new to ubuntu, having some problems

[dreamz Veteran]

i'm having some trouble setting things up. i'm running 9.10 with kde-minimal on top.

1. bluetooth mouse. i downloaded the bluez package, and when i typed 'sudo hidd --connect <bta>' in the console, i got an error: 'sudo: hidd: command not found'. how can i automatically connect the mouse?

2. how do i get flash working in arora? i downloaded the libflashplayer.so file and put it in ~/.mozilla/plugins, but that didn't work.

3. i'm looking for a lightweight qt-based music player. something small and fast like foobar2000. i tried qmmp, but it keeps refreshing the playlist on start, which makes it slow.

4. where can i find a minimal theme for kde windows and how can i install them?

thanks!

[Farstrider]

Have a look at gmusicbrowser Apparently it is pretty good! JuK 2.2 is another one that you can try! I use Amarok and Audacious2.

Cheers and good luck with your mission!

[Lechio]

i'm having some trouble setting things up. i'm running 9.10 with kde-minimal on top.

1. bluetooth mouse. i downloaded the bluez package, and when i typed 'sudo hidd --connect <bta>' in the console, i got an error: 'sudo: hidd: command not found'. how can i automatically connect the mouse?

2. how do i get flash working in arora? i downloaded the libflashplayer.so file and put it in ~/.mozilla/plugins, but that didn't work.

3. i'm looking for a lightweight qt-based music player. something small and fast like foobar2000. i tried qmmp, but it keeps refreshing the playlist on start, which makes it slow.

4. where can i find a minimal theme for kde windows and how can i install them?

thanks!

2. Nah, that wouldn't work. Just install the flash plugin with "sudo apt-get install adobe-flashplugin", while you are at it also install the ubuntu-restricted-extras package.

Flash working in arora (slick minimal browser BTW):

3. Would go for Amarok. If you want to go a bit more simplistic, go with Amarok 1.4 .

4. Here.

The native window decorations for KDE are coded in C++, those can be found in apt. Just do a search, something like "apt-cache search kwin-style" will show a few.

Themes for decorator and aurorae are based on pixmaps and can be installed manually.

[Eric Veteran]

I had problems with Flash because Ubuntu was running as x64 and the production Flash is only x86 right now. I just pointed Firefox at a site that required the plugin and the tan box that popped up installed it correctly.

[Rob2687]

Foobar runs on wine. It works perfect as long as you're not crazy about customizing the look of it. I use it mostly for the dsp plugins and stuff. It leaks memory like crazy when I switched to columnsui.

There should be a bluetooth icon on the gnome-panel to connect to stuff.

[dreamz Veteran]

thanks for the comments.

i've checked out those music players, but they're either too bulky or they lag when they open (loading files).

2. Nah, that wouldn't work. Just install the flash plugin with "sudo apt-get install adobe-flashplugin", while you are at it also install the ubuntu-restricted-extras package.

actually, i decided to go with konqueror with the webkit backend (ran into some issues with aurora and rekonq). putting the plugin file in the directory worked perfectly. i have flash in konqueror.

the only problem i have with 64-bit flash is that playback is choppy. not sure what to do about that.

The native window decorations for KDE are coded in C++, those can be found in apt. Just do a search, something like "apt-cache search kwin-style" will show a few.

Themes for decorator and aurorae are based on pixmaps and can be installed manually.

i'm guessing aurorae is some theming program i have to download. how do you install themes? do you just put them in a specific folder?

i think i might go with foobar2000 on wine. i can't find any suitable replacements. i might try miranda on wine, too.

also, i'm using kde, so there's no gnome panel for bluetooth.

[Elv13]

XMMS 1.2 is like WinAmp but in even lighter. It is not Qt based, but start in less than a second and have tens of plugins aound. It is quite old and packages are getting harder to find, but it is **** fast. The best Qt Audio player is amarok, it is flexible and powerfull, but not light at all. VLC is Qt4 and can handle music playlists, but it is better as a video player.

The aurorae theme engine is great, when you anable it in the config, you will see a "get more theme" button. Just click on it, it is a package manager (select, download, manage). It is included by default in KDE 4.4, but you have to manually install it in 4.3

[Lechio]

thanks for the comments.

i've checked out those music players, but they're either too bulky or they lag when they open (loading files).

actually, i decided to go with konqueror with the webkit backend (ran into some issues with aurora and rekonq). putting the plugin file in the directory worked perfectly. i have flash in konqueror.

the only problem i have with 64-bit flash is that playback is choppy. not sure what to do about that.

i'm guessing aurorae is some theming program i have to download. how do you install themes? do you just put them in a specific folder?

i think i might go with foobar2000 on wine. i can't find any suitable replacements. i might try miranda on wine, too.

also, i'm using kde, so there's no gnome panel for bluetooth.

