7 KDE Apps to Get After Installing Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

Yakuake - Quake-like terminal application - full review
This is a great replacement console for the default Konsole which ships with KDE and implicitly with Kubuntu. The great thing about Yakuake is that is uses a Quake-style show/hide function, which can be accessed by default using the F12 keyboard shortcut. Press F12 to show the terminal, do you work, then hide it again when you don't need it anymore. Yakuake supports profiles (which can be configured the same way like a Konsole profile), global shortcuts, allows to change default size and animation speed, it supports skins, transparency, start-up options (like start with window shown or hidden), transparency. Supported are also multiple tabs, which can be switched by pressing Shift+Right/Left Arrow.
Homepage

sudo apt-get install yakuake


Yakuake 2.9.7


BasKet - powerful notes taking application - full review
BasKet Note Pads is one of the applications that I fell in love with immediately after trying it, ever since it was available only for KDE3. For those who didn't try it yet, BasKet is feature-rich and powerful notes-taking application, but not only. It's not your ordinary notes application, it has much more to it. The workspace can organise your notes in one or more columns, or in custom (free) positions, it supports tags, inserting of images, links, launchers to applications or other disk locations, backup or restore BasKet archives, importing to various notes formats (included here are plain text files, KNotes, Sticky Notes, Tomboy), exporting to HTML file. The configuration window allows to enable/disable the system tray, configure global actions, animate changes in baskets, change the appearance of notes. All in all, if simple is not enough for you and a minimalist application like KNotes doesn't suffice, BasKet is definitely the KDE4 application for it, allowing to build complex projects rather than only text notes.
Homepage

sudo apt-get install basket


BasKet 2.0 Beta


Kdenlive - powerful video editor
Kdenlive is a very powerful video editor for KDE4 which bundles a big number of video editing features. It comes with a wide range video and audio effects, support for camcorders and cameras, multitrack support, exporting to formats like PAL, NTSC, h264.
Homepage

sudo apt-get install kdenlive


Kdenlive 0.7.8


Krusader - full-featured file manager - full review
Ever since the KDE3 days Krusader was usually the first choice when someone would ask for a replacement for Konqueror. Krusader uses by default a twin-panel interface, and ships with all the whistles and bells one would expect from a complete file manager. It includes support for user actions, including creating archives, calculate checksums, split or combine files, mass rename of files, show previews, sort files by various properties, synchronise directories, search, locate, profiles, tabs, shortcuts, sessions, bookmarks. Krusader is also highly configurable.
Homepage

sudo apt-get install krusader


Krusader 2.2.0 Beta


VLC - complete video player
In my opinion there are three major players for KDE: Kaffeine, SMPlayer and VLC, and all three are very good, and this time I chose VLC, one of the most popular movie players out there, and not only on the Linux platform. VLC offers anything you would expect from a media player, support for DVDs and HD formats, ISO DVD images, audio and video settings, bookmarks, subtitles, effects, plugins, playlists, minimal view mode. The preferences window allows to configure and change the way VLC looks and feels, OSD, volume normalization, hotkeys.
Homepage

sudo apt-get install vlc


VLC 1.1.4


digiKam - photo management application
digiKam is the ultimate photo management application for KDE, with support for a wide range of cameras, importing from PicasaWeb, Facebook, SmugMug or a remote computer, and exporting to a variety of services. It organises photos in albums, itoffers image processing tools and effects, and it's highly configurable.
Homepage

sudo apt-get install digikam


DigiKam 1.4.0


Clementine - KDE4 port of Amarok 1.4 - full review
Kubuntu comes with Amarok 2.2.0, but if you're happier with the look and feel of the older Amarok 1.4, Clementine is the perfect replacement. It offers an interface similar to the one of the KDE3 version of Amarok, and currently it integrates a pretty fair amount of features. Clementine comes with a file browser, radio support, Last.fm song submission, sortable playlists, cover manager, equalizer, cross-fading, tray icon integration, OSD, music library. Considering it isn't included in the Ubuntu Maverick repositories, here is a tutorial I've put up a while ago to install it.
Homepage
Tutorial - Install Clementine in Kubuntu 10.10


Clementine 0.3

Source URL: https://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/kubuntu
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How-To: Install Amarok 2.2 Beta 1 from the Kubuntu Beta Backports

The first beta of Amarok 2.2, codenamed 'Crystal Clear', was released on September 4 and packages are available for Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty from the Kubuntu Beta Backports.

