Hello All,

My Kubuntu 6.10 became painfully slow so I decided to trim it and a page on the web showed 3 ways to edit startup items. Rcconf, file-rc among them. File-rc conflicted with sysv-rc so I removed it and while doing so, waved goodbye to most of the main packages. So it was time for a re-load.

Wanting to give Etch stable a try, a single CD KDE version ftp://ftp.isu.edu.tw/pub/Linux/Debian/debian-cd/4.0_r1/i386/iso-cd/debian-40r1-i386-kde-CD-1.iso was downloaded from a Taiwan mirror using 'wget -c url'. I don't know if the site was the same or another one but it was Taiwanese and among the first 4 in the list. The system configuration is P4 2.4 Ghz., Intel 845 GEBV2, 256 MB RAM, 80 GB IDE HDD.

Download after 10 pm India is good as Taiwan is sleeping by then. Installation was absolutely un-eventfull and smooth. Used default install instead of guiinstall at boot prompt. During the pre-install setup, it asks whether you want to install packages from the mirror so select 'No' if you want to reduce your MTNL Triband bill. It will still look for security mirrors and download about 50-60 MB of security updates. Video and sound was properly detected by default.

The distro is packed with KDE utilities but does not have Open Office or KOffice and no CUPS. It comes with Iceweasel which is an avtar of Firefox. Since mirrors were not selected during install, the apt /etc/apt/sources.lst file was not having any repo entries except for security. There was no sudo package, so it was installed using apt-get. The /etc/sudoers file was edited using 'nano' since 'vi' gave problems. Then 'vim' was installed using apt-get. vi worked fine after that. These are done from the CD.

Next, searched the net for apt sources and found a copy of someone's sources.lst for etch and copy pasted it. After an apt-get update, it was time to download other required packages. They are listed below. knemo - for network monitoring. adept - A lovely gui for apt. It helps in searching related packages other than the main namesake. cupsys, cups-pdf, cupsys-client, cupsys-common, cupsys drivers, printconf. Icedove - avtar of Thunderbird.

Iceweasel and Icedove use default .mozilla and .mozilla-thunderbird folders in the user directory, so restoring backups is simply a copy and paste of the entire folders.

Cups-pdf is a utility to add a system wide pdf printer. The HP Deskjet 610c printer was setup using a browser and entering localhost:631 as the url. The pdf printer was added by selecting 'Virtual Printer PDF' from the initial list. In the drivers list, select 'Raw Printer' and go ahead. By default, cups-pdf creates a folder called PDF in the home directory. It can be changed by editing the file /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf.

Open Office is available as an older version in apt, so DON'T install it. Go to ftp://ftp.mirror.tw/pub/openoffice/stable/2.3.0/OOo_2.3.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz

and download the file. Then untar it and you will get a DEBS folder full of .deb packages and a subfolder called Desktop Integration. Get into the DEBS folder and use 'sudo dpkg -i *.deb' to install all the deb packages. Then get into the Desktop Integration folder and install the last package using 'sudo dpkg -i package_name'. This is the smoothest and sexiest installation of Open Office in Linux.

For running knemo, go to KMenu -> Control Center -> Internet & Network -> Network Monitor. Check the box that says 'Use knemo to monitor your interfaces'.

Thats all for now. Things appear to be running smoothly.