Hands on: Ubuntu Linux – Kubuntu and Xubuntu

Next, enter ‘restricted’ into the search box and select ‘Ubuntu restricted extras.’ This ‘meta-package’ does nothing itself, but will pull in several others, including the Adobe Flash 9 plug-in, Sun Java 6 and Microsoft’s ‘Core Web’ fonts. It will also install some unnecessary packages for multimedia support; these are only useful for Ubuntu, but will do no harm in Kubuntu.

The native web browser for KDE is Konqueror. This is a versatile and modern browser; it has excellent CSS support, coming in at the top of web standards compliance with much of its support.

Unfortunately, many modern websites include ‘kludges’ to make their pages work with Firefox and Internet Explorer, which can break Konqueror’s rendering. If the sites you use work without problems in Konqueror, then I would recommend it as a fast and very well integrated browser; otherwise install Firefox. As above, enter ‘firefox’ into the search bar of the Add/Remove programs application.

Optional extras
Although the Ubuntu repositories contain thousands of packages, occasionally there will be ones not present or newer versions not yet available. It is often useful to compile packages from source in these instances. The main development tools can be installed with the ‘build-essential’ meta-package.

Also useful is ‘nasm,’ an x86 assembler used for optimisation by some packages, and ‘xorg-dev,’ a meta-package which installs all the base libraries needed for building graphical programs. Install these as above, or perhaps more quickly through the command-line interface of the package manager:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential nasm xorg-dev

There are various multimedia tools that may come in handy, such as ‘lame’ (the mp3 encoder), mpg321 (an mp3 decoder), flac (a lossless audio encoder), libk3b2-mp3 (for mp3 support in K3b), kaudiocreator (for advanced CD ripping) and sox (for audio effects). Install these in the same way as above:

$ sudo apt-get install lame mpg321 flac libk3b2-mp3 kaudiocreator sox

Note that the version of lame in Feisty is the fairly old 3.96.1. The 3.97 release performs considerably better and is generally recommended as the best mp3 encoder available (see http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org and click on Lame). You can use your freshly installed development packages to build this new version from the source code.

This applies equally to Ubuntu, since the same repositories are in use. First download the source code from http://lame.sourceforge.net and then extract and build the code:

$ tar xfvz lame-3.97.tar.gz

$ cd lame-3.97

$ ./configure

$ make

$ sudo make install

The sequence of commands here is typical for building software, and usually differs little from this. Once done, the binaries will be installed to the /usr/local directories (with the lame executable at /usr/local/bin/lame). Software installed to these directories takes precedence over the standard software, so there is no need to remove the version of lame installed from the repositories, if present.