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Friday, August 31, 2007

KDE The Other Blue Meat

I never talk about the other major Ubuntu distro, Kubuntu. I wish I had the time to cover Kubuntu, but I don't. The good thing is that just just because I run Ubuntu doesn't mean I can't use some of Kubuntu's best applications.

Kubuntu is an official derivative of the Ubuntu operating system using the KDE environment instead of GNOME. KDE enviroment is quite similair and has advantages and disadvantages over GNOME. I will not get into specifics here but I can attest that the following KDE applications I will be recommending are fantastic and many of you might like them more than the GNOME equivalents.

Amarok

Best music jukebox for any operating system. Amarok serves many functions rather than just playing music files. For example, Amarok can be used to organize a library of music into folders according to genre, artist, and album, can edit tags attached to most music formats, associate album art, attach lyrics, and automatically "score" music as you play it. But even under an environment like GNOME Amarok retains all of its functionality. It's biggest features is it last.fm integration, media player support, cover manager and ability to synch the ipod and use many of each features.

To download Amarok, ipod support and mp3 support
sudo apt-get install amarok ipodslave libxine1-ffmpeg

K3b
Provides a graphical user interface to perform most CD/DVD burning tasks like creating an Audio CD from a set of audio files or copying a CD/DVD, as well as more advanced tasks such as burning eMoviX CD/DVDs. It can also perform direct disc-to-disc copies. The program has many default settings which can be customized by more experienced users. The actual disc recording in K3b is done by the command line utilities cdrecord or wodim, cdrdao, and growisofs. As of version 1.0, K3b features a built-in DVD ripper.

sudo apt-get install k3b
sudo apt-get install libk3b2-mp3 for mp3 decoder plugin (allows you to burn mp3s to CD)

K9copy
It is generally seen as the Linux equivalent of the Windows-based DVD Shrink, as it shrinks a DVD-9 DVD down to a DVD-5 DVD, allowing for movies on dual layer DVDs to be shrunk down in order to fit on a single layer DVD. The program allows the user to have the shrunken down DVD written to the hard drive as an ISO image which can then be burned to a DVD recordable by using a CD/DVD burning program such as K3b. Like DVD Shrink, k9copy is also useful for circumventing copy protection that normally leads to an "input/output error".


sudo apt-get install k9copy

KControl
KControl is the graphic tweaking system for the KDE enviroment. It has a modular architecture, the window is split into two parts: the left side displays the list of available modules (also known as applets), and the right side displays the current module. Applications can install their own KControl modules (an example being Konqueror), although most applications prefer to use their own, independent settings managers. This means you can use kcontrol to tweak the look and feel of these kde based programs to fit better into your ubuntu/gnome enviroment.

sudo apt-get install kcontrol
edited by pHreaksYcle

7 comments:

Aditya Kavoor said...

amarok and k3b are my favs

Unknown said...

I have to agree with ya. I miss most of the KDE-based programs when I was using openSuSE, so I ported most of the KDE programs onto my Ubuntu box.

Amarok, Kopete, KControl, and KAlarm are my favourites!

Thanks for the recommendations!

Alex said...

its a shame that KDE is a lot uglier than gnome...but in case anyone was wondering you can install the desktop environment using "apt-get install kubuntu-desktop"

than just select it using sessions...its kinda interesting to use some of the other environments....I really like openbox for coding which u can install by typing "apt-get install openbox" and if anyone likes simplistic interfaces check out xubuntu which runs on XCFE the easiest way to get this is "apt-get install xubuntu-desktop"

Clau said...

[shameless ad begin]
hey, I've got a blog inspired by this one, but with Kubuntu. Check it out at http://kubuntu1501.blogspot.com
[shameless ad end]
Yea, KDE is awesome, can't wait for KDE4!

redDEAD said...

put some more content on your site and ill link to it on my front page

McFingers said...

I am currently in the process of installing the kubuntu desktop on my ubuntu install "sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop"

I will post screenshots of both, and let you know how it all works.

This KDE install is after I followed redDEAD's wirelsss, ati, and synaptics guides.

I will let everyone know how it all plays out, and if there are any erros or bugs.

McFingers said...

I am currently in the process of installing the kubuntu desktop on my ubuntu install "sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop"

I will post screenshots of both, and let you know how it all works.

This KDE install is after I followed redDEAD's wirelsss, ati, and synaptics guides.

I will let everyone know how it all plays out, and if there are any erros or bugs.