Kubuntu Hardy Heron Upgrade

On Friday afternoon I upgraded my desktop PC to the KDE4 version Kubuntu Hardy Heron from the KDE 3.5 version of Gutsy Gibbon

Overall I have to say the process was very smooth and by far the most trouble free upgrade I have done. There were one or two funnies and these are outlined below.

Note: I decided to upgrade by downloading the alternate CD images and doing a cdromupgrade rather than doing an upgrade over the ‘net. I did this as I thought the Kubuntu sites might be a bit busy still, it being only one day after Hardy was released.

Overall the process took just 40 minutes including one false start.

Allow upgrades from the network hung

One of the options at the start of the CD ROM upgrade is to allow the system to connect to the ‘net to get the latest downloads. I decided to allow this figuring there wouldn’t be many updates to get. However maybe it was because the site was busy but the upgrade just seemed to hang. So after 10 minutes I cancelled and restarted it and chose not to get the upgrades from the net.

This restart initially hung with an error saying it could not get the lock file:

/var/lib/apt/lists/lock

This was because the aborted upgrade had left the lock file behind. I deleted this file with

sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/lock

The upgrade process then started itself automatically without me having to go back out.

Remove the CD before rebooting

At the end of the upgrade the systems says it is going to reboot once you press OK. However I didn’t notice any warning to remove the CD before doing this. As my system is set to boot from CD ROM first the result was my system started the live CD on reboot and asked me to select a language.

I ejected the CD and rebooted my machine and all was fine.

KDE4 Not Installed when upgrading from KDE 3.5

After the upgrade was complete and the login screen came up I checked the available sessions and only KDE was listed. There was no option for KDE4 so I thought maybe it will automatically login to KDE4 and there is no KDE3.5 option.

However when I logged in all I saw was the KDE 3.5.9 desktop ( upgraded from 3.5.8 ).

Thinking about this, it kind of makes sense. Although I was using the KDE4 CD the system is an upgrade and since I’ve never had KDE4 on this machine before it just upgraded what was there.

I was able to easily solve the problem by using adept to install the package kubuntu-kde4-desktop, from the command line the same can be achieved with.

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-kde4-desktop

The upgrade took about 10 minutes and interestingly used the alternate CD ( which I had re-instered after the reboot ). I was fully expecting to to start pulling down the package from the ‘net but it didn’t.

This just leaves me with the lingering doubt that I’m not going to get updates for KDE4 over the ‘net. I need to check my sources.list to see if there is anything else I should be adding in there to get the KDE4 updates.

The installation of kubuntu-kde4-desktop asked me what login manager I wanted to use, KDM or KDE4-KDM. I chose the KDE4-KDM version.

Once the kubuntu-kde4-desktop package was installed I logged out and back in again and under the options for sessions I had KDE and KDE4.

Choosing KDE4 did exactly what it says on the tin.

No Sound

In both KDE 3.5.9 and KDE4 initially I had no sound at all. After a couple of dead ends with installing the pulse audio server the problem turned out to be the channel to my speakers was muted in kmix.

I had to choose Kmix from the Multimedia menu and then click on the speaker icon that appeared in the status bar and choose “mixer” to bring up the full mixer panel. For some reason there were two “Front” channels showing and one of them was muted. Un-muting this gave me my sound back. (Click the pic below to embiggen)

No Sound in Firefox for Realplayer plugin

Although sound was now working in KDE4 in general in Firefox the BBC Radio Player was going through the motions of playing but not producing any sound using Realplayer. This turned out to be the fact that the plugins directory had changed for firefox3 and I had to copy in the relevant plugins from /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins to /usr/lib/firefox-3.0b5/plugins

sudo cp /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/nphelix* /usr/lib/firefox-3.0b5/plugins

NB: This is a bit of a sloppy way of doing this I should really use softlinks to the orginal plugin files rather than making a copy. Also it should be possible to set this up in your home directory .mozilla directory rather than the global /usr/lib

Virtual Box

I use VirtualBox to run an XP virtual machine for connecting to the VPN and work. When I fired this up after the upgrade I got an error message about the VirtualBox kernel drivers not being loaded. The new version of the main Linux kernel was the reason.

