$ dpkg-reconfigure gdm3
$ systemctl restart display-manager.service

The reconfigure will bring up a menu that allows you to choose from the installed display managers.  There's a nice summary with pictures here.

If anyone cares, the context here is that I run Ubuntu 20.04 with the Trinity Desktop Environment on my home destkop/server.  The problem is that pretty much every time I run an upgrade on that box it resets the display manager from TDM back to the default GDM. 

This is actually a really big problem because GDM doesn't work on this box.  Aside from the disk drives, most of the hardware in this box is about 10 years old.  So the video card is sufficiently archaic that GNOME just can't deal with.  When I try to log into GNOME or even just use GDM, I end up with massive display corruption and the desktop is basically unusable.  

One of these days, I should really replace that computer.  Or maybe rebuild it.  Or possibly just relegate it to purely headless server duty and get a different box to use as a desktop.  One day....

This is actually slightly relevant because I have resurrected the GUI on my "home desktop", by which I mean my "home server". This is the box sitting under my desk in the basement that runs Ubuntu 18.04 and runs various web and media server software. It does have a GUI installed, but I hadn't really used it in years - in part because GNOME didn't really work well on it. This isn't super surprising, since it's an old box with just the integrated graphics chip. But it's got more than enough memory and processing power for the workload I want it to do, so there's not really any point in upgrading.

Anyway, due to the current CONVID-19 pandemic I'm now working from home and sitting at that desk all day every day, so I decided to fix up my desktop. Part of my cleanup process was to axe GNOME and install the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE). This is a project I just recently discovered and immediately fell in love with. It's essentially a fork and continuation of KDE 3.5. It's since evolved into its own thing, apparently, but it's still noticeably KDE-like, so I'm very comfortable in the UI. Just like the original KDE 3.5, TDE is powerful, intuitive, generally pleasant to use, and works quite well on my not-so-new system. It doesn't have the fancy graphical bells and whistles, but I never really cared much about that anyway. I would definitely recommend it to any old-school KDE 3.x fans.

Anyway, here are my thoughts from the time. To be fair, I haven't used "real" KDE to any extent since this, so I'm sure all of my complaints have been addressed. But then again, I don't really care. I'm happy with TDE. Enjoy!

Kubuntu 8.04 was released yesterday (note: again, this was twelve years ago). That means it's upgrade time for me again.

This time around, Kubuntu comes in 2 varieties: the "rock-solid" KDE 3 version, and the KDE 4 remix. I had been intending to get on the leading edge and install the KDE 4 version. However, just to be on the safe side, I decided to give the live CD a try first. And after messing around with it for half an hour or so, I'm glad I did.

Bottom line: I think I'm going to wait for KDE 4.1. Or maybe 4.2.

I just don't care for 4.0.3. It definitely looks different...but not better. I just didn't see any new features that looked even remotely interesting, let alone compelling. The splash screens were kind of nice, and the plasma widget effects on the desktop were pretty neat, but that's about it.

There seemed to be a lot more down sides. Of course, I'm not sure how many of these are KDE 4 issues and how many are Kubuntu issues, but I found them annoying either way. Here's my list:

1. The window style for the default desktop theme is unbearably ugly. It's too dark and too monochromatic. I guess somebody must like it, but it really bothers me.
2. Where's the control panel? I don't see it and the context-sensitive configuration panels don't have all the options in them.
3. In fact, where the heck are the other options?
4. What the heck happened to Amarok and the other applications? The UI is completely different and it feels like half the features are missing.

I could go on, but why bother? There's just no reason for me to upgrade at this point.

I upgraded my Kubuntu box at work from 8.04 to 8.10 on Monday morning. It did not go well. Not only did the experience waste several hours of my time getting my system back to a state where I could actually do some work, it left me feeling bitter and fed-up.