Amarok 2.2 Beta 1 comes with a huge number of bug fixes and many improvements and new features. To list some of them:
- new videoclip applet
- new photo applet
- improved browser layout to the left
- widgets can now be arranged differently from default
- ratings
- support for audio CDs
- the playlist offers multi-level sorting now
Those are only the highlights though, to see the full announcement and changelog read this.

To install Amarok 2.2 Beta 1 in Kubuntu/Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope just follow the instructions below:

First, edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file with your favourite text editor, e.g.:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Or:

kdesudo kate /etc/apt/sources.list

Next, add the following two lines:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/beta/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/beta/ubuntu karmic main

Make sure to save the file and then add the trusted key for this repository:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 8AC93F7A

Now update your package lists:

sudo apt-get update

Eventually, remove your existing Amarok installation:

sudo apt-get remove --purge amarok
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge

And now install the latest Amarok:

sudo apt-get install amarok

This should be all. Run Amarok 2.2 Beta 1 by pressing Alt+F2 and typing amarok in KRunner.
Source URL: https://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/kubuntu
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Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala (Alpha 4) Overview & Screenshots

The fourth alpha of Ubuntu 9.10 was released a few days ago and since I covered it earlier in this article, here I'll briefly overview Kubuntu, the KDE-based distribution of Ubuntu. All the screenshots were taken after a complete dist-upgrade, so the software should be completely up-to-date as of today.


The new Karmic currently comes with Linux kernel 2.6.31, KDE 4.3, Amarok 2.1.1 as the audio player, Dragon Player as the default video player. In one of my previous articles I pointed out some of the new features in KDE 4.3, some of which are implicitly included in Karmic, like the new Plasma look, called Air, or the new KRunner.

Konqueror is a hell of a browser, with countless features and ease of use for those who are already used to it. These are not all, but it comes with web shortcuts, enabled AdBlock filters, profiles, plugins, shortcut to various web page translations, user agent switching and so on. There was a time when Konqueror was very unstable, but now I encountered no crashes, with Flash enabled. On the other hand it was always mature regarding features and usability, since the KDE3 days. YouTube works fine also, but I had to manually install the Flash plugin, although package flashplugin-nonfree was already installed.



Compared to the current stable Kubuntu, this one seems to be more responsive and faster, although resizing windows with desktop effects enabled can still be slow, but I tested this on my older GeForce 7600. Compositing works very well in KDE 4.3, at least that was my experience with it, and all the KDE applications interact good enough, but Firefox or GTK applications for example may be a little choppy (for example when using the Magic Lamp desktop effect). Of course, this is an alpha.


Some windows still have simple size issues, they are either too small or too big and need resizing.

One thing that bothers me at Konsole is that it still doesn't include a right-click context menu to close separate tabs, instead this functionality is available using Ctrl+Shift+W.


For some reason the Save as dialogue in KSnapshot won't show certain files, although their extension is the same selected in the dialogue. I noticed this happens only when saving on partitions mounted manually. This seems to happen at random.



Amarok 2.1.1


Since this is an alpha, there are still bugs and most of them come in applications which are not included in KDE, for example in Amarok 2. Also, the sound system doesn't seem to work, although this is a KDE problem I think, because on Ubuntu it does work.

Overall, this looks promising. The developers will have enough time to polish it until October, and KDE 4.3 really behaves very nice, not to mention the look.


Source URL: https://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/kubuntu
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How-To: Install KDE 4.3 in Ubuntu/Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

KDE 4.3 was released just yesterday, and it comes with a lot of great new features and improvements, like the the new Plasma theme called Air, new Plasma widgets, several improvements to Dolphin, the default KDE4 file manager, improvements to the KDE games, and these are just a tiny part of all the improvements KDE4 introduced. The full announcement including reader's changelog can be found on the official KDE4 website, here.

Kubuntu comes with an older release of KDE4, but there is a PPA (Personal Package Archives) available which includes the newest packages for Jaunty, so in order to install it just follow the steps below.

First, open up a terminal like Konsole or GNOME Terminal and edit the sources.list file using your favourite text editor, e.g.:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Or, for Kate:

sudo kdesu /etc/apt/sources.list

If you are installing KDE from Ubuntu, you can use Gedit:

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Enter your user password and add the following repository line:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu jaunty main

Next, make sure to save the file (Ctrl+O followed by Ctrl+X in Nano) and update the package lists:

sudo apt-get update

All you have to do now is to install the new KDE 4.3 environment by issuing:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Should take a while. This will fetch and install all the newer packages from the freshly added repository. To see the new KDE 4.3 installation log out and log back in KDE, or open up Konsole and type:

sudo /etc/init.d/kdm restart
Source URL: https://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/kubuntu
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KDE 4.3 RC1 in Kubuntu 9.04 - Overview & Screenshots

I took some time today to install and take for a spin the latest version of KDE4 today, release 4.3 RC1. I installed the packages from the Kubuntu backports repositories, as explained in this tutorial. All the screenshots were taken at 1280x1024 and desktop effects enabled.

