Do More to Achieve Less?

The kickoff menu in KDE-four-oh provides the following options to leave a session:

Let’s say we select Logout. This generates the following dialog:

It’s always good to have a choice, a second chance to change one’s mind. But it does seem slightly overkill asking confirmation for the options selected from the kickoff menu earlier.

While there are definitely valid use-cases for the End Session dialog (such as electing to terminate a KDE session from a Logout plasmoid), it’s just another annoyingly extra step in the workflow from the menu option. Perhaps a good configuration may be to provide an option to skip the reconfirmation dialog in the scenario discussed above.

PostgreSQL 8.1 and Kubuntu 6.10

Just a quick note on my experience with PostgreSQL 8.1 with Kubuntu 6.10:

Installing the updates displayed by Adept updater before installing PostgreSQL 8.1 resulted in a broken install of the program.

However, installing PostgreSQL 8.1 on a fresh install of Kubuntu 6.10 using either apt-get or adept  and then installing the updates works fine.

Of course, this might be a specific case, and YMMV.

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Installing Kubuntu

This post outlines instructions for installing Kubuntu after successfully booting the live cd.

Step 1: Click on the install icon on the desktop. The welcome dialog of the installer is displayed.

Select English as the language of choice and click on Continue.

Step 2:

In the next dialog, select and set the timezone and country.

Step 3: Select the keyboard layout in the next dialog.

Step 4: Set the user name and password which you will use on a regular basis.

Step 5: The next step is to select the partitions to install Kubuntu to.

A common scenario will be making space to install Kubuntu onto a system which already has another operating system.

A simple installation of any linux system requires at least the following two partitions:

1. a root (/) partition for the entire system. This will also contain the user files in the /home directory. For a reasonably usable system a root partition of at least 10 GB is recommended.

2. a swap partition, which is used by linux as additional memory. Generally it is a good idea to make the swap partition double the amount of physical RAM present in the machine. So if we have 1 GB of RAM, then a swap partition of around 2GB is a good idea. Having a relatively larger swap partition (as in 2 GB) is beneficial if we want to remaster our own custom linux CDs also.

3. Additionally, its better, but not necessary to have a separate partition for user files in the /home directory. For our simple installation, we’ll just concentrate on a single root partition.

But if we have the following scenario: the entire hard disk is divided into four partitions: C, D, E, and F and we have Microsoft Windows installed. Then how do we proceed?

Suppose we have E and F drives as FAT32 partitions which we want to clear and install Kubuntu.

Since we have 4 partitions, they might be represented as

/dev/hda1

/dev/hda5

/dev/hda6

/dev/hda7

The jump in numbering from hda1 to hda5 signifies that the remainder partitions are logical partitions.

Once we are certain that we will use the space occupied by hda7 for our install, delete it in the partitioning step and create two partitions in the free space generated: one for swap and one for root.

In the Prepare disk space dialog, select Manually edit partition table since we want a custom partitioning setup for our install. Click on Continue.

Step 6: The next dialog shows the available partitions.

In the figure above, there are 5 partitions already defined.

We will be installing Kubuntu onto /dev/hda9, which is already a formatted reiserfs file system. In order to install linux, we require a native file system such as ext3 or reiserfs.

If we were going to delete the E drive of our Windows installation, we do so here. Let’s say we have a 30 GB E drive.

Select the partition and click on the Delete icon. We will now have 30 GB free space. Note that this is a permanent operation, and we should delete a partition only if we are sure that all information has been backed up. Perform this step carefully!

In the 30 GB free space created, we can now create a 2 GB swap partition, a 12 GB root partition, and a 16 GB home partition. Format the partitions after creating them.

IMPORTANT: BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN YOU DELETE OR FORMAT PARTITIONS, TAKING CARE THAT YOU ARE WORKING ON THE PROPER PARTITION.
Step 7: However, in this installation walkthrough, we are going to install Kubuntu onto hda9 as a single root (/) partition which is already formatted as reiserfs.
Set the mount points for (/) and swap as shown in the dialog below.

Click on Continue to proceed further.

Step 8: A final confirmation dialog is displayed. Ensure that all options have been selected properly, and click on Install to commence the installation.

The installation begins. During the installation process, the GRUB bootloader is installed. GRUB will create menu entries for the different operating systems already installed on the machine. So if we have an existing Windows or any other GNU/Linux system installed, or have an existing bootloader installed, the installation process will replace it with a new GRUB. For more information on choices for bootloader, you are encouraged to read through the Kubuntu community forums.

After the installation finishes, either continue using the live cd, or reboot as desired.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.