I didn’t mess anything up this time under Gnome. Everything was working fine. But I decided to back up and do a clean install of Kubuntu. Everything is back up and running and nothing was really lost (except time to get everything).

So last night I loaded up some games. I love the RTS genre so I got Spring Loaded and the Evolution mod. I would really like to play the Star Wars mod but it’s closed for beta testing.

I found my iTalk finally so hopefully I will be doing a new podcast. I really need to find a new power cord for the mixer but I cannot afford it. So please if you wanna help out with VooDooRadio donate!

I have audacity installed and now I have to figure how to work with it better. It’s been WAY too long since I used it. And hopefully I can make a show as good as I used to under Audition when I was under Windows.

I know I could take the OLD microphone I have (either the USB Logitech or the Radio Shack Omnidirectional) and plug it into the mic jack on the laptop. But the quality is really crumby. I paid good money for a condenser mic and now I can’t use it because the mixer has no power. This is very frustrating to me.

But anyway, nothing much to report on. Everything is running the way I like it more or less.

One thing I didn’t mention is that in order to get the updates for the wireless, I actually had to create a network connection in the system settings area to get it going, but it  a real simple thing to get going.

This is a run down of what I did today and a little explanation of some things as well.

After installing Kubuntu I was really impressed with how far it has come since I last used it (but that was over a decade ago so a big duh on my part). The one thing I noticed off the bat is the way it handles the extra appearance stuff. It’s all native. Gnome needs Compiz installed to set up the extra things (like the cubes) and Screenlets installed for the Widgets.

KDE has all that stuff built in with Qt4 it seems. As you saw in the little gallery I had the cube going on. In case you missed it in that last post, I put it here on the left.

One thing I found is that it’s real easy to set up. Make your desktop have 4 desktops and check the cube. Yeah not much different. But you can name the desktops something other than Desktop 1, Desktop 2, etc.

I left them the default because I couldn’t think of anything to put in for now. But the fluidity of this is a lot smoother than it was under Gnome.

Ok enough talk about the extra effects, I am here to state what I had installed on the machine. Of course there is the necessities:

1. Firefox 3.0 (For now. I am going to see about installing the latest one from scratch later) but I also needed the following extensions for my personal browsing right away:
   • StumbleUpon
   • DownThemAll
   • Gmail Manager
2. gPodder – Runs perfect after install. Downloaded my subscriptions flawlessly from gPodder.com I love that little feature and it’s great when you have to reinstall or going to a new machine. You can also do the OPML file method, but this is off site which means if you don’t have your external media (CD, HD, whatever) you can access it over the internet.
3. All the dependencies for gPodder (Python libraries, ID3 libraries, OGG Tools, and Mplayer all needed to be installed for gPodder addons to work).
4. dvd::rip – yes I needed this back for sure. Which of course knowing what I needed for this to work right:
   • Kubuntu restricted extras
   • Kaffeine,
   • DVD libraries for reading encrypted DVD’s.
5. Weather widget for my desktop
6. Adobe Air
7. Tweetdeck

I also poked around and decided that I would like a few more things for software installed:

1. Second Life – installed from GetDEB then updated from Second Life’s website.
2. Super Maryo Chronicles – Installed from SMC repository
3. Extra Screen savers – This is odd that KDE came with Blank screen only. So I added the extras through good ol’ apt-get.

Seeing I want to use Firefox as the default instead of Konqueror I had to make a few changes so that could happen. In the System Settings area there is a place you can set Default Applications and that seems to work perfect. But there is also a command that you should run in terminal that will make it completely the default:

sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser

After putting in the root password you get the choice. And voila!

The one thing I like is how you can put the icons on the desktop and I am contemplating removing the desktop folder widget. Also how things appear in the bottom bar. I will customize this more soon I am sure, but the default layout is good enough.

I am not going to put Conky on here. It’s not really needed. I just need to adjust to how KDE handles things and the Software administration is kind of clunky in the regards to if you need things installed as dependencies it doesn’t prompt you to install them. So most of my administration of programs has been handled by command line. Go me.

I found that Kubuntu uses a lot of the same apps I was using before, Open Office is still there.. Oh wait, no it doesn’t no FireFox. It uses Konqueror as it’s web browser by default. But check this out, all those nifty things I was doing under Gnome that required extras, it’s all native here under KDE 4. Here’s some of the screen shots. I will report more about what I had installed and stuff tomorrow. Read on for the little gallery of pics.

I still have the ability to transfer stuff to my iPod with no issue, but I can’t listen to MP3′s on the laptop or even watch videos for that matter. What did I do wrong? I know I must have killed something, but I cannot find out where. BACKUP TIME!

So I moved the new pictures, music, and videos I ripped and transcoded onto the handy dandy external hard drive… And now the big decision. Do I attempt a reinstall over this installation and hope it fixes the issue that way or do I try out another flavor of Linux.

I chose that I would stay with the Ubuntu family. But I will try Kubuntu unstead. For those who do not know what this is. It’s Ubuntu with KDE as it desktop instead of Gnome. Now I have used KDE a LONG time ago with Mandrake Linux. When Linux was still kind of a clunky and not so userfriendly Operating system. Although there is some things you still should install via terminal there are a lot of things you can use the GUI to install things onto the system. But you always have the terminal (aka command line) to help in doing things quicker.

So I basically began downloading Kubuntu from it’s main site and burned the CD under Gnome. Did a completely clean install of Kubuntu and did the updates.  Tommorrow I begin reinstalling some applications or poking to find what I can use that I used under Gnome.