Kubuntu Mini Install Fest

Introduction
MrCopilot was asked to assist in a Linux deployment for a home over the weekend. I usually jump at the chance to help bring new users to the fold. This particular request though, came from a person with a Masters Degree in Computer Science. Installation of most distributions is now so easy that surely my learned colleague could handle this task on his own, I encouraged him to do so, and I would help with any problems he encountered.

Well I was wrong. Linux is not Windows. Those of us who use it regularly tend to forget how difficult the learning curve can be. I must give him and Kubuntu credit. He managed to get both machines up and running, wifi working and even a seamless virtual Windows installed with Virtual Box. Using the almighty Google to handle any questions. Unfortunately, adept was hopelessly broken and frustration started to set in. I was called on site.

1 Kubuntu disc, 8 Hours, and 4 PCs later. I offer this Post Mortem.

Users
The clients were 2 wonderful pre-Tween sisters, who up until now had shared a room and a single Windows PC in the "play room." Now they have their own rooms equipped with fairly beefy PCs. Their usage habits include surfing the web, playing online games (Club Penguin and Gaia Online) and a few anime MMOs.


Kubuntu 7.10 was chosen for a couple of reasons, ease of use, maturity, and stability. We have a few Kubuntu machines here and they have posed no major support problems.

Diagnosis
The first PC, (with the virtualized Windows) would not boot. Grub showed up but reported error 15 file not found. I briefly looked over the machine and having only the Kubuntu disc on hand, the decision was to start from scratch. All that was lost was the Virtual Windows install, which he has a ton of experience installing, and can do himself.

Not so Adept
Installation was (as usual) flawless, painless and quick, about 15 minutes.
Enable all repositories and Security updates, added another 10 minutes to get the 163 packages with updates, all handled (sort of) by adept.

Something broke during the security update. If you weren't paying close attention, you wouldn't have even noticed it. I was though, and after I explained that adept is a (couple of) graphical frontend(s) to apt-get and it is itself a frontend for dpkg, the problem was easily fixed.

Open a terminal.

sudo apt-get install

It reports "some packages were left unconfigured and installation cannot continue. Please run dpkg --configure -a"

sudo dpkg --configure -a

then

sudo apt-get install

to finish installation of updates. Viola, adept now works again.

Nvidia
Installing Proprietary nvidia-glx-new driver was also handled by adept. Unfortunately it was unable to update the xorg.conf file automagically. Why, I have no clue. Manually fixed with:

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

change from Driver="nv" to Driver = "nvidia" and Save (ctrl-X, Yes)
Restart X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace) and tada Nvidia logo.

FireFox
For reasons I do not understand Kubuntu chooses not to put Firefox in the default install, even though Ubuntu does. I love Konqueror but not for browsing. Back to adept, via add remove programs from the menu, to install Firefox with no problems. Flash and friends, using a handy Kubuntu package that includes Flash, Java and a few other proprietary things. No problems, after installation, Youtube, Google Video and Club Penguin and Gaia worked perfectly, and there was much rejoicing. We sat our new Linux user down for some extended Penguin Play.

Meanwhile the other machine was already installed but no updates had been applied for fear of breaking adept again. Now that the solution had been shown, we applied it identically and quickly brought it up to par.

This little one is a bit of a tom boy, she like Trucks, Cars, Tools and camouflage. I installed Trigger, SuperTuxKart, Torcs, TuxPaint and a few other Open Source games for her using adept through the add remove programs menu, and again much rejoicing.

Wait, didn't it say 4 PCs? Yes, it did, glad you are paying attention. Off in the corner was another broken Kubuntu, courtesy of a house guest. He, of course, has a totally different set of needs, Dual Booting. Sharing folders, Best of Both Worlds type. He too was stumped by the adept update bug and had been unsuccessfully banging away at trying to solve it. I showed him the problem, installed nVidia drivers and he was off and running in no time. Happily playing an MP3 in Amarok and rocking away with StreamTuner. Somewhere along the way he lost the ability to see his windows partition from inside Linux and I offered no help other to install ntfs-write in case he finds it again.