The first change it jumps into the eye is the new Plasma appearance, called Air now. It is brighter than the old one, but I found it looking not so appealing, at least not for the desktop widgets. Here's how the desktop looks in Kubuntu Jaunty, with several widgets running on the desktop:


New look for Plasma



Dolphin, the default file manager


KRunner received several great improvements: it now displays the applications to be run as a list (see screenshot) and this list can be customised too. See below:

According to the announcement on the KDE official website, this release got many Plasma improvements, several game updates, PolicyKit integration, and several other changes or improvements.

For those who like desktop effects a lot and have a video card capable of supporting OpenGL, a combination of wobbly windows + window transparency and the magic lamp minimize effect should be very satisfying.


Konsole


I noticed plasma-desktop eats constantly 30% CPU (Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz, 1 GB DDRAM2 and nVIDIA 7600GS), which is a lot greater than in KDE 4.2 which comes by default with Kubuntu. Still, this is just a release candidate, and the upgrade was performed over an existing KDE installation using dist-upgrade in Kubuntu.


Konqueror in 4.3RC1 - KDE web browser



System Settings



Okular, the default document viewer in KDE4



Gwenview is now included in the KDE distribution


Source URL: https://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/kubuntu
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How-To: Install KDE 4.3 RC1 in Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

The first release candidate of KDE 4.3, the next major version of KDE4, was put out on July 1st and comes with new features and a lot of Plasma improvements and bug fixes.

In this short tutorial I'll show you how to install KDE 4.3 in your Kubuntu 9.04 machine with the help of the Kubuntu Backports PPA (Personal Packages Archive) repositories. Just follow the steps below:

1. Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file with root privileges using your favourite text editor:

E.g.:
- for nano:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

- for Kate

kdesudo kate /etc/apt/sources.list

And add the following line:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu jaunty main

Make sure to save the file and proceed to the next step.

2. Update your sources lists
Type, using your user password:

sudo apt-get update

If you haven't added the trusted key of this PPA, don't worry about the warning, and type 'y' when it asks to continue the installation at the next step.

3. Install KDE 4.3

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

If you don't have KDE installed and want to try this RC, then type:

sudo apt-get install kde

Or, better yet:

sudo apt-get install kde-core plasma

To get only the core KDE packages.

Notice that this command will replace your existing KDE 4.2.2 installation with the latest KDE found in the repositories. According to the Kubuntu website, X may die during the upgrade, but the upgrade will be performed, so just restart the computer after upgrading.
Source URL: https://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/kubuntu
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Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope Overview & Screenshots

Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope, was released on April 23rd, also celebrating the 10th Ubuntu release. Since its first version back in October 2004, Ubuntu went through many improvements and quickly became one of the most popular distributions out there, with a huge and continuously thriving community and a fast development method. Free CDs through the ShipIt service can be also ordered, which is another way from which users can benefit of Ubuntu and spread it.

Ubuntu is based on Debian, one of the oldest distributions out there, well-known for its highly stable releases, but it delivers the latest versions of applications with each release and offers a more polished desktop. Many other projects were born based on Ubuntu, including Kubuntu (which is practically Ubuntu using KDE instead of GNOME), Edubuntu (for educational purposes), or Xubuntu (using the Xfce desktop environment).

In this article I'll overview Kubuntu 9.04, which comes with KDE 4.2.2, bleeding-edge software like OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 and Amarok 2.0.2.


Typical Kubuntu 9.04 desktop with default wallpaper


First of all, Kubuntu was always known as Ubuntu's little brother, since it was based on KDE and opinions were always different regarding its stability. Some say Kubuntu was always a buggy distribution, and probably the worst KDE-based distribution out there, while for others it works very well. Since Kubuntu shares the same repositories with Ubuntu and the KDE packages come from Debian Sid (the unstable Debian repositories), this can be understandable, especially that usually the Ubuntu community focuses on GNOME.

Although I already had Kubuntu 9.04 Beta installed on a separate partition, I decided to download the final release and install it on a clean partition instead of apt-get dist-upgrading. Anyway, here's what the brand, new and shiny Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty has to offer...