OK, glad you've figured out how to get flash working on konqueror. But copying the flash lib file to your home directory is really not the best way to do it. If you do it that way (outside your package manager) it will not update itself, and you might end up running an outdated and unpatched version of Adobe flash. With all the security problems that Adobe software seems to be having, it's not really a good idea to be doing this. Again, if you want an advice on this matter, use your package manager to install the flash plugin.

Elv13 has already replied to some of your other questions. BTW for the window decoration part, some minimalist ones are already included with Kwin, have you tried those already?

For the bluetooth part you just have to run "kbluetooth".

[dreamz Veteran]

thanks for the info. i have some more questions.

1. is aurorae the best (simplest, most convenient, least disruptive, etc.) way to customize kde?

2. does the command noted above install the 64-bit version of flash?

3. when you say 'kbluetooth', do you mean 'kdebluetooth'? i've noticed that it's fairly large, which is why i wanted to do everything manually. all i want to do is connect my mouse, not a phone, etc. can i ignore certain packages?

4. how can i completely remove a package? i use the 'sudo aptitude purge' command, but files remain (e.g., configs, cache, etc.).

5. i want to use the latest version of rekonq (0.2.90), but the latest version in the ubuntu repository is 0.2. can i just download the package separately?

6. what maintenance procedures should i perform? clear cache? temp files? chkdsk?

7. are there any tweaks that you suggest for ubuntu/kde? it's pretty fast already, but i figured i could always try to slim it down some more.

[Lechio]

1. aurorae is a theme engine for KWin (window manager). It allows ease of creation for KWin themes (window decorations), which can be based on images (SVG). Themers instead of having to code a window decoration in C++, just design the window decoration in an SVG editor.

2. Oh you wanted the 64bit version. It does not I believe, it will install the 32bit version. If it's working now just keep it as it is, but remember that you have to manually update it if some serious security flaw comes out for flash. It won't update itself automatically.

3. Yes, the package is named "kdebluetooth" on Ubuntu, but the command to launch it is "kbluetooth". The package alone seems to take 930KB, but should have some other dependencies. Running "sudo apt-get install kdebluetooth" will install it and all the necessary dependencies. I don't own a bluetooth mouse, can't provide much help to you there.

4. "purge" will eliminate all traces of the package including its configuration files.

5. A package of rekonq 0.2.90 for Ubuntu doesn't seem to be available yet. You could get the source, compile it and make a deb package from that.

6. You could browse into "/var/log" or "/var/tmp" once a while and clear some logs. There's a few GUI programs that can do those tasks. But a Linux system is pretty low maintenance and takes care of itself. chkdsk to the root filesystem is done automatically when needed.

7. A few. To KDE itself I only change desktop, default file manager (using konqueror instead of dolphin), disabled some services that I do not need, changed session manager settings (to start with a clean session), some default file associations, (...). Depends on everyones needs. For example kubuntu starts up "printer-applet" and "update-notifier-kde" scripts on session start, those can be disabled if you don't have any use for them.

For Ubuntu, there are a few tricks that can be done to it. To have faster boot for instance I've just learned about this site that has a guide explaining how to get faster boot times in Karmic. Some unneeded startup services can also be disabled in "/etc/init.d". It's a matter of tweaking it to fit your needs.

Hope some of this was helpful.

[dreamz Veteran]

thanks, lechio! almost everything is set up now. aurorae is quite nice and i managed to get the latest version of rekonq by adding a ppa.

i've been using 'sudo apt-get clean' to clear out the cache.

and thanks for the tips. i'll keep doing some research to see how i can slim things down and speed things up (not that i really need to, though).

i'm still looking into bluetooth. apt-get wanted to install about 100mb of packages. that seems like a lot just to get bluetooth.

[Growled Member]

i'm still looking into bluetooth. apt-get wanted to install about 100mb of packages. that seems like a lot just to get bluetooth.

I suspect kbluetooth needs a lot of KDE dependencies to operate, hence the huge download size. I'm always surprised by the things that are pulled in as dependencies.

[ichi]

I'm always surprised by the things that are pulled in as dependencies.

There's an option in synaptic that defaults to pulling suggested packages as if they were dependencies. I guess you could reduce the cruft by unchecking that.

Then again you might also lose some functionality (that you might or might not want).

Anyway, one of the hardest steps when going from gentoo to ubuntu was getting used to the idea that I could no longer leave dependencies out of my system by selecting only the functionality I intended to use :pinch:

[Lechio]

Glad you've managed to figure out how to setup things. Sorry for forgetting to mention clearing the apt cache, that will free a lot of MB.

Now it's me who will ask you for a tip. :D Could you share the URL for the PPA with the latest version of rekonq? I've searched with no luck, still on version 0.2.0. :/

For the mouse part, good news. kbluetooth doesn't seem to even be necessary when installing a bluetooth mouse. A quick search showed this tutorial: http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-setup-blue...-in-ubuntu.html

Again, I don't own a bluetooth mouse won't be of much assistance on this. Hope you can get it working.