Not that the upgrade failed or anything - on the contrary. The upgrade process itself was relatiely fast and painless. So, in contrast to some of my previous upgrade experiences - which have left systems completely inoperable - this wasn't that bad. It's just that, once the upgrade was done, nearly every customization I'd made to my desktop was broken.

Broken Stuff

As for the breakages, they were legion - at least it felt that way. The 2 most annoying were the scrolling on my Logitech Marble Mouse trackball and KHotKeys. It turns out the mouse scrolling was fixable by adding a line to my xorg.conf to disable some new half-working auto-configuration feature.

KHotKeys, on the other hand, was a lost cause. From what I've read, it just plain doesn't work right in KDE 4. So, since key bindings are an absolute must-have feature for me, I worked around it by installing xbindkeys. This works well enough, but it's a huge pain in the neck. Now, not only do I have to recreate all my key bindings, but I have to look up the DBUS commands for all those built-in KDE functions rather than just picking them from a list.

Another annoying one was that the upgrade somehow broke the init scripts for my MySQL server. I don't know how the heck that happened. I tried uninstalling it, wiping the broken init scripts, and reinstalling, but they weren't recreated, which seemed odd to me. I eventually ended up just doing a dpgk --extract on the MySQL package and manually copying the scripts into place.

On another weird note, KDE and/or X11 has been randomly killing the buttons on my mouse. I'll be working along fine and suddenly clicking a mouse button will no longer do anything. It still moves, and the keyboard still responds, but clicking does nothing. Restarting the X server resolves the problem, but that's cold comfort. It seems to happen randomly - except for when I try to run Virtual Box, in which case it happens every time the VM loses focus. Fortunately I'm more of a VMware person, so that's not a big deal, but it's still disquieting.

KDE4 In General

The other big pain-point is KDE 4. To be perfectly blunt, I don't like it. It has a few neat new features, but so far it doesn't seem worth the effort to upgrade.

The good parts that I've noticed so far seem to be small. For instance, Dolphin has a couple of nice enhancements. The one that sticks out is the graphical item-by-item highlighting. It allows you to click a little plus/minus icon to select/deselect an item, so that you no longer need to hold the control key to do arbitrary muliple selects. The media manager panel applet is nice too. It pops up a list of inserted storage devices and allows you to mount and eject them. I have to admit that I also really like the new "run" dialog. It does program searching much like Katapult, but makes it easier to run arbitrary commands and select commands with similar names. While it doesn't have some of the cool features supplied by Katapult's plugins, it's still quite good.

On the other hand, there are a lot of things I don't like (not counting the breakage). For one, I think the new version of Konsole is a huge step backward. I can't access the menus with keyboard shortcuts, the "new tab from bookmark" feature is MIA, the session close buttons are gone, and generally everything I had gotten used to is missing.

And then there's the new "kickoff" application menu. I'm getting slightly more used to it, but I still don't like it. It just feels a lot slower to access items using it. This is only made worse by the "back" button for browsing sub-menus, which is extremely hard to click when you're in a hurry (hint: Fitt's law doesn't apply on multi-monitor setups).

As for the "cool" new look of KDE 4...I'm not a fan. Maybe it's just because I don't have any of the fancy desktop effects turned on on my system (a side-effect of the crappy integrated video card that's part of my tri-monitor setup), but I just don't think it looks good. Yeah, the bare desktop itself is kind of nice looking, but the window theme is ugly as sin. It's one of those "brushed metal" sort of looks, which I find even more depressing than Windows 95 gray. It's too dark for my taste and far too monochromatic. I also find the active window highlighting to be way too subtle to be helpful. The icons also leave something to be desired. They look nice, but they don't look distinct - even after a week, it takes me a second to figure out what some of them are supposed to represent. It kind of defeats the entire point of icons.