Wifi Easy?
While bouncing back and forth between these three machines something strange happened. All are on wifi, and it was reported that one of the Belkin adapters was not working. I moved it over to the guest's machine and tada no problems. He stated "great mine wasn't working anyway" An off brand dongle. I took his over to another machine, tada no problems. Here is the strange part. Kubuntu uses Knetworkmanager to handle configuring, notification and what not. The Belkin wifi adapter would not work on one of the three machines, but fine on the other 2. KNetworkManager, has a menu item marked configure, It consists of 2 radio buttons DHCP, and Manual Configure. On a working Belkin adapter, neither is ticked. If you click either DHCP or Manually Configure, you have now broken that adapter for that machine. Why? I still don't know. Nor do I know where it stores this information to remove it. We had to open a brand new one due to me checking it on 2 of them. I counseled him that thankfully we did not have to go through that whole ndiswrapper install and that is definitely a very good thing. I highly recommend the adapter pictured above for Kubuntu, provided you don't try to manually configure it. ($30 @ Walmart)

Where we failed
Unfortunately, Kubuntu could not do everything. One of the games the kids play is a nogo under Linux. Fly for Fun which uses GameGuard. GameGaurd games do not (and probably will not) run under wine or cedega. His only option (besides dual booting) is running it in Windows with VMware Workstation, which includes 3d acceleration, but at $189 per seat that solution is prohibitively expensive for a single game. Instead I pointed him to a few OpenSource MMOs, the girls chose PlaneShift and we'll see how that goes.

The fourth PC? That is his main machine. We put it off until later, he is working with mission critical apps until next week, at such a time I shall regale you with stories of a Monstrosity of a PC (Brand New AMD proc, Ridiculous Nvidia) running Windows Vista with a virtual Linux, Dual Booting with Linux running a Virtual Windows XP.

Conclusions
I really wanted this install to go super smooth. Quoth the Stones, "You can't always get what you want"

Still, installation was far less painful than the typical Windows install. I left only after setting up new (nonAdmin) user accounts for the girls and pointing him to a few invaluable resources for administering Linux installs.

Overall, he got what he needs.

A Video Tour of Kubuntu Installation Courtesy of Linux.com


MrCopilot

Windows Platform Death Revisited

After my KDE article, comments are everywhere complaining about the headline.
OSNews, Linux.com, and even the Dot. One guy even blogged his grief about it.

So here I offer a response.

First off, Get a grip. Articles need good titles. This one was too good to pass up.


Second, according to the company that produces Windows XP, end of life is Jan 2009, 11 months from now. See Microsoft Lifecycle

Third, the article clearly states that my Windows development platform was going unused for months at a time. No more .Net and no more embedded coding. I preferred to use a text editor on the linux box. Kate for embedded, Kdevelop + QT for cross platform apps. In that sense it was dying. Giving me Kate on Windows does a world of good for it's usability.

My only question is, Why don't these people ask these questions here?

Windows is the market leader, it will be for some time. We all know this. However, I bought my last copy long ago. I recommend it to no-one, I support it not at all. OK, I still help my mother out when she calls.

At my home there is one laptop with XP, explicitly for the purpose of maintaining .Net applications, testing cross platform apps and re-programming an embedded processor.

This was the KDE for windows test machine. Since KDE installation, It has been very popular with my pre-Teen daughter, who never even touched it before. She now wants KDE4 on her Kubuntu box. She doesn't even know about all the cool Plasma, KWin compositing stuff, only what KDE for Win shipped with.

In my circle, Windows isn't dying, it's all but dead. Our next Laptop will be a Everex Cloudbook or Asus eeePC. All of our PCs run Linux with KDE for a variety of reasons, but mostly because it works.

Hold on while I check what the end of life is on our distros. Oh yeah, there isn't one. That is no small distinction. Planned obsolescence is not something I intend to support with my money, but to each their own.


MrCopilot

Update 3/24/08: Computer World has a nice explanation on the XP lifecycle titled:

Windows XP: Going, going ... gone?

Covered by Slashdot with the Headline: The Death of Windows XP

I fully expect all you complainers to give them hell just like you did me.