[dreamz Veteran]

i'm using kpackagekit, and i don't see an option to disable the installation of suggested packages. also, it looks like the packages are real dependencies, not suggested packages, at least according to my terminal output.

lechio, i got it from here: http://f4l3.net/?q=node/1429

0.2.91 is much better, but still a little buggy. definitely check it out.

as for the mouse, that page is from 2007, so it might not be updated. in particular, i noticed that the new version of bluez doesn't include hidd. i've read that some people use bluez-compat with some success, but that's a transitional package. i'm wondering if it's possible to get bluetooth working with the most recent bluez package.

[dreamz Veteran]

another problem. i'm installing to use either juk or minirok to play my mp3 files. but whenever i click 'play', the programs just skip past all the songs without playing them. how do i get them to play songs?

[Lechio]

Have you installed mp3 playback support yet?

Also, have a look at muine it's a very minimalistic media player with only the basic functions, if that's what you are searching for in a music player.

[dreamz Veteran]

if you're talking about the gstreamer ffmpeg and 'ugly' packages, then yes. or do you mean the restricted-extras package? can i pick certain packages? i'd rather not install 300mb of packages just to play music.

[Lechio]

The restricted-extras package is a meta package, you can install packages that compose it individually. I believe minirok (as well as other KDE applications) uses the Xine frontend for media playback. If that's so, you should at least install libxine1-ffmpeg, libxine1-plugins, (...).

[dreamz Veteran]

here's the minirok page: http://chistera.yi.org/~adeodato/code/minirok/

all it says is gstreamer. do i still need all the xine packages?

[Lechio]

Yeah, minirok is actually a python script and doesn't follow the KDE ways for media playback, it indeed uses Gstreamer. From the README file:

Requirements

============

Minirok is written in Python, version 2.5 or later is required. If it's

available from your distribution, I recommend you install that package,

since it'll take care of installing everything necessary. For Debian and

derivatives, you should be able to install directly with apt-get, and

you can check if there's a more recent version here:

http://chistera.yi.org/~adeodato/code/minirok/packages

For installing from source, here's a list of the *required* libraries

for the program to run:

* PyQt and PyKDE (version 4)

Debian and Ubuntu: python-qt4, python-kde4

Source: http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/pyqt/download.php

http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/pykde/download.php

* Mutagen (audio metadata library)

Debian and Ubuntu: python-mutagen

Source: http://www.sacredchao.net/quodlibet/wiki/Development/Mutagen

* The json or simplejson modules (shipped with Python 2.6 already)

Debian and Ubuntu: python-simplejson | python (>= 2.6)

Source: http://undefined.org/python/#simplejson

* The GStreamer media framework, in particular:

+ The GStreamer Python bindings

Debian and Ubuntu: python-gst0.10

+ Plugins, in all the flavours needed to cover your audio formats:

- MP3: gst-plugins-ugly *and* gst-plugins-good

- Ogg Vorbis: gst-plugins-base

- FLAC: gst-plugins-good

- Musepack (MPC): gst-plugins-bad

Debian and Ubuntu: gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly, gstreamer0.10-plugins-base,

gstreamer0.10-plugins-good, gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad

+ A suitable audiosink, for example ALSA.

Debian and Ubuntu: gstreamer0.10-alsa

Source: http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org

Install all of those and it should work. It's working on my system right now.

[dreamz Veteran]

amazing! it was the last one, gstreamer0.10-alsa. now it works. thank you, lechio! :D

now, i find that it works even if i don't have some of the other packages. which ones can i safely remove?

[Lechio]

amazing! it was the last one, gstreamer0.10-alsa. now it works. thank you, lechio! :D

now, i find that it works even if i don't have some of the other packages. which ones can i safely remove?

No idea. Probably none, if those are dependencies. Something may stop working if some is removed.

You have a small HDD?

[dreamz Veteran]

my root partition is 10gb. it's not a bad size, but i don't like clutter. also, my system felt a little sluggish.

i ended up formatting and installing foobar2000 in wine. so far, so good.

also, i grabbed kdebluetooth and my mouse works perfectly. now i'm just trying to tweak and customize my system. :)

[Lechio]

my root partition is 10gb. it's not a bad size, but i don't like clutter. also, my system felt a little sluggish.

i ended up formatting and installing foobar2000 in wine. so far, so good.

also, i grabbed kdebluetooth and my mouse works perfectly. now i'm just trying to tweak and customize my system. :)

So it's all working now... :)

Ubuntu doesn't really seem to be the distro for you. Ever thought about installing a bare bones distro? You could do a custom install of Debian (only requires a minimal CD or 2 floppies) and choose what packages you wish to install right from the installer by choosing custom install. It's an advanced solution, but it just might be what you are looking for. Ubuntu is Debian based, so you can easily find support if you go with pure Debian.