I’m sad to report that I will be uninstalling the VirtualPC installation that I did last week. I had installed Ubuntu under it; but it just ended up not working out too well. Ubuntu was pretty much useless under VirtualPC; even when I gave it 512mb dedicated Ram. I don’t know if it is the fault of VirtualPC or Ubuntu; but that whole configuration was not good. The only way to truly enjoy Ubuntu is to do a proper installation on a separate partition. I really want to try out beryl; but I need a better video card than my POS Radeon7500 from 4yrs ago..
February 26th, 2007
With the recent move by Microsoft to make VirtualPC a free download; I downloaded it and tried it on my computer. Ofcourse the only ‘other’ OS I wanted to install was Ubuntu and see how it looks. I have to see; it was very easy to install Ubuntu with Virtual PC; the only problem was that I had to hack the xorg.conf file to default to ‘16bit depth’ rather than 24. For some reason; VirualPC only support 16bit. So now I have ubuntu running inside a window on my compute.. How cool is that?
virtualpc_ubuntu Hosted on
Zooomr February 24th, 2007
I finally removed Ubuntu from my computer this weekend. It was a pretty cool OS and everything; but I never used it. I believed it must have been a month since I logged into Ubuntu. Mainly due to the fact that I was so busy at work; I did not even use my home computer all that much. Anyways; I removed it and reclaimed the 15gig partition that I had set up for it. 5 of those gig went to my music partition. The other 10 I have just lying around for now. I think I might experiment with VMware a little bit and see how that goes. But that will have to wait; need to get some free time from work. Its been absolutely insane for the past few months there; but slowly and surely things are falling in place.
July 31st, 2006
Today Kubuntu 6.06 has been officially released . I have been running the release-candidate (dapper drake) version for about a month and can’t wait to upgrade to the release version. There might be a lot of people who are going to be trying out Kubuntu for the first time. Here are some guides that I have written in the past that may come in handy.
- Guide to access your Windows Partitions
- Setting up KDevelop on Kubuntu
- How to setup your default web browser to Firefox
June 1st, 2006
I religiously use Picasa on my computer to manage my digital pictures. I have been trying out a few things on Kubuntu but did not find anything as cool as Picasa. I tried using digiKam, showFoto but none of them came close to the beauty and power of Picasa. Well; looks like my search for a Picasa replacement is over in Kubuntu. Google labs has introduced a native Linux version. It runs and looks just like the Windows version; and trust me, in this case that is a good thing. 
Link to Download
The whole thing downloaded and installed in seconds; thanks to the nice packaging job Google did.
May 25th, 2006
One of the main reasons that I chose kubuntu over the more popular Ubuntu was the KDE base that it was built on. I had heard good things about development on Kde; and I wanted to try my hand at it. KDE, in my opinion, has one of the best free IDE available for it: KDevelop. KDevelop allows you to easily develop and deploy KDE applications. I was very surprised to see that KDevelop was not installed in the base Kubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake install that I had done. But the beauty of Kubuntu (or Ubuntu) for that matter is that the software installation method is much more refined than in the past. For Kubuntu; I was able to use Adept (package manager) to download the KDevelop package. But to my dismay, just downloading the KDevelop package was not enough. There were other key development libraries/tools that were missing. I decided to document the steps that I followed to get to a stage where I could compile and run a simple KDE application.
Below is a list of packages that you will have to download. The order listed is the order that I downloaded them in. I suggest that you do the same. All of these packages were available in the Adept package manager. Just type in the names as listed below and install away. One nice thing to note is that during the whole install process; not even one restart was required. Windows can learn a little something from this. On to the list!
- kdevelop3
- kdevelop3-data
- kdevelop3-dev
- kdevelop3-doc
- kdevelop3-plugins
- make
- automake 1.9
- gcc-3.3
- g++-3.3
- libc6-dev
- kdebase-dev
Now that you have installed the required packages; we need to do some cleanup. My Kubuntu installation came with ‘automake 1.6′ install. So I used Adept to remove that package since we just installed automake v1.9 listed above. The second thing that I had to do was change the executable for gcc and g++. The versions we installed are called ‘gcc-3.3′ and ‘g++-3.3′. The problem is that KDevelop is looking for ‘gcc’ and ‘g++’. I fixed the problem by just creating a ’sym link’ in my /usr/bin directory. Think of a ’sym link’ as a ’shortcut’ in Windows. The commands to do that are listed below.
sudo ln -sf /usr/bin/gcc-3.3 /usr/bin/gcc
sudo ln -sf /usr/bin/g++-3.3 /usr/bin/g++
Now you are done! You can go ahead and attempt to build your first KDevelop App. Launch ‘KDevelop: KDE/C++ (IDE for KDE development)’ from the Development menu that is in your ‘K menu’. Once KDevelop launches; create a ‘New Project’ and build a ’simple KDE app’. Use this image as a guide on which entry to choose.
Run through the new project wizard and you will have a bare bone KDE project. From the build menu; choose ‘Run automake and friends’. After this is successfull; run ‘Build->Run Configure’. Now your project is ready to ‘Build’. Choose ‘Build->Build Project’ and then you can execute it by doing ‘Build->Execute Program’. Congrats! You have just built your first KDE application.
I hope this guide was helpful for you. Please digg this story so others can find it. If you run into any problems; please post them here because they might be similar to what I have already seen. I might be able to help; since I ran into a lot of problems while I was setting up my system for development.
Please digg this guide if you found it useful so others can see it.
May 19th, 2006
