jennyrad

When Pigling was running Debian, plugging TomTwo - my EOS300D, or "camera" - into Pigling resulted in a dialogue box which I had a sensible way of using. This no longer appears to be the case.

TomTwo saves photographs into folders: in effect, you have MemoryCard/DCIM/SubFolders/File.CRW, with a hundred images per subfolder. The dialogue box I got under Debian showed me all the File.CRW files irrespective of their subfolder, and I could thus choose the ones that had not previously been synced to Pigling and copy all of them onto Pigling, where they went into a subfolder of my Images by date/time of sync. This worked well. KPhotoAlbum, which I use to keep track of images, looks at all subfolders of Images, and it's all hunkeydory.

KUbuntu, whether I plug the memory card in directly to a card reader or plug the cable into the camera, is using something called Gwenview Importer, which will only allow me to select photos from one subfolder at a time, or else multiple subfolders. This is inconvenient; rarely do I sync when (e.g.) 234Canon is full but 235Canon hasn't been started yet. Either I have to go into multiple folders and sync multiple times, or I have to end up with duplicate images because I've taken a folder I'd already moved. Not good.

Must find a better syncing resource, this one doesn't work!

So, small pointy point: System Settings -> Workspace Appearance and Behaviour heading -> Window Behaviour -> Screen edges allows me to stop the blasted thing from maximising windows I don't want maximised.

I don't like Amarok at all and Rhythmbox doesn't seem to love me ... someone's recommended Clementine, which is an Amarok 1.4-inspired player. Currently it seems to be very nice indeed, though I have yet to persuade it to give me a smart playlist of all my unrated songs - oh, yes, I can; setting it to find everything with a rating of 0 didn't work, but setting it to everything with a rating less than 1 worked. It also isn't seeing all the ratings I gave music before, nor do I know how to import that stuff - I really must remember, next time I change OS or anything, to export and save said ratings. (I have the rhythmbox data, but converting it's going to be a bugger and I can't be arsed.)

I've also been playing a lot with themes, trying to get the thing to look the way I want it to. Struggling so far, but it's interesting struggling.

The sound problem has been solved by removing /etc/asound.conf. I still have no notificationy beeps coming from XChat, but this is not a surprise.

I'm now installing updates - quite why so many things need updating, or claim to, given that I installed from the internet using a totally recent net-boot installer, I do not know. But I shall assume there's a good reason and hope it doesn't break anything.

I'm also installing Aptitude; I don't like KPackageKit at all. I don't have a clear idea of how to make sure Kubuntu knows it should be using Aptitude. This will take some research, I fear.

A very very minor niggle I want to turn off: lots of my non-maximised windows are, and should be, in the upper right. When I open them they're in the top left. This was true under Debian too and I'm acclimatised to moving them - though I suppose in theory it would be interesting to find out how to default open windows in the upper right. But more importantly - when I move them, the blasted things seem to think this is me telling them to maximise. This is irritating. Somewhere there must be a setting ... I must find it.

Another small irritation is that what's in the system tray is thoroughly silly - and I can't seem to edit them. Or at least, what I think ought to work doesn't. This needs correcting.

Indeed, I'd quite like to be able to move things around on the task bar - I could do this in Debian by click-and-dragging, and surely it should therefore be possible here? Must be a setting somewhere. Must try to find it.

Oh, lord. While faffing around with the systray thing - if systray is the right word for it - I shifted things around and the taskbar bits ended up hidden and then the whole flaming thing crashed. Oops. And hasn't recovered, either; I suspect I need to restart stuff. Tried restarting the desktop - plasma-desktop - via the instructions given at this random website, to no avail. So I killed it using top and then did kstart plasma-desktop. And it was still thoroughly unhappy. So I deleted ~/.kde/share/config/plasma* and then killed using top and restarted using kstart again. This obviously undid what I'd done about pinning launch icons to the panel and also re-imaged my desktop, but those are easily fixed. Now I have to play about without making the same mistake.

KGS. Java. Oh, I hope this works more smoothly than last time! A problem for another day.

Apparently installing Aptitude was a mistake. KPackageKit now won't do anything - it just sits there forever claiming to be searching but finding no packages. Aptitude, on the other hand, loads (albeit with many warnings at the console) and then searches happily for packages, for all the world as though it's working. Lets me mark them for installation. Then ... doesn't do anything (not even giving warnings on the console) when the "apply changes" button is clicked. Happy joy.

Using aptitude-curses may, or may not, be successfully installing LaTeX. It certainly appears to be successfully downloading the relevant packages. But I am going to emphatically claim that something has gone wrong and that I don't think it was me doing something stupid - if installing a second package-manager is going to make the first package-manager crash, how the hell is one supposed to change package-manager? I suppose in theory I should have googled first to see if it would break anything ...

While I wait for aptitude-curses to finish, I will also note that xchat appears to be trying to be far too clever with opening links - it's opening some things in Firefox as I want it to, but a link someone posted that had a .gif extension, it opened in an image viewer of some sort. This isn't an xchat session, I don't think; I think it must be plasma-desktop or, I don't know, some X thingy? At any rate, perplexing!

