Saturday, January 5, 2008

My Unbranded Kubuntu


I did I removed the Kubuntu startup and shutdown displays. How I did can be found in my latest Theme Package that I pasted at KDE Look. It was an effort but I am extremely pleased with the results. Now for my next trick...

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Kubuntu Breaks Itself

Okay that's an odd title but let me explain and you'll see why I am kinda glad things worked out this way.

First off I make no qualms about my issues concerning many of Canonical's more "interesting" decisions and why they PO me.

One of the more recent issues is the KDM over ride. I like making KDM and Ksplash screens. Its fun and helps me learn how things work and people generally like my material when I'm done packaging it.

I can't use the KDM theme manager but I did find the way to get around it and have plastered that information all over kde-look.org. Whatever Canonical did to KDM is not as i shall say, a good thing. This is another one of the "hmmmms" things. Is Canonical trying to be the MS of the Linux Community?

Usplash versus Splashy: I can give a lot of reasons why Splashy is superior to Usplash but the one I feel is the most important is that Splashy allows anyone to create and change splash themes without to much effort. Usplash on the other hand requires some pretty hard core programming knowledge, requires a bunch of steps to convert the graphic to something it can use and then you have to compile that. three letters, a acronym, WTF?

So after banging my head around slightly I actually got Usplash replaced with Splashy and that means I can do a total theme configuration.

However, KSplash went nuts on me and I had to clean out the KSplash cache folder in ~/.kde/share/apps/ksplash/cache and also move all my themes to /usr/share/apps/ksplash/themes so now that's working again.

Now why all this is going on something happened to my KDE config files. I.E. Kubuntu broke itself and my desktop just went bye bye. I had to reset EVERYTHING and then I noticed a wonderful thing. Those annoying little Kubuntu hacks were gone. KDE started acting like KDE should. Yep my New Year just strated off great.