MrCopilot

Can KDE Save a Dying Windows Platform?

I want to start by telling a story. Bare with me.

Once upon a time there was a software engineer. He wrote code, windows code, embedded firmware. He was happy. Then one day a new project is put before him, a project unlike any other he had encountered. It was going to require all new hardware, and the features, wow. Something like this is going to require a full blown Operating System not the usual rinky dink assembly program.

Research leads to the inevitable conclusion, Linux. Further Research leads to a graphical toolkit called Qt (pronounced “Cute”.) A request was made and granted for a new workstation to create a new Linux development environment, after all the windows development machine was far too mission critical to muck about with dual booting and virtual machines.

This engineer had some Linux experience on the desktop, having a PC or two running it on and off for the last couple of years. He picked his favorite distribution and after a bit more research had a fully working development machine up and running a chair swivel away from his usual trusty machine. The choices made for this workstation would have a lasting effect on this engineer. KDE for the desktop, with Kdevelop as the IDE won out over Gnome and Eclipse. It stood to reason that if he was developing with Qt, a desktop made atop the Qt libraries was appropriate. Even with the incomplete KDE cross compiling documentation it was fun to work on.

Fast forward, the product is designed, operating system compiled, drivers tweaked, application software is written, units are built, tested and released to production. During this time a funny thing happened, Windows disappeared from the engineer's home PCs completely. The research requirements were so much that many an evening he could be found at his desk until the wee hours of the morning going over documentation, compiling newer kernels, and generally pushing Linux as hard as he could.

When the morning came he would go back to his office and he noticed he swiveled his chair less and less towards the Windows PC. So much so in fact, he decided he should do something about it, He designated it the email machine. That would ensure he used it more frequently. While using it he missed the simplicity and stability (especially the Stability) of his Linux box. No amount of cygwin or virtual machine tweaking was satisfactory. Every open source application that was cross compatible was deployed, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and the rest, but still it was not enough. Eventually he gave in to dual booting to enable him to use his favorite tools. But the sad truth is, an embedded engineer needs Windows. There are just too many specialized tools for programming devices, analyzing signals, and device drivers that are Windows only and no amount of Wine-ing will do.

His only hope was that he knew Qt was cross compatible with Windows Linux and Mac, and there was talk that someday, KDE was to be ported to Windows. So he waited.

Well, KDE4 was announced and there was much joy. Betas were released and there was much bitching. KDE4.0.0 was released and there again was much joy (and still a little bitching). More importantly an actual honest to goodness Windows port is released.

Here follows that engineer's report.

I could hardly wait. Download the KDE for Windows Installer. (Link is to the Stable version)
(For this review I went with the bleeding edge unstable version 0.8.6 beta4 marked 1/28/08)

Note the disclaimer.

KDE on Windows is mostly in an alpha state, so not suitable for day to day use yet.

My first thought was “1.6 Megabytes, wow that is some port.” Followed by "oh, I see, it's a cygwin-like installer." Hmm, what to install? When in doubt grab it all. Pick a Mirror, I have no preference, I picked a KDE mirror in the US. You have the choice of User or Developer package installation, naturally I chose developer. This gives you all kinds of goodies like Mingw, Qt, Qdesigner, and other development tools.

Ok downloading packages, this may take a while..........

Hours later, Installing Packages this too may take a while, but don't leave because a few packages have installers themselves requiring you to click next, next, next, finish.

All right finished in a blazing 4 hours.

Follow the post install instructions from the KDE guys. Again note the disclaimer:

Disclaimer These are early days for KDE4 on Windows, some programs work better than others and some fail to run altogether.

Never mind all that, lets see what works.

What Works:

Quite a lot actually. See below for Screenshots of included apps that work. Almost all the apps shipped "work". Two are all but useless due to bugs. The rest seem to function perfectly as long as you don't need to refer to Help. Fortunately most apps have an online help while this bug gets ironed out.

What doesn't work?

Sound, at least on my setup there was no sound, any application that tried to make a peep instead produced this error message. Most Apps let you disable sound.