As for the much touted Plasma, I'll grant them this - it is pretty. The panel and desktop plasmoids do pretty much all look nice. Not that it matters to me, though, because I never see my desktop - it's always covered with work. And while the various applets and widgets may look pretty, approximately 90% of them are completely useless. That's the problem with all desktop widgets for any platform. I find that if a desktop widget actually provides enough valuable functionality to justify leaving a space open for it on the desktop, it's job is probably better served by a full-fledged applicaiton. And if it's not important enough to make constantly visible, then why bother to put it on the desktop at all? I'm never going to see it, so I might as well save the RAM and CPU cycles.

Conclusion

Overall, I guess Kubuntu 8.10 and KDE 4 aren't bad systems. But to be honest, I'm not impressed. For the first time, I think that the new Kubuntu is not an improvement. In fact, I have no plans to upgrade the 3 Kubuntu boxes I have at home any time in the forseeable future.

The thing that's most disappointing to me about the upgrade to KDE 4 is that it totally defeats my purpose in switching to KDE in the first place. When I switched from the ROX desktop to KDE back in 2005, my main reason was that I was tired of having to build my own desktop. ROX was great, but it was a small community and just didn't have the range of applications and degree of integration that KDE had. You see, I always had this crazy idea that I could just use all KDE applications and everything would be tightly integrated and work well together and there would be harmony throughout my desktop.

However, more and more I've been finding that that just isn't true. Part of the problem is that lots of KDE applications just aren't that good - many of them are missing functionality and have stability problems. I find myself using fewer KDE applications all the time. I dropped Quanta+ for Komodo Edit; I tried to like Konqueror, but it just doesn't hold a candle to Firefox or Opera; I recently tried to become a KPilot user, but was almost immediately forced to switch to JPilot; I finally got fed-up with Akregator and am just using the RSS reader in Opera's M2 mail client; I still use KMail, but not because I particularly like it - I just dislike it less than M2 or Thunderbird. In fact, I think the only KDE app I would actually miss is Amarok. (K3B is very good too, but I don't burn enough disks to care what program I use, just so long as it works.)

So now I'm starting to wonder: What's the point of using KDE? If I'm not using many KDE applications, and most of the ones I am using could be easily swapped out, it seems like there's nothing keeping me with it. Maybe I should just switch to GNOME. Or maybe Windows. I have been wanting to get more into .NET development, and my tollerance for things not working has been falling over the years, so Windows is sounding better all the time.

I think next weeek I'm going to have to reinstall my work machine. Maybe a fresh install and a fresh KDE profile will give me a better experience. Or perhaps I'll ditch Kubuntu and go for straight Ubuntu with GNOME. Or perhaps I could take another look at ROX. I don't know. And while I'm at it, I think I might reinstall that old Windows partition I still have on that machine. Maybe some time playing with a nice clean install of XP, or even Vista, if we have a spare copy, will give me a little perspective.

In the past, Ubuntu upgrades have been a pretty hit and miss process. Earlier releases involved manually editing your sources.list file and running apt-get commands in a particular order. The last upgrade, however, was a much less painful procedure, and this one followed in its steps. However, it still wasn't nearly as seemless a process as I would have liked.

Currently I have 4 machines running Kubuntu Linux: my home desktop, Sarah's desktop, my laptop, and my work desktop. So far I have upgraded my home and work desktop and done a clean install on my laptop. Sarah's desktop will also be a clean install when I get around to it, because she's still on release 6.06, which can't be upgraded directly.

First, I'll start with the good news. I experienced no hardware problems whatsoever when upgrading. Everything "just worked" after the upgrade. This was no surprise on my home desktop, which is now using a wired LAN connection and has no exotic hardware. It wasn't a big surprise on my work desktop either, as the only weird hardware that has is the tri-head display setup, the configuration for which should have carried over from before the upgrade. With my laptop, however, I was pleased to discover that the integrated Broadcom card now works without NDISwrapper. Kubuntu's new restricted driver manager allowed me to automatically download and install the binary firmware the card needed to run, and after that it worked perfectly. The process was entirely graphical and consisted of just a few clicks. No fuss, no muss!

