My most annoying issues with Kubuntu

[metricus]

Some may know already that I have migrated to Kub from SUSE recently,

Now I am a happy camper here but I do have a few most annoing issues:

1: On top of the list by far: Although i have added all possible sources in adept I still do not have recent versions available for many programs, f ex: K3b 0.12.14, Twinkle 0.4.2, libdvdcss 1.2.5, kaffeine 0.7.1.
The problem is that many of these old versions have certain bugs which make them quite unusable. For example the combination of k3b and libdvdcss cannot copy encrypted dvds in dual layer. k3b crashes.

2: I just purchased a new mobo on 64 bit and just found out that there are no solutions for applications like acroread, win32codecs, skype, libdvdcss2, flash and so on. At suse they seem to have created a sort of built-in 32bit emulation and packages compiled under 32 architecture may run without issues or extra settings. Did not find any solution so far under Kubuntu other than installing the 32 bit version instead of 64.

3. There seems to be no way to downgrade a package under Adept. Yast was capable of listing different versions if they were still available in the repos and one could choose what to use. (This issue is however not as bad as the above since there are no packages that are so new that someone would need to downgrade.

Now, you may curse at me and tell me I'm stupid but please tell me that I missed something and there are solutions to the above that do not involve compiling and dependency nightmares.

FYI my repos are:
deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/amarok-latest dapper main restricted universe multiverse
# The above lines were generated automatically by EasyUbuntu 3.02 Release
deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/koffice-latest dapper main
deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/kde-latest dapper main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~jbailey/snapshot/bzr ./
deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt dapper main
# deb http://ubuntu.uni-klu.ac.at/ubuntu.uniklu/ dapper uniklu-vserver

[jakykong]

Re: My most annoying issues with Kubuntu

i don't know if you're missing anything, but i do know what i usually do to get newer versions of things (which has worked quite well so far) is to download the rpm and use alien to make it into a deb... then you get the newer version, and the dependencies are usually mostly taken care of

as for downgrading: i use dpkg for that. As with above, get yourself a deb. Then you can force it to install, whether new or not, with dpkg. I haven't ever done that; i couldn't tell you how well it works. But it would definately be worth a try .

Personally, though, i find that having the last stable instead of the newest version (i could be wrong but that seems to be what is happening) can be nice... generally there are more bugs in unstable releases then stable ones :-) (again, my experience only.)

Hope it helps!

[Orc65]

Re: My most annoying issues with Kubuntu

Metricus,
Try some of these and see if they give you more options.
deb http://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper multiverse
deb ftp://ftp.free.fr/pub/Distributions_...lf/ubuntu/plf/ dapper free non-free
deb http://packages.freecontrib.org/ubuntu/plf/ breezy free non-free
deb http://mirror2.ubuntulinux.nl dapper-seveas all

Be warned, I'm a total Linux Newb and I'm not even sure I should be using these

[metricus]

Re: My most annoying issues with Kubuntu

Thank you, jakykong,

now the alien option I knew it but it is really not kosher. Besides why use an rpm...

I don't believe it is about stable version. I am not talking about having beta versions available but true releases. K3b 0.12.16 works much better than 0.12.14.
Libdvdcss is so old I can't remember when/if I ever used this version. It is dated Dec 2004!!!
Twinkle 0.7.1 which is the latest works so good and has so many features that are useful and I could not find any bug at all.

And the repositories could be like in Debian: Stable, testing etc. so that one can choose if he wants stability or "bleeding edge" or a combination of the two. I certainly don't want to suffer annoyances just for the sake of using new releases but many new apps are really good and can be used.

And with the annoyance #3 if this would be possible, then switching from a testing version back to a stable version would be a breeze.

But I just tested again suse 10.1 and k3b is available on packman with the latest version 0.12.16 while here I have to struggle with a buggy 14.
I could understand some delay in having the packages available but what we have is really too old. So this remains by far my outmost annoyance.

metricus

[metricus]

Re: My most annoying issues with Kubuntu

Metricus,
Try some of these and see if they give you more options.
deb http://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper multiverse
deb ftp://ftp.free.fr/pub/Distributions_...lf/ubuntu/plf/ dapper free non-free
deb http://packages.freecontrib.org/ubuntu/plf/ breezy free non-free
deb http://mirror2.ubuntulinux.nl dapper-seveas all

Be warned, I'm a total Linux Newb and I'm not even sure I should be using these 

Will try thank you but afaik plf does not work nor does seveas and the othere one is just the australian mirror of archive.ubuntu. And the breezy repo I don't need because I have dapper. If you have dapper as well, then you could remove it too.