Cleverly the error message told you exactly what to do, run “/etc/init.d/vbdrv setup” as root so for Kubuntu this just meant:-

sudo /etc/init.d/vbdrv setup

I really like VirtualBox and much prefer it to VMWare server. The way it handled this error message just confirms it’s the best choice for me for running a VM.

Hotkeys not loaded by KDE Autostart

The hotkeys application I use to set up my multimedia keys was not loaded when I logged in to KDE4. This was because the Autostart directory for KDE4 is in a different place to KDE3.5

In KDE3.5 is it ~/.Kde/Autostart but for KDE4 it is ~/.kde4/Autostart

So all I had to do was recreate my soft links:

cd ~/.kde4/Autostart

ln -s /usr/bin/hotkeys  hotkeys

I am not sure if .kde4 is the official directory for KDE4 files or if this has been set up by Kubuntu because they are allowing you to run both KDE3.5 and KDE4

Skype Not Working

This is the only issue I have yet to resolve. After the upgrade Skype was completely uninstalled. I tried installing it from apt-get but this gave an error saying there was no valid install candidate.

I still had the .deb package I had downloaded from the Skype website so I just re-installed this using dpkg -i

This gave me Skype back on the menu and it ran ok but whenever I try to make a call it just fails.

I suspect this might be something to do with the sound system and the fact in fixing my lack of volume I installed the pulse audio server.

I will try un-installing pulse audio and see if it makes any difference. Though I would like to use pulse audio to see what it is like and what all the fuss is about.

KDE4 Save Current Session - DBUS to the Rescue

Executive Summary

To cut to the chase, if you want to save your current sessions in KDE4 run the following command from a command line ( or put it in a script that you can call from a desktop shortcut ):

dbus-send --dest=org.kde.ksmserver /KSMServer org.kde.KSMServerInterface.saveCurrentSession

The Details

Now for how I got here in the first place:

I’ve just upgraded to Kubuntu Hardy Heron and decided to give KDE4 a go. I’ll be posting about the upgrade process and KDE4 in general over the coming days but one thing that has kept me “amused” today is the lack of a “Save Current Session” button in KDE4

Rather than have the desktop returned to how it was when I last logged out ( “Restore Previous Session” under KControl ) I like to return to a standard set of applications so I use the “Restore Manually Saved Session” option under KDE 3.5.

In KDE4 KControl there are the same options for the session manager. The snag is that there is no button anywhere to actually save the session when you want to. Thus choosing this option effectively logs you back in to a blank session. This has been reported as a bug in KDE but does not seem to be making any progress.

Flushed with my success with dcop recently I was hoping I could use it with the ksmserver object ( the session manager ) but in KDE4 dcop is not used and the dbus interface is used instead which is a bit more complicated to use.

There is a tool you can install called kdbus that does a similar job to kdcop but I found a much better tool called qdbusviewer along with a useful overview of KDE and dbus here.

To use qdbusviewer you need to install the package qt4-dev-tools then run qdbusviewer from a command line:-

sudo apt-get install qt4-dev-tools

qdbusviewer

You can use qdbusviewer to browser what objects are available and execute methods on them just like kdcop and kdbus ( but kdbus is rather slower )

Internet Hotkeys - Amarok dcop play/pause

Well the solution to getting my Play/Pause button to actually work as a play/pause toggle was pretty easy.

Amarok supports a playPause() method that is registered to the dcop server so in my hotkeys.conf file the command for the Play button became

dcop amarok player playPause

dcop is the command line based client to talk to the dcop server, amarok is of course the application I want to talk to.

player is the section of the amarok services and playPause is the function/method I want to call.

To find this out I used kdcop the graphical interface and explored what it offered under the amarok application.

Internet Hotkeys

My keyboard is a Logitech Internet Pro and it has 7 keys at the top for special functions that I’ve never really made use of in Kubuntu, but now I’ve got them all functioning using the handy application “hotkeys”.

