Moving over – part 3

So its time to continu reporting of my move over to kubuntu8.04 on my new laptop – the Acer Aspire 8920. I have managed to get more and more of the necessary things over so im using the new laptop now for work every day, even if I am missing things.

One of the main things still to fully solve is the sound issue. I have tried to switch over to oss4 and that works and I do get sound from the KDE system, but it seems that a lot of the IP phones I’m using will not work. But lets go over the things one step at the time. The things I will cover today is the

  • Blurtooth mouse
  • Flash for firefox
  • krdc
  • skype

Bluetooth mouse

I do think that the touchpad is ok for some minor work, but when using the keyboard fully during the day and writing documents and other things, I think its in the way. I do have the tendency of moving the pointer while im typing and that usually means that I insert text wher I dont whant it. So I normally use a external Bluetooth mouse (from Microsoft 🙂 ). But that has to be configured into the system.

Its realy not hard. I uses the command hcitool scan to se what different bluetooth devices is around and the do:

where 00:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx if the adress of my mouse. That connects the mouse (and you have to remember to turn on bluetooth every time you boot the machine, but thats only one button). But I whant the connect to be done everytime the system boots, so we need to edit the /etc/default/blurtooth file.

Change the lines HIDD_ENABLED and HIDD_OPTIONS to the following

This means that the system will connect to the mouse at startup and – as long as you remember to turn bluetooth on – you will have it running even during the login screen.

Flash for firefox

As im running hthe 64 bits version of the kubuntu OS and therefore the 64 bits version of firefox there is some notes out there about getting the flash plugin to work. After some googeling there seems to be quite easy to get it to work now. I needed only to install nspluginwrapper – this wrapper alows you to run the u386 versions of the plugins on 64 bits version of the OS and firefox. SO just run:

This installs the wrapper and the flash plugin and all works very well. Ther eis a small issue with th oss sound system but I will get back to that when I talk about the OSS install.

krdc

krdc is the KDE program for running remote desktop in the Linux world. Its a wonderful tool for using when you are a consultant like me and have customers with a lot of windows system. It allows you – among other things –  to connect to a windows server.

There is ofcuase a number of setting you need for that and I preferred to have my old setting copied over to the new system.

The config file for krdc is only in the file .kde/share/config/krdcrc so i copied that from the old system and now that works.

Skype

I have stuggled and keept out of the skype world for some time as I do work with free IP phones but more and more of my clients have skype and some is using that as a chat system also, so I did start and installed a client on the old system. I then ofcuase have to copy that over to the new system.

So the prerequsites for skype is ia32libs, and lib32asound2 so i installed this with:

and the download the skype client with:

and then install it all with:

sudo dpkg -i –force-all skype-install.deb

The –force-all is required as the .dep package is for the i376 platform specific and you whant to install it on this 64 bits version. This gives you the skype klient, and besides the oss / sound problem it works ok.

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