I am no newbie to linux but not a guru either so any suggestions are welcome.

MetricUS

[Orc65]

Re: My most annoying issues with Kubuntu

Sorry I wasn't much help mate.
I'll have to remove the useless repos and see what else is out there.

[metricus]

Re: My most annoying issues with Kubuntu

This is basically (AFAIK) how your sources should look like with exception that in your case, Orc65, instead of us.archive.ubuntu..... you should have au.archive.ubuntu... since you don't really want to download from the US every time:

deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/amarok-latest dapper main
deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/koffice-latest dapper main
deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/kde-latest dapper main
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper-proposed main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper-security main restricted universe multiverse

[Orc65]

Re: My most annoying issues with Kubuntu

Thanks mate , did you sort out that mldonkey thing?

[caryb]

Re: My most annoying issues with Kubuntu

I am in Brisbane Aust & I use the US mirrors as the OZ ones are too slow!


Cary

[metricus]

Re: My most annoying issues with Kubuntu

Thanks mate , did you sort out that mldonkey thing?

Welcome, See next reply apparently the au repo is slow so maybe the us one my work faster. Up to you to try...

No I did not fix the mldonkey issue. If one installs the package there is trouble trying to remove it. But it seems to work once installed. I did not find how to get more servers connected. Now I have a different problem though since I got this new 64 bit mobo and am struggling to get things working on it.

I figured something though:
Many packages are there and either there is a trick that I don't know on how to get them loaded or there are othere dependencies that are not resolved hence Adept does not offer the package for upgrade since it has some missing libs.
here is a snapshot of the dir contents:

[Orc65]

Re: My most annoying issues with Kubuntu

Mmm... Okay I replied to the mldonkey post, it's not a perfect solution as it leaves some files behind, it does remove it.
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=6634.0

Is that a screeny of a repository?
You could try to cut and paste the url into the repository list of Adept.
But you'd still need the gpg key, correct?

I found these konsole commands earlier, would changing them to match the url help?

wget http://people.ubuntu.com/~jriddell/k...iddell-key.gpg
sudo apt-key add kubuntu-packages-jriddell-key.gpg

[kbuser]

Re: My most annoying issues with Kubuntu

You can have a good sources.list here: http://ubuntulinux.nl/source-o-matic
Firstly for a basical sources.list and then (from the middle of the page to the end ) there are supplementary repositories.

[Orc65]

Re: My most annoying issues with Kubuntu

Thank you.

[jakykong]

Re: My most annoying issues with Kubuntu

well this post really took off...
yeah those versions are old... maybe it's because this is the only version of linux i got to liking (besides knoppix...) because of KDE instead of Gnome and general ease of use (less painful. Though i am plenty interested in the inner workings of a linux system, i would like to get to work instead of work on getting to work ) so i have never used versions newer then the ones in the ubuntu repositories (hence, i have no complaints :P)

Ah well, maybe i should try a few newer versions

[greensh]

Re: My most annoying issues with Kubuntu

1) If newer Kub packages don't exist then it's best to use CMMI (configure; make; make install). If you don't want to compile, then you don't really have any other good options. Note that while debian packages may appear to work, there could easily be some dependency problems, and the simple way around it is to just compile/install from std tarballs (which are still the true std distribution of packages).

I've only had to do this for a few newer packages to get a working Kubuntu desktop (MPlayer, QtiPlot, etc) and dependencies were easily fixed since the dependencies exist in the repositories (you're talking about upgrading older packages already in the repositories this will be easier for you).

Your second point about k3b also has a workaround- instead of upgrading it, remove it along with dvd+rw-tools, etc. The 2.6.x kernel is under heavy development and so you need to install the latest dvd+rw-tools (and optionally cdrtools) that work better. That's all k3b uses- there's no magic in the GUI. I've always burned on the command line and it even works better this way using bash scripts since you can see the output better (see the dvd+rw-tools web site).

2) I only have 32 bit, but my guess would be to 'try' recompiling a new kernel for 64-bit and tailor it for your 'bleeding edge' HW. This will probably be lots of fun on Kubuntu since it may use a heavily patched kernel so the vanilla 2.6.16 series may not work.

If you're after stability, 32-bit compatibility may be better.

3) Well, it's easy enough to remove anything in Adept, then add any older ver (same as 1). But another good way to control anything you install this way for easier removal later is to use checkconfig, which is covered elsewhere on the Ubuntu forum. This will create a deb package right before you 'make install'.