Hands on: Tips and tricks for Ubuntu

Over the past few months, we’ve looked at the installation and configuration of Feisty Fawn, the latest release of Ubuntu Linux, which is perhaps the most popular free Linux distribution available.

First we saw the standard Ubuntu release, followed by Kubuntu, the KDE desktop variation, last month. This time, we shall round off the series with a few extra tips.

Upgrading KDE
As regular readers of this column will know, every package from each variation of Ubuntu comes from the same set of repositories (large pools of packaged software).

This means that if you install KDE applications on the standard Gnome release, you will end up with exactly the same packages as you would by installing Kubuntu directly. Each variation of Ubuntu picks a different set of applications from the repositories.

However, the maintainers of Kubuntu often update several KDE applications, including the desktop release itself, in separate, semi-official repositories. If you configure your system to use these repositories, you can install the updates on Ubuntu or Kubuntu as you would any other.

Feisty came with KDE 3.5.6, which at the time of release was the latest version. Since then, 3.5.7 has been released, which fixes lots of minor bugs and contains a few significant enhancements, particularly to the Pim applications. You can read more about the new features at www.kde.org. A repository for the new version is available from the Kubuntu website. For details, see http://kubuntu.org/announcements/kde-357.php.

There are a few options for setting up a new repository. The hands-on way is to edit the file /etc/apt/sources.list and add the necessary lines yourself. In this case, as shown on the Kubuntu website, the line to add is deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/kde-357 feisty main

Download the security key from the website and add it, as the packages are signed for authenticity. This step needs to be done only once:

$ wget http://people.ubuntu.com/~jriddell/kubuntu-packages-jriddell-key.gpg

$ sudo apt-key add kubuntu-packages-jriddell-key.gpg

Alternatively, use the Adept Manager in KDE or Software Sources in Gnome. Click ‘Import Key File’ from the Authentication tab and find the downloaded key. Then click the ‘Third Party Software’ tab and add the deb line above. This performs the same steps as the commands above.

The update notification manager will pick up the new packages, and you may install them that way if you wish. To get the job done quickly, update the package list yourself and perform the upgrade manually:

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get upgrade