Short list of problems after install, advice appreciated.

[shmuck]

Alright, I've just installed Kubuntu a few days ago and worked out as many of the kinks as I'm able. There are a few puzzling tidbits left though.


First: my /home directory is my desktop for some reason - the files that are in my /home directory are showing up on my desktop. I know that this happened because I was fiddling with the location of my desktop directory, but I don't know why.

My /home directory is in a pretty small partition and I want to use the desktop as a dump for downloading files to deal with later, so I deleted the /home/Desktop directory and replaced it with a sym link to a Desktop directory in another, larger, partition. But then this happened for some reason and I don't know how to fix it.


Second: Kaffeine is really choppy when I'm trying to play videos at full screen. When I shrink the window everything's fine, so I can conclude that it's maxing the CPU and just can't keep up. Thing is, these aren't very demanding videos, these used to run fine with Totem in Ubuntu, so I'm assuming it's just an inefficient codec. Is there somewhere where I can get better ones? (also mplayer doesn't work. I'd ask about that too, but I haven't given up on fixing it myself yet.)


Third: Kopete works most of the time, but occasionally when I boot it has trouble connecting and seems to just give up. It never tries to connect again after it has trouble the first time. Is there a way that I can set it to keep trying every few minutes or so? As it is now, the only way I can get it to reconnect is to reboot.


Fourth: Konqueror help says that I can set it to use Netscape bookmarks, but I can't figure out how to do it. If I could share bookmarks between Firefox and Konqueror, that would be great.


I'm also having trouble with shutting down / rebooting, but that's covered in another thread already. If anyone can give me solutions/suggestions for any of these, I'm happy to try anything. Thanks.

[shmuck]

Re: Short list of problems after install, advice appreciated.

No takers on any of these? The first one seems like it'd just be a config file somewhere, just need to know where it is.

[Nate]

Re: Short list of problems after install, advice appreciated.

Is this kde4 or kde3? Even if you answer this question I can't really help you...but I do remember people having weird problems with files showing up on the desktop after playing around with kde4 and then going back to kde3.

[blackpaw]

Re: Short list of problems after install, advice appreciated.

Is this kde4 or kde3? Even if you answer this question I can't really help you...but I do remember people having weird problems with files showing up on the desktop after playing around with kde4 and then going back to kde3.

Yeh I got that, ended up wiping and reinstalling Hardy

[shmuck]

Re: Short list of problems after install, advice appreciated.

It's KDE 3.

All right, well if a reformat is what it'll take than I guess I'm stuck with it. At least for problem #1.

[daihard]

Re: Short list of problems after install, advice appreciated.

#1. Open KDE Control Panel ("kcontrol"), choose "System Administration" --> "Paths." There you should see entries such as "Desktop path" and "Autostart path." Make sure your "Desktop path" correctly points to your /home/Desktop symlink, and that the original directory it points to has the correct permissions for you.

[shmuck]

Re: Short list of problems after install, advice appreciated.

Hey, that got it. So that's problem #1 solved, no format required.

Thank you.

[daihard]

Re: Short list of problems after install, advice appreciated.

Hey, that got it. So that's problem #1 solved, no format required.

FYI...if you would like to start over with a fresh KDE profile, you can remove the entire ~/.kde subdirectory and restart Kubuntu. It is rather drastic, but it's at least much better than reformatting / reinstalling.

As for your Kaffeine problem, does it pertain to any particular codec, or does it happen no matter which video file (i.e. *.wmv, *.avi, etc) you open with Kaffeine?

[shmuck]

Re: Short list of problems after install, advice appreciated.

Hrm. Alright, I've tested it now with several .avi's (don't know the codec), a small .wmv, a pretty demanding .mkv (h.264), and a pretty large .ogm (assume it's theora).

The .mkv wasn't great, but only the .avi's exhibited the really bad choppiness. So I suppose that's a plus. I'm sure that the .avi's are either xvid or divx encoded - is there another source of codecs for these?

[Linuxgirl]

Re: Short list of problems after install, advice appreciated.

Hi,

I guess there's two of us : Media player issues. Are you on a laptop or a PC?

[Tecumseh]

Re: Short list of problems after install, advice appreciated.

I have had the same problem with media playback of avi files. At first I couldn't get it fixed. When I wanted to play a commercial dvd I had to install some things from medibuntu, I followed a guide I found either here or on the international ubuntu forum. I sadly don't have the link to it but I have documented it on my personal blog. However that is entirely in dutch. If you are able to read and understand dutch here's the link: http://tecumseh.homeip.net/?p=64

Here's the short version of commands to enter in the terminal:

Add medibuntu to sources.list and add the gpg key:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

Do a package upgrade with the new package source:

sudo apt-get upgrade

Install packages for commercial dvd playback:

sudo apt-get install libdvdread3 w64codecs libxine1-plugins

After that avi playback also worked perfectly. Do mind that I run a 64-bit system. So if you run 32-bit you need to replace the package w64codecs with w32codecs!

[shmuck]

Re: Short list of problems after install, advice appreciated.

Well I followed the instructions, everything appeared to go smoothly, but it doesn't seem to have helped. The .avi movies are still choppy. Maybe it's slightly better? A little? I'm not sure. It's hard to tell.

[Tecumseh]

Re: Short list of problems after install, advice appreciated.

It could be that my results were good because of the things I have tried before this. The combination of earlier package installation with the installation mentioned above. I do have to recall what I did from memory, thought I think it was just the installation of smplayer that also took care of a couple of codecs.

[daihard]

Re: Short list of problems after install, advice appreciated.

It could be that my results were good because of the things I have tried before this. The combination of earlier package installation with the installation mentioned above. I do have to recall what I did from memory, thought I think it was just the installation of smplayer that also took care of a couple of codecs.

If I'm not mistaken, the steps you described above are for commercial DVD playback. That will probably not have much effect on the video playback. Now a bit off-topic, I must thank you for reminding me that I need to intall those "extra" packages in order to play back commercial DVDs on Kubuntu.