Now the bad news. While the laptop install was pretty smooth, the desktop upgrades weren't that great. My home desktop just had a slight hicough, as the installer bombed out after complaining that it couldn't verify the gutsy-security repository. This was easily fixed by commenting that repository out of my sources.list and re-running the upgrade. After that, the only problem was that the entire process was really slow and required sporadic user interaction. That part actually caused the upgrade to drag out over the entire day, as I would answer one prompt, go away for two hours, come back to another, and so forth. However, it wasn't as bad as the last upgrade.

My work desktop, on the other hand, was a huge pain. The system functioned properly once I was done, but it was way harder than it should have been. But on the up side, the dual-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and gigabit LAN with a fiber connection made things pretty fast.

Basically, my problem was that the upgrade tool just kept crashing and hanging. For instance, I had to kill it after it spent over half an hour configuring an OpenOffice package. This might have been due to our internet connection going down briefly, but it's hard to say for sure, as I the upgrade tool wouldn't give me any terminal output at that point. After that, I had another, similar, hang, followed by several crashes. The one crash which kept recurring turned out to be caused by the mono-xsp package. Apparently, when the install script tried to shut down the service, the xsp script in /etc/init.d was bombing out with an invalid file descriptor error. This, in turn, was killing Adept. To cut a long the story short, I forced the upgrade on xsp, ran dpkg --configure -a a few times, and everything was eventually fixed. But it was an ugly, command-line intensive process.

Going back to the brighter side, I'm liking Kubuntu Gutsy so far. It's not a radical departure from Feisty, but the changes I've seen so far are nice. I've already mentioned the restricted driver manager, which is great. The boot time seems to have dropped noticably as well. They've also switched from Konqueror to Dolphin as the default file manager. I didn't care for Dolphin when I had tried it in the past, but it's starting to grow on me. It has the features I use on a regular basis and is certainly less complicated than Konqueror.

Another little nicety is that they've moved to a KDM theme with a user list. I believe that, in the past, KDM themes didn't work correctly with user lists, but it seems that that's no longer a problem. I always liked that feature - it just makes the login a little more personal, I think, what with the little avatars and such. It will also be nice for when I migrate my mother's system from Xandros 3.0 (hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time) to Kubuntu. Having a list of usernames means one less thing to remember.

Lastly, I see that they've added Strigi as the default desktop search engine. I don't have any experience with Strigi, but I have had some not-so-great experiences with Beagle. In particular, it has a tendency to just hammer your system, sometimes causing serious drag. It also generates pretty large indexes. I've read that Strigi is supposed to fix both of those problems, but haven't used it long enough to say for sure.

The one problem I have with Strigi is the user interface. To call it "spartan" would be an understatement. It's a browser-based interface that makes Google's front page look lavish. Honestly, it feels like the UI is an afterthought. Compare this to Kerry Beagle, which is simple to use, but very pretty and very functional. Hopefully there's a Strigi front-end someplace that's comparable.

So, to summarize, Kubuntu keeps getting better. It's evolution is gradual, but visible. We'be certainly come a long way from release 5.10, which I thought was pretty good at the time. Now if only KDE 4 was done....

My requirements for a PHP IDE are, I think, not unreasonable. In addition to syntax highlighting (which should be a given for any code editor), I need to following:

1. Support for editing remote files over SSH. This is non-negotiable.
2. A PHP parser, preferably with intellisense and code completion.
3. A file tree browser that supports SSH.
4. Syntax highlighting, and perferably parsers, for (X)HTML and JavaScript.
5. Search and replace that supports regular expressions.
6. Support for an ad hoc, per-file workflow. In other words, I don't want something that is extremely project-centric.
7. It should be free - preferably as-in-speech, but I'll take as-in-beer if it's really good.

