Terminally Incoherent

I took this test (very nicely done btw - the page is awesome). Here are the results:

We found 2 perfect match(es):

It seems like I nailed it I’m quite happy with my Kubuntu so far. My only complains are wireless issues (no surprises here) and weird lags when I use firefox (haven’t figured out why it does this).

Anyway, go ahead and test yourself. This test seems to be designed to be newb friendly so even if you have never installed Linux before, and know very little about it, you can still get decent results

Tags: linux, linux chooser, linux test, linux distro, distro chooser, distro test, choose linux distro, test, kubuntu, mepis

Spellbound is a great extension for Firefox which allows you to spell-check your text forms. It’s a great toy for people who frequently blog and post on message boards.

I installed it a while ago on the old knop hd, and forgot how painful it was. Main problem here is installing dictionaries. You can get them from here and they do seem to install just fine - but they do not work. I spent 15 minutes installing, and removing them and Spellbound simply refused to acknowledge their existence.

Turns out that these files need to be installed in “[installation folder]/components/myspell” - at least that’s what they suggest on the spellbound site. What the hell does that mean?

By trial and error I finally figured out that on linux this means:

/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/components/myspell/

And, strangely enough I did not have that directory at all. So I did this as root:


cd /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/components
mkdir myspell
chmod a+w myspell


You need to have write permission in the myspell folder to install the dictionaries. Once you install them you can remove the permission for security reasons. After you do this, spellbound works like a charm

I used my Linksys WPC54G v1.2 card with Linux before. I used to run a debianized Knoppix installation on the same laptop and the card worked great. This time however it didn’t want to cooperate. My kubuntu did not accept the little green card

I actually followed the Ubuntu Nidswrapper Howto very carefully. I grabbed the source from sourceforge, compiled it into a deb and then installed it. Then I installed the windows .inf file.

Nidswrapper did not complain. Dmesg did not show me any error messages. In fact, the whole installation procedure went without a hitch.

The link light on the card even started blinking at some point but I had no internet connection. I suspect that I might have fucked up the WEP settings somehow. I will try this trick again, once I’m on a non-encrypted network.

Btw, putting ndiswrapper in /etc/modules was a really dumb idea. The system basically got stuck trying to initialize it. After 5 minutes of failed attempts to initialize wlan0 gave up, rebooted into recovery mode and commented out ndiswrapper from /etc/modules. After that the system booted just fine.

I have no clue why it didn’t work for me. I think did everything correctly. There was no errors, no crashes no big issues. It simply did not connect. I hate this types of problems because they are really hard to diagnose. When you have an error message you can at least research it. When something simply does not work, even though it should - who the hell knows that happened.

I will try this again with a non WEP networks. Meanwhile I have a brand new, shiny, fully supported proxim orinoco card in the mail. They are tad on the expensive side, but hey - if it works, it will be worth every penny

I found it the hard way that kcontrol in Kubuntu does not work properly. This is due to the fucked up way Ubuntu deals with root. I wish they just be normal about this… But by default root account is disabled in this distro. Of course you can easily enable root by changing it’s password using:

sudo passwd root

Which works for the most part. You can su and become root as normal after doing this. Unfortunately the messed up system restrictions stay in place and affect the system at a deeper level. KDE was never designed to run in a rootles configuration. The control panel screen for example requires you to provide root password to edit stuff like network config, wireless and etc..

But, in Ubuntu root is account is crippled in a way which prevents KDE from acknowledging it within the kcontrol dialogs. When you try to go into “Administrative Mode” from kcontrol you will be prompted for “Administrator Password”. The dialog will not accept neither root or your user password. You can try all you want - it is broken.

There is a workaround though - if you run kcontrol as a root you will be fine. Try the following:

kdesu kcontrol

Kdesu will accept the root password, and will allow you to edit root only sections in the control panel. Which suggests that the only GUI based, temporary user privilege elevation scripts in KDE are b0rked.

I hope they will fix this issue in the following releases because it is annoying…

I finally figured out how to get Java installed with Kubuntu. Some nice people at ubuntu bakcports packaged both j2re 1.5 and j2sdk 1.5. Kub is based on Horaey so you simply need to add horaey related entries to your /etc/apt/sources.list:


deb http://ubuntu-backports.mirrormax.net/ hoary-backports main universe multiverse restricted
deb http://ubuntu-backports.mirrormax.net/ hoary-extras main universe multiverse restricted


Then just install them using apt:


apt-get install sun-j2re.15
apt-get install sun-j2sdk1.5


Please note that the whole operation takes a while. The packages are 38MB and 65MB each

So there. Java on kubuntu without problems.