Here’s what I did to get them working:

First the actual keys are labelled

Media ,Play/Pause,Mute,Vol +,Vol -,Favorites,Email,WWW

I tried to use KDE keyboard variants to get them working but this didn’t really work that well so I installed the application hotkeys:-

sudo apt-get install hotkeys

The hotkeys application intercepts keys and processes actions according to a couple of configuration files.

The first config file is the definition of the keycodes that are generated by your keyboard and what hotkeys command name to map them to. There is one definition file for each type of keyboard that hotkeys supports. To see the list of supported keyboards run the command

hotkeys -l

This actually reads the contents of various .def files from the config directory ( /usr/share/hotkeys in Kubuntu)

The second config file defines what action or programs are run when the various keys are pressed. By default in Kubuntu this is installed as /etc/hotkeys.conf. The best way to customise this is to create a directory in your homedir called .hotkeys and copy /etc/hotkeys.conf into there.

mkdir ~/.hotkeys

cp /etc/hotkeys.conf ~/.hotkeys/hotkeys.conf

The hotkeys.conf file consists of simple key/value pairs and you can edit it to launch the applications you require. The setting for Kbd defines what keyboard definition file is loaded when you run hotkeys.

Here is the final version of my hotkeys.conf ( note that Kbd is set to logitech-internet-pro which is not a standard definition, it’s one I created myself. More of which anon.)

############################################################
# Global configuration for hotkeys #
############################################################

# These are the default values.
# A line starting with # is a comment.

### Specify the default keyboard (without the .def extension) so you
### don’t need to specify -t every time

#using my own definition based on itouch
Kbd=logitech-internet-pro

Play=amarok –pause

WebBrowser=firefox
Email=firefox gmail.com
Favorites=dolphin

# osd_font=-arphic-ar pl kaitim big5-bold-i-normal–0-250-0-0-c-0-*-*
### For the color, you can either use the strings in /etc/X11/rgb.txt,
### or use the RGB syntax #RRGGBB, e.g. ##A086FF
# osd_color=LawnGreen
# osd_timeout=3
### osd_position is either ‘top’ or ‘bottom’
# osd_position=bottom
# osd_offset=25

The syntax is pretty obvious, when the WebBrowser key is pressed the command firefox is executed. To test the config just run the command

hotkeys

You’ll see a splash screen appear briefly and the application is now running. Press a key and you see an on screen display in green telling you what is happening and the relevant action will be executed.

You’ll notice I haven’t mapped anything for mute, volume etc. these all work with the defaults.

To get hotkeys to always be loaded when I am running KDE I added a link to the hotkeys executable to the .kde/Autostart directory:-

cd ~/.kde/Autostart

ln -s /usr/bin/hotkeys hotkeys

The Play/Pause keys executes “amarok –pause” , unfortunately from the command line this is not a toggle thus I can press the “Play/Pause” key and it will pause amarok but a second press won’t restart it. The command for that is “amarok –play” so I have mapped this to my Media key at the moment.

The “Media” key is not a standard hotkeys command name but the keyboard definition files allow you define commands to executed directly in there. The “key” (pun intended) to the keyboard definition files are the keycodes your keyboard generates.

I started with the itouch.def file and found it worked for most of they keys. Using the excellent application “xev” I was able to discover what keycodes my keyboard was generating and create my own variant called logitech-internet-pro.def the contents are reproduced below. I shall have to see if there is anywhere appropriate I can upload the file to make it available for others.

<?xml version=”1.0″?>

<definition>

<config model=”Logitech Internet Pro”>

<Play keycode=”162″/>

<VolUp keycode=”176″ adj=”2″/>
<VolDown keycode=”174″ adj=”2″/>
<Mute keycode=”160″/>

<WebBrowser keycode=”178″/>
<Email keycode=”236″/>
<Favorites keycode=”230″/>

<!– Feel free to customize this - the media key –>

<userdef keycode=”237″ command=”amarok -p”>Amarok</userdef>

</config>

<contributor>
<name>Simon Stanford</name>
<email>sjs atraetsel dot co dot uk</email>
</contributor>

My next task is to see if I can get the Play/Pause button to actually act as a toggle and for this I think I am going to need to use dcop to interrogate the state of amarok and/or pass it the appropriate command.