Installing and configuring Kubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10)

Posted by Al Twohill on 7 March 2008 | 0 Comments

Tags: ubuntu, linux

So, the latest and greatest version of the greatest Distro ever is out (haha flamebait :P), and I thought it would be good to document how my install went, so others might be able to get their system up and running nicely. But first:

The hardware:

The machine I'm installing this on is also my gaming machine, so it is dual booting Vista Ultimate x64. It also currently has Kubuntu 8.04, though I didn't use it much because it was too ugly and broken for my liking.

Specs are as follows:

• CPU: Intel Dual Core E8400 @ 3.00 GHz
• Motherboard: Asus P5E (Intel X38 Northbridge/ ICH9R Southbridge)
• Memory: 2 GB DDR2-1200
• Video: Gigabyte ATi Radeon HD 3870 + Sapphire ATi Radeon HD 3870
• Storage: 2x Seagate 320GB SATA2 HDD w/ 16mb cache in striped RAID
• Sound: Creative X-FI Extreme Music

It would be pretty straight-forward, apart from the X-Fi sound card, and the fakeraid requirement for dualbooting. I am wanting to re-format my linux partitions and keep Vista happy.

So, without further ado,

The install

I download the x86 live installer .iso from the nearest mirror. I'm still very suspicious of x64 on linux at this stage, and will continue to be until Java, Flash, and Skype (among others) are sorted out.

So, freshly burnt CD in drive, I give 8.04 one last wave good by and hit the reset button. The CD boot prompt is pretty much the same as the last version, and still miles behind Redhat-based loaders (such as OpenSUSE), but never mind. So I boot up and get the age old progress bar doing its thing. That disappears and I expect any minute to be be landed into the live CD. 

Uh oh. My monitor light is blinking in a way I don't like. I try the old CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE trick to no avail. Hmmm. I reboot, and choose 'Safe graphics' under the F4 menu. This time, we're off. I wish it would do that automatically though - how hard can it be to detect that a display mode isn't working and revert back to safe? Or, dare I say - the windows way of starting off in safe graphics mode then prompting to change once everything is loaded is a very good way to handle it.

Nevermind, I'm now in the live environment, and I have to say - KDE4.1 is a hell of a lot nicer and complete looking than KDE4. I'm quite impressed. There's no real Kubuntu styling though (save for a forum-signature-like Kubuntu image in the Kicker menu). After using distros such as OpenSUSE 11, which completely immerses you in a uniform look and feel, Kubuntu just seems bland. I only wish I had a decent design sense so I could help out in this area! But, at the end of the day you can't complain about the default KDE4.1 look.

So I fire up the Ubiquity installer and set off. All is well until I get to the hard-drives bit. It seems Ubiquity still doesn't support fakeraid. I was dreading a return to  my Kubuntu With Fakeraid page, but then I found that the alternate cd fully supports fakeraid! Why isn't this noted somewhere on the download page?

Never mind, it only takes a few more minutes to download the alternate .iso. I also note that the New Zealand mirrors now show up as an option to download from, but they don't work... maybe this is just a temporary thing. No worries - I get it from across the ditch just fine.

The alternate cd install is fine for people who don't mind ugly terminal-based graphics, like me. Sure enough, when it comes to partitioning the installer prompts me that it found some fakeraids and would I like to enable them. Yes! This is waay easier than the last install - thanks guys!!

First boot, first trouble

OK, so the installer is all done, and I restart the computer. Hmmm... even though the grub installer recognised the Vista OS it didn't add it into the boot menu. Never mind - I can deal with that, but it might trip up new users (I'll detail how I fixed this in a wee bit).

The machine boots up the Kubuntu loading screen, then uh-oh - that blinking monitor light is back! However, we can fix that now we have a loaded system. Hit CTRL-ALT-F1 and you get the console login screen. Do your login, then install the graphics drivers. I have a couple of ATi cards, so I run

al@grif:~$ apt-cache search fglrx

This gives me a list of the packages that might help with my card.

fglrx-modaliases - Identifiers supported by the ATI graphics driver
jockey-common - user interface and desktop integration for driver management
jockey-gtk - GNOME user interface and desktop integration for driver management
jockey-kde - KDE user interface and desktop integration for driver management
xserver-xorg-video-radeon - X.Org X server -- ATI Radeon display driver
fglrx-amdcccle - Catalyst Control Center for the ATI graphics accelerators
fglrx-kernel-source - Kernel module source for the ATI graphics accelerators
xorg-driver-fglrx - Video driver for the ATI graphics accelerators
xorg-driver-fglrx-dev - Video driver for the ATI graphics accelerators (devel files)

Sweet! that looks promising. I install

al@grif:~$ sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx-amdcccle

Once that's done it's thing, I run

al@grif:~$ sudo  aticonfig --intitial

And now you can either restart, or just run

al@grif:~$ startx

Before you restart though, lets fix up the boot loader not showing Vista. Open up the menu.lst file in your favourite editor

al@grif:~$ sudo nano -w /boot/grub/menu.lst

Put the following text either before the bit that says "### BEGIN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST" (if you want Vista at the top), or after "### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST". DO NOT PUT IT INBETWEEN THIS BLOCK! YOUR COMPUTER WILL EXPLODE!

title           Windows Vista Ultimate
root            (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader     +1

Save and exit by hitting CTRL-X . Now when you boot you should see Vista in there as well as Ubuntu.

Second boot - video working, now where is sound?

Now that I can boot into either OS, and have graphics I'm a bit more comfortable with how things are going. Next task is to get sound working. To make things difficult I have a Creative X-Fi, one of the worst supported sound cards in Linux (c'mon Creative dammit!). The only reason I keep it is because it is awesome when gaming.

I do have a sound card that came with my motherboard that is reasonable (and supported out of the box), but I don't want to have to switch my speakers back and forth all the time.

The solution is to use OSS. OSS is getting more and more support these days thanks to them re-releasing their code as opensource (and the fact that it is sooo much better designed and writen than ALSA). In saying that, I couldn't find an OSS package in the repos, so I had to compile it. It's not too hard though, and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenSound details the steps to follow in a very clear way. I had to reboot for sound to work, as there still seems to be a bit of rough edges between phonon and OSS. The sound control panel applet doesn't really work any more either. But I don't care - I have sound!

Overall - the review

I'm going to finish off this bit soon - I promise!