Monday, June 15, 2009

usb-creator-kde... for karmic

So, during UDS, the Kubuntu team decided it would be nice to work on making Kubuntu easier to install on netbooks.

The are several things that need to be adjusted to make the netbook experience enjoyable, but the first real thing required is a native client for putting a Kubuntu desktop image into a usb stick.

There already exists a PyGtk front-end, but no PyKDE one. At UDS I decided to take on the task of porting the existing PyGTK client to PyKDE.

At this point, I have ported much of the required code base to support a native client for Kubuntu. There are still some bugs to fix, and some of the new code for the PyGTK front-end does not yet work 100%, and hence neither does the PyKDE front-end.

If anyone is interested in looking at the code and feels like offering advice, it can be found here: https://launchpad.net/usb-creator

To check out the code: bzr branch lp:usb-creator

Anyway, I am working closely with the usb-creator team, and hope to get this working/completed within the next couple of weeks.

Thanks to all who have helped thus far.

12 comments:

  1. Cool! As a Kubuntu user, that's appreciated. That being said, I haven't yet had problems just using unetbootin and pointing it towards Kubuntu ISOs, although mostly I've been using the KDE3 remix of Jaunty since that still performs much better on netbooks than KDE4. (For most other on-netbook installs I use my PXE server, but I guess that's not really a "for every user" solution!)

    Hopefully though the KDE team will get their netbook interface ready (which I remember reading about at the start of development, but haven't noticed anything since) and then Kubuntu-KDE4 can start to shine :)

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  2. Thanks Keith Z-G.

    I actually already run Kubuntu Jaunty using KDE 4.3 on my Acer One Netbook. I changed the default font sizes and that was about all I needed to change to make it pleasant on the netbook.

    It runs fairly smooth here. Also, I am using EXT4...

    I have since installed Karmic Alpha 2 on it, and the new kernel and with enabled kms, things are getting pretty good.

    Also, unetbootin does work, but it's a swiss army knife, and we sort of need a scalpel (i.e. something for just *buntu images). Anyway, thanks. :)

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  3. Unetbootin is easily cusomisable...
    http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/#faq third question.

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  4. True enough Ryan, however, the idea on writing a KDE version is to keep feature parity with Ubuntu. Since a Ubuntu version exists, it made sense to use the backend from the Ubuntu one and simply slap a nice PyKDE fronend onto it.

    This ensures that it will be easily maintained for future releases. If we were to customize uNetBootin, we could not guarantee feature parity and ease of maintanance going forward.

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  5. Makes sense I suppose, Roger. That begs the question, though, "why did Ubuntu make their own?"

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  6. I believe, Ryan, that uNetBootin is a Qt application, and for Ubuntu, they do not use Qt applications in their default install/build (they are Gtk based, unlike Kubuntu, which is Qt based). Additionally, I believe there was no Gtk application available at the time, capable of doing what they wanted.

    So, they wrote one.

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  7. So, they made you run in circles ;)

    Altogether, it's a silly situation that you are in (Porting a GTK application ported from Qt back to Qt) but, good luck, at any rate. Your help is very much appreciated in the community. I've got a EEE1000he netbook shipping to my house currently (it's probably arrived, already, actually) and being able to easily install Kubuntu-KDE4 on it will be very nice.

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  8. Umm... they never ported anything to Gtk. :)

    The application was written from the ground up using Python and Gtk bindings.

    uNetBootin is a pure Qt/C++ application (I believe), so no port was really considered. Ubuntu prides itself on using Python for many system and utility tasks, so writing the app in Python was no big surprise or challenge for them.

    For me, it was also pretty simple, Kubuntu takes it's direction from Ubuntu in many ways, and uses Python in the same way. 70+% of the code is completely re-usable, as the backend is (mostly) separated. The frontend was minimal effort to port (for anyone knowledgeable in both Gtk and Qt - which I wasn't - but am getting there quickly).

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  9. Ported in the sense that the featureset et al were brought from Qt to Gtk; I know it wasn't an explicit port.

    Just saying it's kind of humorous. :)

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  10. Thanks to those people that mentioned unetbootin. I am trying it out now, looks good and I like that it downloads different distro's directly from the internet!

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  11. Hope you get this done soon, since KDE4.3 release usb-creator kills my X 100% of the time...

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  12. putt1ck,

    It's uploaded already to Karmic (9.10) which is currently at Alpha 4, and will be released this fall.

    Cheers.

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