LinLog

Well, I installed Kubuntu 6.06 "Dapper Drake" from scratch the other night. I didn't actually intend to, though. I actually wanted to upgrade, but that didn't go so well. In fact, the upgrade completely hosed my system. Either I made a really bad mistake following the directions on the Kubuntu web site, or the directions were just plain bad. (To be fair, they were at least incomplete.) At any rate, Adept stopped responding in the middle of configuring autofs and I had to kill it. I tried to recover by running apt-get, which told me to run dpkg, which seemed to complete the upgrade. However, after rebooting, I found that I was without KDE (as in the upgrade removed it and never installed the new version) and without a network connection. So, since I had wanted to fix my brain-damaged legacy partition scheme anyway, I just reinstalled.

I must say, I'm extremely impressed with the new installer. Instead of booting into a crumby command-line installer, the install CD is now a live CD. You boot into a working graphical environment and then run a graphical installer program to put Kubuntu on your hard drive. You answer a few questions, configure your hard drive with QtParted, wait a while, and reboot. The mount point selection screen could have used a few more visual cues, but other than that it was the easiest install I've ever done. Bravo!

However, it wasn't all wine and roses. After booting into my new installation, I found that I no longer had sound, despite the fact that I'd gotten the system sounds when I booted from the live CD. There didn't seem to be After flailing around in vain for a while, I found the answer in this Kubuntu Forums thread, which basically said to turn off a few switches in KMix. I certainly never would have thought of that, since I never actually set any of those switches. In fact, I don't even know what they do. But, at any rate, it worked.

It also took me a few minutes to remember that Ubuntu doesn't come with MP3 support out of the box. It would have been a lot faster if Kaffeine or Amarok had just told me that they couldn't play MP3s. But nooooo, that would be too easy. Instead, I sat there for fifteen minutes wondering why Amarok was zooming through a two hour recording in three seconds without making a sound. I probably would have figured it out sooner if I wasn't so flustered from the previous failure of sound to work at all. At any rate, I eventually remembered and followed the new instructions to enable the multiverse repository and install libxine-extracodecs.

In other bad news, I still haven't gotten the extra buttons on my Marble Mouse to work yet. Just copying the mouse setup from my old xorg.conf file didn't work. The really weird thing about that is that when I try to remap the buttons with xmodmap, I get errors saying that I need to define 11 buttons instead of 7. But the trackball only has four physical buttons and I've only set the buttons option to 7 in my xorg.conf file. So where is it getting 11 from?

We'll see how the rest goes. I've still got a bunch of other things to install and configure, so I'm sure there will be some rough spots. Hopefully I'll get them all worked out and be able to post the solutions for posterity.