Aptitude-curses having successfully downloaded the LaTeX packages, it won't install them, because something is locking /var/lib/dpkg . Botheration. I can't find what's locking it - nothing obvious in ps -A. Judicious use of lsof identifies a rogue thing that needs root to kill it, so I kill it. Then it installs them. Hurrah.

Using aptitude-curses again, I installed synaptic.

This I had trouble running it - and I think I may have discovered what the aptitude problem was at the same time - because it isn't running as root. Synaptic had the courtesy to tell me that's why it wasn't doing anything, though. So. This was resolved once I discovered I had to use kdesudo instead of sudo. No idea why, but it worked, so I'm not knocking it.

Well. That's been an exciting day (or number of hours, anyway) faffing around, and the machine is getting on for feeling like home. Huzzah!

While KPhotoAlbum and LaTeX were busy installing themselves, I got on with doing other bits of fiddling. Things were going quite nicely.

Then I was playing with display settings and it crashed again. I rebooted. Had hardly started anything going again when it crashed again.

That's five times.

There's nothing that stands out to me in the syslog, kern.log, daemon.log, Xorg.0.log, or ~/.xsession-errors. This is ... mystifying. Frustrating. Infuriating, even.

Of course, Matthew is more alert than I and spotted the quantities of "ERROR" and "ILLEGAL" things in the kern.log that I totally missed. And the fact that the proprietary NVIDIA drivers did not, in fact, install.

Reinstalling them. Rebooting as required.

This time, the proprietary drivers are definitely installed and appear to be working. So I'm going to bed, to play more with settings in the morning.

Well. That didn't work. As in, it reverted to the "black screen with flashing cursor". Tried removing all USB cables, just in case it was getting confused. No joy.

Grub is clearly broken somehow. Again.

I've re-run the Ubuntu installer in Rescue Mode and am about to try reinstall Grub, as soon as I've worked out where I'm meant to put it.

Trying /dev/sdb.

Appears to work. Rebooting system.

Appears to have successfully booted Kubuntu.

That's ... not the operating system I was expecting. I am disinclined to complain ...

So. On reflection, what difference can asking it not to download stuff make? Very little.

It was clear, if I booted to the LiveCD version, that /home/flopsie/ had been created as appropriate. Manifestly, there was a problem with the bootloader not being installed, not with the install itself.

So, following a recommendation, I'm installing Ubuntu using the net-boot-thingummy.

I've chosen the GUI expert install options.

I've told it I'm in the UK, with no additional locales.

I've set up the correct keyboard.

I've told it I'm happy having the usb-storage module installed.

I'm not specifying a PCMCIA hardware option.

The network can configure via DHCP. I bloody hope, anyway.

The hostname is pigling.

I'm a bit perturbed by its asking for a domain name. I wonder if it's going to sulk when I leave it blank.

I've asked it to use http, and a mirror in the UK.

No http proxy should be necessary.

Now it's downloading installer components, with nothing additional selected because it doesn't look as if I need them.

The timezone is set correctly.

It has scanned for disks, and is now setting up partitioning ... this could be where it gets hairy.

Having established that the larger disk is sdb, I've asked it to resize that and use the freed space.

I've written changes and am moving on to partition sizes. It tells me what min (10.2GB) and max (484.8GB) are permitted, but not what's a good idea. I wonder what I should do ... Arbitrarily using 247.5GB.

Requesting seperate /home, /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions.

It is now formatting the partitions.

Now it's installing the base system. This appears to be a slow process.

In fact, it's so slow I'm afraid of losing this post, so I'm going to post it.

Advice To Those Creating Operating Systems: don't have a screensaver of blackness kick in during install! I failed to realise that that was what had happened and took the disk out instead of trying moving the mouse ... Fortunately it doesn't seem to have stopped the install, but ...

Oh, maybe it did. Who can tell? Finished up at the screen that was identical to the one given when I did "try Kubuntu" - but as soon as I clicked, it black-screened and unresponsive.

Rebooting without the disk in gets back to the "flashing cursor", so back to the drawing board, try again, this time without removing disk mid-install.

Chug chug chug, Pigling went, installing.

"Installation complete!" he declares, "You must now restart the computer! Click restart!"

I clicked restart.

Chug chug chug. DVD drawer opens. Quoth the screen: "Remove the media from the tray, close the tray (if appropriate), and press enter."

I remove the DVD, close the tray, and press enter.

Chug chug chug. Black screen. Flashing cursor at top left. Sit. Sit a bit longer. Wait. Wait more. Nothing happens.

Turn off using On switch. Turn back on.

Normal BIOS-offerings and HD detection and all that jazz. And back to ... the black screen with the flashing cursor.

Repeat.

This time I'm going to wait 10 minutes - as timed by this entry - just in case I'm missing something obvious. Then I'll put the disc back in and reboot again.