Month: April 2008

I finished up all the upgrades to my home PC putting me on Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). Unfortunately none of the auto-magical upgrade tools provided by Canonical worked for me, so all my upgrades were done via cli, using aptitude. Mostly this means I had to repeatedly run “sudo aptitude dist-upgrade”, interspersed with removing/installing specific packages based on errors thrown up by apititude, with a couple “sudo aptitude -f install” and “sudo dpkg –configure -a” thrown in for good measure.

I’ve been running Gutsy for a day now and the apps I normally use1 seems to be working fine. A couple of tweaks I made almost immediately after upgrading to Gusty:

  • Removed Strigi. From what I understand Strigi is supposed to be some sort of indexer to allow for quick searching of your computer. Only I found it had a horribly impact performance. Everything became extremely sluggish.
  • Switch the default file manager to Konqueror from Dolphin. Dolphin looks like it might be useful and it did feel faster. But I’m used to Konqueror and don’t feel like making the switch right now.
  • Installed Compiz. I found it interesting but different enough from my normal preferences that I’ve disabled it for now. Though I do plan to look at it more another day.

1 Kontact, Firefox, Konsole, KMyMoney, Kaffeine, Digikam, and Amarok

KDE Logo I’ve been running Kubuntu 6.06 LTS as my main OS on my home PC since it was released. Along the way, I’ve upgraded to KDE 3.5.5 and Amarok 1.4.3 and installed a variety of packages from unofficial sources. When I Edgy 6.10 was first released I looked into upgrading, but held off. This was due to all the complaints and problems I had been reading about where people had done similar things to myself (e.g. installed apps using unofficial sources). While I was no longer living on the edge, I still have been keeping up with the community by reading Planet KDE. A lot of changes and new features sounded really cool but with all the horror stories out there and Dapper being a Long Term Support release, I figured I was better off waiting to upgrade until I absolutely had to.

Last night, I decided I’d held off long enough. So I backed up all my data and started the upgrade. As expected, upgrading from Dapper to Edgy was painful. Fortunately I’ve gotten some experience with the cli and was able to work past my problems. I might still be missing a few things (e.g. Flash player doesn’t seem to work at the moment) but overall I’m rather impressed. My computer feels a bit more speedy and the fonts look enormously better. It’s really quite extraordinary how much better things look.

I’ve already started the upgrade to take me from Edgy to Feisty 7.04 and am very much looking forward to being on Gutsy 7.10 (not to mention Hardy 8.04 later this month). For now though, my eyes are burning with sleepiness, so I’ll post this and catch some shut-eye while my computer downloads all the packages it needs to upgrade me to Feisty.

Sometimes when you’re staring the bash prompt, you want to be able to see if a specific program is currently running. There are a couple of ways to do this; generally I run:
ps -ef | grep ProgramName

However I once saw a tip for doing something similar with top but I lost the link and for a long time couldn’t find it again. Truth be told, I still haven’t found that specific link but I did some googling and found the right cli switches to do it. Since I want to make sure I remember in the future, I’m posting it here:
top -b -n 1 | grep ProgramName