If you’ve been watching the development of KDE 4 with a lot of anticipation then you probably know that 4.0 was released over a month ago. I was going to wait for the next release of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to try it out, but after seeing all the rave reviews and slick screenshots, I couldn’t wait.

Fortunately, installing KDE 4 on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) is fairly straight forward, but because I’m quite attached to a must-have terminal emulator called Yakuake, I had to jump through a few extra hoops to get both installed. So here are the steps I took in case you’re looking to do the same thing…

First, login with root access:

sudo su

Edit the package list:

cd /etc/apt/
vi sources.list

Uncomment the lines for ‘backports’ and ‘partners’ then add the following line to the bottom of the file.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu gutsy main

Save the file and exit vi.

Update the package list and upgrade the installed packages:

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

Now, let’s install KDE 4:

apt-get install kde4-core
apt-get install kde4

Since I can’t live without my Quake-style terminal emulator, we’ll need to install the KDE development libraries before we can install Yakuake.

apt-get install kdelibs4-dev
apt-get install yakuake-kde4

That’s it! Just restart or logout, and at the Login screen, click “Options” then “Select Session” and pick “KDE 4″. Finally, enter your username and password. Enjoy!

If you’re a Linux fan like me and you’re living in a (mostly) Windows world then there are times when you need to run Windows. In my case, my 3 daughters prefer Windows over Edubuntu because most of the kid’s websites require the latest Flash plugin. Grrr!
So what I do is install Windows Vista on one partition and Ubuntu on another partition then I let the Grub bootloader do its job. But once in awhile, one of my girls will forget to pay attention when the boot menu appears and Ubuntu will get auto loaded. Instead of just rebooting, my girls always complain. So here’s a simple solution to make the Windows partition the default:

1. From a Terminal, open your text editor with “super user” privileges on the Grub configuration file.
   

   sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

2. Change the value on the “default” line from “0″ to the position of your Windows partition.
   

   default 0

   If you scroll down the “menu.lst”, count the “title” lines of the partitions. Remember to start counting at “0″.

3. Save the file.
4. Reboot. You should see your Windows partition selected by default. If not, go back and check your “menu.lst”