First 5 minutes with Kubuntu Lucid Lynx

                         

During the weekend I ran into the news that Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS, the new upgrade of Ubuntu, was already available. As a Linux fan this is always good news, but at the same time I'm wary about bugs an problems that can delay what I'm doing at the moment or even break something and make my system unusable for a couple of days.

  

It was time to check the features included in this version and see if they were interesting enough to make me go “lucid”.

It turned out that most of the things were already somehow available for me, but what mainly caught my attention was the new Ubuntu One music store, open for many European countries including Estonia, unfortunately not so sure about Venezuela and other Latin American countries yet.

One of the best things of the store is that it will be synched with Ubuntu One, the cloud storage solution offered by Canonical, which means that all my songs will be available in my work and personal computer automatically. Besides this, if you buy through the store you’ll get to help the Iberian Lynx:

“To contribute to the charity all you have to do is buy a track at the normal cost. That's it. Canonical will give away 50% of our take of the revenue up to a total of $1004. You can of course directly contribute to the charity if you prefer.”

After reading all this I decided to go for the upgrade, which took around 7 hours with a 80KB/s average download speed and around 1 hour to install, remove deprecated packages and configure the whole thing. In the end, it was the smoothest upgrade ever! Though I have to warn that some people with dual partition (I removed Windows a while ago) have had problems after reboot, so it might be wise for you to check this out before doing it.

My first impression? Awesomeness! The UI seems more stable and integrated, boot up time reduction is obvious, in general you can feel that it was totally worth doing the upgrade J

So that’s it, I hope this gives you enough interest to give a try to the new Lucid Lynx!

Smb4k "org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply" problem in Kubuntu Karmic Koala

I was trying to start Sbm4k today and after running the command I noticed that the application was doing nothing besides creating an entry in the task bar that disappears in a while. After executing Smb4k from the console I got the following error:

(4408)/: Communication problem with  "smb4k" , it probably crashed.
Error message was:  "org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply" : " "Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus)" " 

Well it seems that there is a bug related to this problem in launchpad that has been fixed but obviously doesn't work in my system and after reading for a while I found the following suggestion:

"remove the ~/.kde4/share/apps/smb4k/custom_options.xml"

Smb4k is running on an infinite loop mounting things on startup. In my system I couldn't find such file and I noticed that I have the fixed version of this application as described in the launchpad bug, but since this is the first time I run Smb4k since the update, the old setting that was causing the bug was still being used and it was trying to remount old bookmarked  locations on startup hence falling in the infinite loop.

The solution in my case was to rename the bookmark file before starting smb4k:

"/.kde/share/apps/smb4k$ mv bookmarks.xml bookmarks.xmlBAK"

Then changing it back to its previous name, I hope it helps ;)

Eclipse button problem with Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

I ran into this issue while installing the Google App Engine... a quick description of the problem is that some buttons in Eclipse were not responding (doing nothing) after I upgraded to Karmic Koala, after checking the log file, network connection settings and some other things that didn't work I decided to ask the oracle (Google) about it and after a while I found a simple and quick solution here.

Just create an executable file with the following content:

 #!/bin/sh  
 export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1  
 /opt/eclipse-3.5/eclipse  

Now back to coding ;)

How to disable Kubuntu login sound

I don't know about you, but in my case the login sound can be a problem at home while rebooting the system when my wife is sleeping, so I took a couple of minutes to find out how to disable it and here it is.
 

1. Go to "System Settings"
2. Click on "Notifications"
3. Select "KDE System Notifications" from the drop-down menu
4. Find the "Login" event
5. Untick the "Play a sound" option and that's it.

Here you can check the screenshot

Upgrade to Karmic Koala (Kubuntu 9.10)

The new version Karmic Koala was just released this week and I took a few hours during the weekend to upgrade my system. The download and install process through the upgrade manager went out perfectly until I had to restart and noticed the following errors:

"init:sreadahead main process terminated with status 1 init"

and

"One or more of the mounts listed in /etc/fstab cannot yet be mounted: 
(ESC for recovery shell)
/: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx"

To solve the first issue find the follwing lines in your /etc/init/sreadahead.conf file

“start on starting mountall

stop on stopped rc”


And replace the first line like this:

“#start on starting mountall

start on filesystem”

To solve the second issue edit the following in your /etc/fstab file:

- Disable fsck on vfat by setting to "0" the value in the last column of you vfat entry this way

“UUID=XXXX-XXX /media/hda1 vfat defaults,utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 0”

- Replace all UUID by /dev/sdxx

After this changes the error was still there, then I noticed that during startup my old kernels were the only option in the grub menu and I couldn´t access the one installed during the upgrade. Googling the issue resulted in a forum thread that describes this solution:

- Make your devices writable again:

“mount -n -o remount,rw /”
- Install broken packages (it took a while for me):
“sudo dpkg --configure -a”
- Now you should be able to reboot the system and access 9.10!

In case you want more info about the fstab file you can check this link.

That´s it for now!