Blinken - Simon unfortunately requires Sound to be playable.

As does KLetres:

MimeTypes for Dolphin and Konqueror.
(I may have missed something and am investigating)

Dolphin is the new Filemanager for KDE and it looks very nice, however It could not run any executables, view any pictures or play and music. It browsed my directories just fine after complaining about not being able to open ~ directory. After setting up my home directory it stopped complaining. But not being able to do anything but browse was disapointing.

Konqueror – KDE's Swiss Army Knife, Web Browser, File Manager, FTP Client, Embedded File Viewer, Etc ... Unfortunately on my Windows box it is reduced to a Web Browser (without Flash support) and a Menu Explorer (without being able to launch anything.)

What is missing?

Besides the things mentioned above. Koffice the KDE Office Suite, Amarok Media Player, Kontact PIM Suite including Kmail, Kopete Instant Messenger. KDEVELOP!!!!!!! These are still being worked on for KDE4, so no real surprise their not ready for Windows yet.

Help Functions on all programs are broken.

So what's the answer?
Can KDE save the dying windows platform?

Not Quite Yet, but they are making a damn fine start of it.
I know I will be pitching in to help them out with new KDE Windows apps and I won't be alone. Qt is already a powerful Windows Toolkit but the KDE family of Applications are a welcome addition. Amarok is coming along nicely, and as soon as KMail, and KDevelop gets up and running, I will have to re-evaluate.

Applications:

Kwrite – Notepad Replacement.

Kate – KDE Advanced Text Editor, the brains behind my favorite IDE Kdevelop. Syntax Highlighting and Code Folding is working perfectly.

Kfind – KDE File Search Tool – I didn't expect this to work but what do you know it does.

Kig- Figure Editor

PixelTool - Zoom tool

Konqueror Web Browser, Nice to see the Konq on XP too bad about the flash and it doesn't seem to support Gmail.

Kworld Clock – It's a Clock for the whole world.

Education:

KAlgebra - Math Education Tool

Kalzium – Periodic Table educational Software

Kbruch – Learn Fractions and Decimal Conversions

Kgeography – World Geography and Capitals

KPercentage - Percentage Study Tool

Kstars – Internet Connected Observtory one click to retrieve gorgeous pics of distant galaxies as well as Wikipedia and Nasa Pages.

Ktuberling – Mr Potato Head for KDE shown here in Space mode

Kturtle – LOGO Educational Programming Environment.

KTouch - KDE Touch Typing Tutor

Parley – Language Phrase Teacher, No files loaded.

Marble – The Earth on your desktop.

KwordQuiz – Flashcard and Q & A Study Tool

Kmplot - Matematical Plotting Tool

Games:

Katomic – Connect Molecules in this Puzzle Game.

Kanagram - Anagram game

Bovo – Tic Tac Toe on Steroids

Kbattleship - KDE sunk my battleship

Kblackbox – I hate this Game and I refuse to describe it.

Kbounce – KDE's Version of Jeezball

KHangman - Hangman for KDE

Klines – Make Lines of 5 or more but don't block your path

KmahJong – KDE Mahjong, The Art Department has been working overtime.

Kmines - KDE MineSweeper

Knetwalk – Get those computers on the Net as fast as you can. This game is like Crack, You have been warned.

Kolf – Minature Golf, This is the fugliest of the KDE games.

Konquest - Galactic Conquest

Kpatience – Several Different Solitaire Card Games

Kreversi – Reversi or Othello finally with fullscreen scaling.

Kshinen – Cross between Tetris and Mahjong

Ksudoku – Sudoku except on your PC

KspaceDuel – Another game I was never very fond of.

Ksquares – You remember that game where you draw a grid of dots and take turns connecting them, this is it without all that drawing and paper.

Lskat – Another Card Game

Kriki – K Yatzee again without the paper.

Kfourlines – Konnect Four was taken I guess.

Kjumping cube – Dice Game, I don't get it.

SameGame - Remove Groups of the same color.

Kgoldrunner - Oh Yeah Lode Runner.

MrCopilot

UPDATE: Some people have taken issue with the Title of this post. Here is my response.