So far, my preferred IDE has been Quanta Plus. It has all of the features I need and also integrates nicely with KDE. It also has a few other nice features, including context-sensitive help (once you install the documentation in the right place). However, the build of Quanta 3.5.6 that came with Kubuntu Feisty is kind of unstable. It crashes on me every few days, and for one project, I actually had to switch to something else because I was making heavy use of regex search and replace, which was consistently crashing Quanta. Also, while Quanta has a PHP parser with some intellisense, it's pretty weak and not in any way comparable to, say, Visual Studio.

My second heavier-weight choice is ActiveState's free KomodoEdit. This is a very nice, XUL-based editor. It's stongest feature is undoubtedly the PHP parser. It's really outstanding. For instance, it can scan pre-determined paths for PHP files and do intellisense for them. It even understands PHPDoc syntax and can add the documentation to the intellisense.

The down side is that, while Komodo does speak SFTP, the file browser tree only does local files. There is a Remote Drive Tree extension that adds this feature, but while it's better than nothing, it still isn't that good. I also don't much care for the look of Komodo or for the keyboard shortcuts. Those things are much easier to customize in Quanta.

After Quanta, my other old stand-by is jEdit. After installing the PHPParser, XML, and FTP plugins, this meets my needs. On the down side, the PHP parser doesn't do any intellisense (although it does detect syntax errors). The interface also feels a littly clunky at times, although it's much better than the average Java application and not really any worse than Quanta in that regard.

I took a brief look at a couple of Eclipse setups, but wasn't initially impressed by them. It might be worth looking at them again some time, but the whole process of getting and installing the appropriate plugins just seemed like a lot of trouble. Same goes for Vim. I'm sure I could get it to do most, if not all, of what I want, but it seems like an awful lot of trouble. And then, of course, there's the Zend IDE, which I don't really want to pay for. And besides, my one of my co-workers told me that, while it's a decent IDE, the real selling point is the integrated debugging and profiling, which won't work on our setup.

And so my intermitent search goes on. I'm hoping that the upgrade to Kubuntu Gutsy will fix the stability problems in Quanta, which is my biggest problem with it. I'm also hoping for some nice new features when KDE 4 comes along. But I guess I'll keep looking in the meantime.

The basic idea behind Katapult is simple. It runs in the background, waiting for you to press a hotkey combination. When you do, it pops up a pretty little window that catches keystrokes and matches what you type against the installed programs. When it finds the one you want, you hit enter and it runs.

There you have it. Simple, efficient...and not particularly useful. At least, I didn't used to think so, because you can only enter programs with a .desktop file, not arbitrary command lines. It's kind of handy when you don't feel like typing a full executalble name, but what's the big deal?

Well, it turns out that Katapult does more than just launch programs. It does a number of other handy things as well. For instance, you can use it as a calculator. Just type in numbers and arithmetic symbols instead of letters. Hit enter and the resulting equation gets copied to the clipboard. Neat!

It also can act as a spell checker. For that, you type a pre-configured keyword and then the word you want to spell check. This is actually an insanely useful feature. I often find myself firing up a word processor or opening a browser tab and heading to dictionary.com just to I can check the spelling of a single word. With this feature, I can do it with just a few keystrokes rather than switching applications.

And there's even more goodness to talk about. Katapult can search for bookmarks to open, it can search for file names in your documents folder, and it can even find audio tracks if you have Amarok running. In reality, it's not so much an application launcher as it is a generic "quick-launcher" for just about anything.

The only problem I've found so far is that all these cool features are not immediately obvious. After all, that's why I was so uninspired by Katapult initially - because I thought it just ran applications. It just took a quick visit to the website and a perusal of the configuration options to figure out just how cool it is. Now that I know, I think I'm going to be using it all the time. Kudos to the Katapult guys!