I took the following screenshots at 1280x1024, with the nVIDIA 180.29 driver on a GeForce FX 7600GS graphics card.

As usual, I noticed incompatibilities between KDE's desktop settings and nVIDIA driver, but they seem to go away after using nvidia-settings utility to set resolution and save settings to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

I made a full review of Amarok 2.0.2 on Kubuntu here, and although I found it buggy and lacking features, 2.1 promises great improvements.


Amarok 2.0.2 - currently pretty buggy


There was a problem after ticking the 'Ctrl+Alt+Backspace restarts the xserver' check box in System Settings' Display tab (it didn't restart the X Server), but it went away after setting the resolution through the nvidia-settings tool.


System Settings



Kontact, Kopete and KTorrent



Konqueror



KMenu



Dragon Player


I could notice Dolphin will eat 100% CPU and practically freezes the system when moving the mouse over a Quick Time .MOV file (I guess that's because codecs are not installed, but nevertheless, this should be fixed).


Dolphin


I liked to see KDE 4.2 is much faster than how it was in Kubuntu 8.10. Great transparency effects, wobbly windows, animated minimise/maximise of windows are just a few of the wonderful desktop effects KDE has to offer.

Overall, Kubuntu 9.04 seemed, at least to me, buggy as usual. The pppoeconf utility does not seem to work, despite the fact that the Internet connection works flawless in Debian; (update: this proved to be actually a problem with the ISP),there are still some problems with fonts when changing resolution (this is probably a KDE issue, since it's been there for years, KDE3 too). But still, with a little tweaking, Jaunty can offer a good KDE 4.2 experience and bleeding-edge applications.Source URL: https://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/kubuntu
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10 Essential Applications Included in Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

While I agree that there are applications for KDE 4.2 which still lack several important features (like for example the equalizer and ability to go to the previous/next song using the tag editor in Amarok), I must say that it also improved very much since the last time I had a look at it. It is definitely faster, the desktop looks nicer, it does not seem a beta environment any more. Overall, the improvements in KDE 4 are really visible and I'm glad for that from a user's point of view. The only drawback is that (at least on my system - an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz, 1 GB DDRAM2 and GeForce FX 7600GS) I had to disable desktop effects (OpenGL support) when playing Unreal Tournament 2004. The nVIDIA driver I used was the last one from the official website (180.29). I also tried the ones included in the repositories (all 4 versions of the packaged nvidia-glx) but this one seemed to work best for me. I'll give it another go when Jaunty will be stable and eventually make a full review.

Back to the main topic of this article. I will briefly review no less than ten applications which are included by default on the Kubuntu 9.04 CD. The Kubuntu team released the first Jaunty Jackalope beta on March 26, so after installing it on a separate 10 GB partition (my other system is Debian Lenny) I performed a sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade to make sure the last updates were included. Kubuntu 9.04 comes with KDE 4.2.1, Amarok 2.0.2 and OpenOffice 3.0.1 as an office suite (still no inclusion of KOffice).

Music player: Amarok 2.0.2
This is the KDE 4 port of the famous Amarok audio player. It has some issues with scanning the music collection, but it's usable overall. It comes with a lot of features, including a powerful collection manager, cover manager, support for services like Last.fm and Jamendo. One of the great features introduced in Amarok 2.x was the widget support, which allows you to embed lyrics, song info and many more in the central area of the player.
Official website


Movie player: Dragon Player 2.0
Although not as powerful as players like SMPlayer or Kaffeine, Dragon Player (formerly known as Codeine) will play all the popular video formats (including Matroska MKV) and DVDs. It is a small, basic player with support for subtitles but not any other options.
Official website


Web browser: Konqueror 4.2.1
This is the port of the famous and default file manager, viewer and web browser in KDE3. Currently it still has some issues, especially crashes when pressing some web buttons or filling in forms. For example, I couldn't write a Blogspot post using Konqueror. Still, it is the default web browser which ships with KDE 4 and implicitly Kubuntu Jaunty and I hope it will be fixed in the versions to come.
Official website


File manager: Dolphin 1.2.1
Praised by some and highly criticised by others, Dolphin is now the default file manager in KDE 4. Although there are many (including me) which prefer to use Konqueror as the file manager, Dolphin has a nice clean interface and it's pretty simple and intuitive to use.
Official website



CD/DVD burner: K3b 1.0.5
Probably the most loved and the most complete burning application available for Linux, K3b still is at version 1.0.5 for KDE3, which will make it look a little ugly compared to the way KDE 4 applications look now. Although Kubuntu 9.04 will come with this K3b version, the official maintainer of this wonderful application started working at a KDE 4 port for it.
Official website


