Kubuntu

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Contents

Backstory

In 2001 I built a new gaming computer - 2 GHz is quite the upgrade from 200 MHz. I got Windows 2000 for it as well; again, hella awesome compared to Windows 98. I took this computer up to college with me, but didn't need both a desktop and a laptop that was, frankly, faster. So the Win2k box became mom's computer.

2007

Windows 2000 is getting old. I'm concerned about security, as it is approaching the end of its update period. So I want mom to have a new, modern, secure operating system. I suppose I could install Windows XP, but that means buying it. Also, it is kinda old and is being replaced by Vista. I have been using Linux (Ubuntu) lately, and decided to set it up for mom.

Most importantly, I needed to 'trick' her into using it. If it's too different from Windows (2000), she will hate it. I decide to go with Ubuntu, as it has the best support, and I know how to use it best. I decide to go with KDE, because Gnome and Xfce look too different from Windows. I figure it would be more work to install the default (Gnome) Ubuntu install, then add KDE than it would to just install Kubuntu (also, they may set some stuff up more customizedly). Also, my parents have a slow Internet connection, so I downloaded the Kubuntu DVD at school.

The install

Mom's computer has one 60 GB hard drive that had one Win2k partition on it. I wanted the computer to have a Windows partition, just in case she completely freaked out. I booted to Windows, defragged, and backed up all her important stuff. I booted from the Live DVD and prepared to wipe the hard drive and create two new partitions and reinstall Windows from scratch (sigh). But! I found a program called Qtparted, and it said it could resize partitions! So I tried it, and it holy-cow worked! I made the Windows partition 20 GB, swap 1 GB, and the main Linux ext3 partition 37 GB. I did this three times before I figured out you had to go to Device | Commit. I installed Kubuntu on the new partition, and tried booting back into Windows. It needed to do a chkdisk, but that's fine. Still works. Also, Linux works! Hooray!

Now time to go about fixing it up. 130+ updates? No prob. Oh god, that's right, 15k Internet. I let that run while I slept.

Appearance

Then I found the wonderful KDE options screen (System Settings) and changed all the appearance and desktop themes to Redmond (2000).

  • System Settings | Appearance
    • Colors: Redmond 2000
    • Style: MS Windows 9x
    • Window Decorations: Redmond
  • System Settings | Desktop
    • Background: Slide show (of my University)
    • Multiple Desktops: 1
  • System Settings | Splash Screen
    • Redmond

Not bad! Then from the Adept package manager I installed Firefox (she is using that in Windows) and Gaim and set up her account.

Login

I had set up Windows to automatically log in, so I wanted the same thing in Linux.

  • System Settings | Advanced | Login Manager | Convenience
    • Enable Auto-Login
    • Enable Password-Less Logins

No problems.

Wine

Two of the biggest things mom does on the computer is Solitaire (sol.exe) and a BOWEP game called Pipe Dream. If she didn't have these, then she wouldn't use Linux at all. I installed wine via Adept, and grabbed c:\BOWEP\ and c:\WINNT\system32\sol.exe from /media/hda1 (which was automatically mounted). I put BOWEP and sol.exe in ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/. I then ran winecfg and added pipe.exe and sol.exe in Win95 mode. They both worked, but only from their directory, so I copied sol.exe and BOWEP's contents to /windows/system32/. I then gave each game its own button by the K menu -

  • Panel menu | Add Application to Panel | Add Non-KDE Application
    • Executable: wine
    • Command line arguments: pipe.exe | sol.exe

and found a big enough picture for each. Perfect.

Gaim

The current repository has only 2.0.0.3 (beta 3), and there was a continue-to-flash-the-taskbar bug going on. I decided to upgrade to 2.0.0.6. 

wget http://umn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gaim/gaim-2.0.0beta6.tar.bz2
tar xf gaim-2.0.0beta6.tar.bz2
cd gaim-2.0.0beta6
sudo apt-get build-dep gaim
./configure
make
sudo make install

That's not exactly how I went about it. I tried ./configure-ing a lot, grabbing the necessary libraries each time it errored out, finally make install-ing it, then it not compiling with SSL and not being able to use MSN. The above should work.

Retrieved from "http://modzer0.cs.uaf.edu/~dev2c/wiki/Kubuntu"