The first beta of Amarok 2.2, codenamed 'Crystal Clear', was released on September 4 and packages are available for Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty from the Kubuntu Beta Backports. To install Amarok 2.2 Beta 1 in Kubuntu/Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope just follow the instructions below:

The fourth alpha of Ubuntu 9.10 was released a few days ago and since I covered it earlier in this article, here I'll briefly overview Kubuntu, the KDE-based distribution of Ubuntu.

KDE 4.3 was released just yesterday, and it comes with a lot of great new features and improvements, like the the new Plasma theme called Air, new Plasma widgets, several improvements to Dolphin, the default KDE4 file manager, improvements to the KDE games, and these are just a tiny part of all the improvements KDE4 introduced.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala simply have do an apt-get upgrade to update to the latest KDE 4.3 (which was released yesterday) but (K)Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope users have to add the Kubuntu PPA backports so they can install the latest KDE 4.3.

Many network problems in Ubuntu or Kubuntu seem to be related to the network manager not working correctly so here is how to configure your wired network manually:

I took some time today to install and take for a spin the latest version of KDE4 today, release 4.3 RC1. I installed the packages from the Kubuntu backports repositories, as explained in this tutorial. All the screenshots were took at 1280x1024 and desktop effects enabled.

The first release candidate of KDE 4.3, the next major version of KDE4, was put out on July 1st and comes with new features and a lot of Plasma improvements and bug fixes.

digiKam is a free photo management application for KDE, and probably the best alternative to Picasa from Google. digiKam includes many photo retouching and photo manipulation functions, and it allows to organise your collection into albums.

With the release of KDE 4.2, Google Gadgets became fully integrated into Plasma. You can add them to your desktop with a few clicks of your mouse, unless you happen to be a Kubuntu user. For reasons that are outside the scope of this article, Kubuntu developers decided to remove the Google Gadget code from Plasma. Being the stubborn hackers that we are, however, we are going to get them back.

Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope, was released on April 23rd, also celebrating the 10th Ubuntu release. Since its first version back in October 2004, Ubuntu went through many and quickly became one of the most popular distributions out there, with a huge and continuously thriving community and a fast development method.

While I agree that there are applications for KDE 4.2 which still lack several important features (like for example the equalizer and ability to go to the previous/next song using the tag editor in Amarok), I must say that it also improved very much since the last time I have a looked at it.

The Kubuntu team announced on Saturday (February 21) the second maintenance release of Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), which is supported with security fixes and maintenance updates until October 2009.

I took these screenshots using a Kubuntu Intrepid Beta installation after performing a full dist-upgrade, at 1280x1024, with the nVIDIA 173 driver installed. I left all the settings in applications default, but I had to make fonts smaller and resize windows (in Konqueror for example), because they didn't look very well as default. The default theme used is Oxygen.

There are tools available to allow anyone to create and distribute a completely customized Ubuntu Based distribution using the Gnome Desktop. Many Kubuntu users would like to do the same thing but such tools are not fully compatible with KDE and the Kiosk tool does not change or remove all of the Kubuntu defaults so that a program like Remastersys can create a customized ISO with the defined changes.

Kubuntu Tutorials Day is back. Join the Kubuntu team on IRC, #kubuntu-devel, for some fascinating chats with Free Software’s finest developers.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Kubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Kubuntu 8.04 LTS is derived from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and uses the KDE desktop instead of the GNOME desktop.

Recently, we reviewed Ubuntu 8.04 beta. We received several complaints for cranky people in the comments, and so we decided to take a look at some newer code. Always in search of variety, however, we decided to spice things up a little bit by trying Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu. We downloaded the nightly build of the alternate installer, and took it for a spin.

First off, cheers to Jonathan for his great work with Kubuntu and KDE. Everyone should go read his reasons why Kubuntu is good for KDE. I’d also like to share some of my own comments about Kubuntu and KDE.

Kubuntu (and some other KDE-based distributions) features a special System Settings application which takes the place of the full KDE Control Centre application, which is used for setting all sorts of KDE preferences and changing different settings on the system.