Package List

No distro is complete without downloading all the apps that are missing on the CD. Ubuntu's Debian repositories make that easy. Once I got my internet connection running I downloaded the following:

Tips for Configuration and Installing

Virtual Consoles

I found this tip at the Ubuntu Wiki:

	Go in your /etc/inittab 
and add to the "1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1" 
lines the following code:
 "-I '\033[2J\033[f'".
	
	Like so:
	1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1 -I '\033[2J\033[f'
	2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2 -I '\033[2J\033[f'
	... (etc)
	
	This sends a clear console code on exit. An old modem thing.
	

Postfix

Configuring Postfix was a little more difficult. The challenge is getting Postfix and SASL to interoperate in order for me to authenticate to my ISP. I learned a lot about how to do this from this webpage.

I added the following to /etc/postfix/

	smtp_sasl_auth_enable=yes
	smtp_sasl_password_maps=hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
	smtp_sasl_security_options=
	
	smtpd_sasl_auth_enable=yes
	smtpd_use_pw_server=yes
	

I added the following to /etc/postfix/sasl/smtpd.conf

	smtp_sasl_auth_enable=yes
	smtp_sasl_password_maps=hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
	smtp_sasl_security_options=
	
	smtpd_sasl_auth_enable=yes
	smtpd_use_pw_server=yes
	

Dial up Modem

Since most developers have broadband, the old-fashioned, unlucky dial-up users like myself are frequently forgotten. The Gnome desktop as a whole is criminally guilty of forgetting about dial-up folks like myself, and the excellent KPPP dialup utility is one of the many reasons I prefer the more feature-complete KDE desktop. Kubuntu's kppp required some tweaking, however.

First of all, the first time I loaded it up it complained that there was no /etc/resolv.conf file. I opened a shell and created one to get past that problem (sudo touch /etc/resolv.conf). Afterwards KPPP would dial up, authenticate, and then die as soon as it passed control over to the PPP daemon pppd.

# Require the peer to authenticate itself before allowing network
# packets to be sent or received.
# Please do not disable this setting. It is expected to be standard in
# future releases of pppd. Use the call option (see manpage) to disable
# authentication for specific peers.
auth

I disregarded the warning, put an additional # before the auth command to disable it, and kppp has worked like a charm ever since. The reason is that kppp does its own authentication and then hands control over to the pppd daemon. But as configured originally the first thing it tried to do was authenticate again. Not necessary, and disabling that behavior lets me dial up with ease.

Printing

I had trouble getting an Epson Stylus C60 printer to receive information over a parallel cable. Fewer and fewer people still use parallel cable in a world of USB, but my old laptop only had one USB slot, so using parallel cable allows me to save the USB for another peripheral, in this case a trackball.

I found very few articles on the Internet about people experiencing printer trouble with (K)ubuntu, which makes me think my problems do not represent the typical Kubuntu user experience. The problem was that as I ran the KDE printer setup wizard (a very nice little wizard!) but when it came time to test the printer setup, nothing was printed, and KDE didn't register any errors for my attention. Trying to run the wizard as root didn't help.

The following are the steps I took to diagnose the problems. Turns out to have been a simple driver issue and maybe a couple of easy tweaks.

1. Determine whether or not the Cups daemon (cupsd) is running at all.

		pl -Al | grep cupsd
	

That showed the cupsd was indeed running.

2. Check that the kernel is able to deal with parallel cable by running

 modprobe parport_pc

An empty response is good (no news is good news). Otherwise you'll get an error stating that kernel module was not found. But that was not my problem.

3. Read the cups error log to see if the errors revealed any useful information. Turns out, they did. Find the error log at /var/spool/log/cups/. In my case, the errors didn't provide enough information to tell me what was wrong, but suggested helpfully that I enable more verbose logging. This I did by modifying /etc/cups/printers.conf and killing and restarting cupsd. The verbose logging helped me figure out that cupsd was receiving the document but was unable to render it - sounded like a bad driver to me. I tried another driver combination instead of the one the kprinter wizard listed as recommended, and this resolved my problems.

4. The following are changes I made en route to my solution. I don't know if they really made a difference or not: User kprinter (run it as root) to make myself part of the "lp" group. Kuser gave me some trouble so I finally just manually edited the /etc/group file, which was easier, really. I also fixed the permissions on the lp cups driver by switching to the /etc/udev/permissions.d/udev-permissions directory and ensuring that lp had permissions level of 0666 (it was 0660 before, I think).

Locales and Consoles

I had a lot of trouble with the $LOCALE variables and the smooth operation of my virtual consoles, Konsoles, aterms, and vterms. Xterms never worked right with emacs and mutt displayed a lot of characters with diacritical marks incorrectly. I solved it by adding the following to my .bashrc:

LOCALE=en_US.utf8 && export LOCALE
LC_CTYPE=en_US.iso88591 && export LC_CTYPE
alias xterm='xterm -en ISO-8859-1 -fg white -bg black'
	

To get the locales thing working correctly I had to reconfigure the locales package with 'dpkg--reconfigure locales'. To get Konsole to deal with the diacritical marks I had to manually set the encoding to Western European (ISO-8859-1) from the "Settings" menu. This is something that could definitely use more work in the next release, as console users like myself rely so heavily on these things being correctly configured.

The Verdict:

I finally went back to SUSE, this time installing 9.3 over FTP. Their excellent YaST2 utility makes a world of difference, and most packages I use came already installed. I was furthermore pleasantly surprised to find out a lot of what had annoyed me about 9.2 were specific to that release, and 9.3 was a much better product, even on the same hardware.