly

So my wife bought the Monopoly game from Yahoo games. She wanted me to try it so I installed it using using wine in Kubuntu 7.04. It installed ok with a desktop link for the game in my desktop and even a short cut for yahoo games.

But it does not work, I double click on the icon and it seems to be initializing for a while and then it just quits. I searched in Ubuntu Forums and it seems that it will still be along while before I can play yahoo games in Kubuntu.

It just of course means that I would have to play other games besides yahoo games.