Kubuntu Notes

Gutsy Gibbon

Fuzzy Fonts

After upgrading to gutsy, fonts might appear a little fuzzy. To fix this, go to System Settings > Appearance > Fonts and change the "Use anti-aliasing" box to "Enabled". Then click on the configure button and turn off sub-pixel hinting.

Compiz

Follow this tutorial: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=601310

You may need to turn on composite mode for X. To do this, you can run nvidia-xconfig --composite, which as far as I can tell just puts this in your xorg.conf:

Section "Extensions"
    Option         "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

Restart X when you're done.

Make sure you enable the Window Decorations plugin in the compiz configuration manager, or you won't have borders for your windows!

The KDE pager and taskbar don't work with compiz. Install these instead: kicker-compiz, taskbar-compiz. Here's a kubuntu gutsy theme for emerald: http://tinyurl.com/2typn9. And here's some widget information: http://compiz.org/Desktop_Screenlets.

General

Building source packages

If you need to build a package from source, first run apt-get source <package>. That will download the source files and unpack them for you. Next, cd into the directory it created (something like package-1.2.3). You'll need to install dpkg-dev and fakeroot next (apt-get install dpkg-dev fakeroot). Finally, run dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot ( see the note below first before building). This command will build the package files (*.deb) which you can install via dpkg -i.

In summary:

1. apt-get source <package>
2. cd <package-1.2.3>
3. apt-get install dpkg-dev fakeroot
4. dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

After installing the package you just built, apt-get dist-upgrade might install over your "self-built" package because it thinks its own version of the package is newer. To get around this, you can change the version of your package by using the dch command. You'll need to install the devscripts package to get this command. Run dch -i from the package source directory, and type a little note to yourself about why you're building the package from source. Then follow the above steps.