BitTorrent client: KTorrent 3.2.0
Together with clients like Azureus or Deluge, KTorrent was always one of the top BitTorrent clients available for Linux, and definitely the number one choice for KDE users. It's just feature-complete, it has support for plugins and the default ones are more than enough, you can download many torrents at one time without any problems, it can download only specific files from inside a torrent, you can search for torrents directly from within KTorrent and many, many more.
Official website


IM client: Kopete 0.70.0
Kopete hasn't changed much compared to its KDE 3 counterpart. It currently has no more features, it's just the same old client ported to KDE 4 with a changed interface here and there. It supports many networks like Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Jabber and WLM.
Official website


Image viewer: Gwenview 2.2.0
Gwenview was always my default image viewer of choice. It is powerful enough, well-designed, with a clean interface and all the options one needs from an image viewing application. It also comes with a bunch of plugins which will turn out quite useful for basic image manipulation.
Official website


IRC client: Quassel 0.4.1
Quassel is an IRC client which is new to me, and I've never used it before. Since the Konversation port to KDE 4 is yet to be complete as far as I know, Kubuntu includes this one. It's a basic client with no scripting support, but it includes enough configuration options to make it useful for getting on IRC. Those who never bothered making various plugins or customising their IRC client using event-based scripting will be fine with Quassel. There are, however, some problems with Quassel. I couldn't change the chat window font and it doesn't seem to remember the size of the nicklist.
Official website


Terminal application: Konsole 2.2.1
I couldn't exclude a terminal application from an 'essential applications' list in Linux. Konsole is the default shell in KDE and it supports configurable profiles (together with font sizes and colours).
Official website


Together with those there are also included OpenOffice 3.0.1 as the office suite, Okular, which is the universal document viewer in KDE 4, and KOrganizer.Source URL: https://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/kubuntu
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Kubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' Beta Screenshots Tour

In less than a week the new Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex should be out.

I took these screenshots using a Kubuntu Intrepid Beta installation after performing a full dist-upgrade, at 1280x1024, with the nVIDIA 173 driver installed. I left all the settings in applications default, but I had to make fonts smaller and resize windows (in Konqueror for example), because they didn't look very well as default. The default theme used is Oxygen.


Moving a window around



Konqueror



Desktop widgets



Dolphin



Dragon Player



KTorrent



Kopete



Konversation



Konsole


K3b - KDE4 port not available yet



Desktop Settings



Good ol' Amarok



About KDE4


Impressions
I think KDE 4.1.2 looks just awesome, and so does Kubuntu. The only problem is that it's not very stable, and there is less than a week until it should be released as a new stable, 18-month supported distribution. Konqueror crashes very often with segmentation fault errors, and gives no feedback in return. It just disappears, so I had to run it from Konsole in order to see the output.

The main problem I encountered was that most of the windows and widgets must be resized, and the resolution Kubuntu uses by default is the maximum supported by my Philips 107P5 CRT monitor, and that's 1920x1440. For this resolution, default fonts are very big.

Here's how the Display tab in System Settings looks like:


You'll have to actually scroll in order to see the drop-down list to select the frequency. I think this is the kind of work which a distribution must fix and polish, not necessarily the KDE team. Of course, Kubuntu never does these things anymore, so I don't even expect it to.

This screenshot also shows the available resolutions, so pick any colour you like:


As you can see, the font size is too big. It's true, after changing the font sizes it looks well, but this should have been done by default.

I encountered artifacts everywhere, but I'm not sure if it's because of the nVIDIA driver or KDE, and I never had the occasion to test KDE 4 with another graphics card. Scrolling and window resizing is also extremely slow.

Here's another addition from the Kubuntu developers, but I guess it never matters that you can see only the upper half of the text 'your password' (and that is after I switched text size from 9 to 7):


I recommend Kubuntu Intrepid if you want eye-candy and bleeding edge software, but I strongly advise against using it for a stable, productive system. I think you'd be better off with Ubuntu or Debian + KDE 3.5.9 for that.

Overall, I found this beta looking very good with a little tweaking, and since I'm a KDE fan, I'm happy to see how good KDE 4.1 can look. I think all the new development which has been put into KDE 4.x, all the eye-candy, beauty, transparency effects, artwork, and a completely new approach really makes up a powerful, innovative desktop environment, and I hope for improvements over time and even more usability where possible.Source URL: https://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/kubuntu
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