Take today, for example. I was having a slow day at work, so to control the bordom, I downloaded some old episodes of Scott Hanselman's podcast, Hanselminutes. The episode in question was on the top ten Windows tools/features you didn't know you had. The first tip (#10) was that you can still use the keyboard in the middle of a drag-and-drop operation. So, for example, you can still alt+Tab, use a VirtuaWin hotkey to switch desktop, and just generall do a bunch of stuff I never thought to do with drag-and-drop. It just struck me as both very handy and so obvious I can't believe I never thought of it.

So, naturally, the first thing I did was try it out. Unsurprisingly, it worked and was very cool. And just as naturally, the second thing I did was fire up Kubuntu Edgy in VMware to see if it worked in KDE. And guess what - it does! Not that I should be surprised - there's no reason I know of why it wouldn't work in KDE. It's just that when you go back and forth between Linux and Windows, you get used to the idea that everything is always different. This was one of those "freebies" you discover every now and then that makes you feel nice.

In fact, the relative closeness of KDE to Windows is what attracted me to it in the first place. I started off with the Unices back when GNOME and KDE were in the 1.x releases and - let's face it - they both sucked. Thus I was an old-school AfterStep user for several years and then migrated to ROX and Sawfish. But while ROX was nice, and I really bought into the idea of how it worked, the user experience was just too different from Windows. After a while, going back and forth started to feel jarring. I just had to bring the two closer together. And since there's not much you can do about the interface for Windows, it was obvious that the Linux side would have to change.

I really appreciate it when KDE and other Linux desktop projects make things more Windows-like. Windows might get some things wrong, but there is also a lot that it gets right. Real respect for the user is fixing the geniune problems with the interface he's accustomed to, not making things different for the sake of being different or for some abstract design principles. I think Tog said it best in discussing the differences between Windows and Macs:

Consistency is a funny thing. The most important area of consistency is the area most people don't even think about; which is why it is the most important area. What am I talking about? Shortcut keys. Button ordering. And all those other little things users learned way-back-when, soon absorbed into habit, and never considered again. The way a lot of these work is backwards in Windows. No, let me correct that. It was backwards in Windows, until Windows hit a 90% market share. Now, it is backwards in Macintosh.

As you may know, the traditional UNIX method for hiding files is to start the name with a period, such as ".vimrc" or ".profile". That works well enough, but there's one obvious problem: you have to rename the file. You can't just go renaming any old file or directory willy-nilly. That's how you break your system.

Hence the .hidden file. You just create a .hidden file in a directory and in it you put the names of any files or directories you want to hide, one per line. That's it. Once you have that, KDE will treat those files/directories as hidden.

This is quite useful for my home directory, because I have my home directory set as my desktop. For the most part, I like this setup. However, there are always a few directories that I seldom, if ever, need to see in the file manager, like ~/Mail or ~/texmf. Using a .hidden file conveniently frees up those extra pixels without the hassle of dealing with symlinks or shortcuts and without the need to reconfigure any software.

This time, something happened to Amarok. I'm not sure what, but the next day, my podcasts were just gone. The previously downloaded files were still there, but the "Podcasts" folder in my playlist panel was empty.

The worst part was that, when I tried to re-add the few podcasts I subscribe to, things didn't work properly. I used the "configure children" option to set the defaults to download under a particular directory and to download when available. However, when I added child podcasts, the settings reverted to the system defaults. And for some reason, it took several tries to get the "download when available" option to stick.

So my question is: what the hell?!? That's just weird and I can't figure out, for the life of me, why that would happen. But on the other hand, Ubuntu Feisty is supposed to be coming out in the next week, so hopefully this won't be an issue for much longer.

I already knew about updating the desktop and file manager configuration with kfmclient configureDesktop and kfmclient configure, but I never stopped to think that there was a similar command for KDE in general.

But then, a KDevelop error message reminded me of SyCoCa, the KDE System Configuration Cache, and pointed out the kbuildsycoca command. Basically, is just regenerates the configuration cache. This includes updating the start menu (or K menu, or whatever the hell you want to call it). Very handy when you just installed something two seconds ago and want to bring up it up without resorting to the command line.