I recently had a chance to install the latest Kubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) on a desktop computer with a 64-bit Athlon processor. In the article I’ll try to cover the issues I had with this configuration as well as the reasons I have chosen Kubuntu to do the job.

Author: Borys Musielak

First of all: why Athlon 64?

I had to buy a new computer for home use. Well, I didn’t really have to, but the previous one was a 5-year old Athlon 1.2Mhz with a lot of stability issues (random hangups, kernel panics, etc) and I had no time to analyze them thoroughly. I wanted a new powerful machine for a reasonable price (wishful thinking, huh?). Athlons are usually cheaper than Intels and AMD has better experience in providing 64-bit solutions. Moreover, I always had Athlon processors on desktops and Pentiums on mobile computers and I guess these were the main reasons I finally decided to go for an AMD Athlon 64 instead of an Intel Duo or some cheaper Sempron/Celeron model. A remark on the side: it looks like it’s even hard to buy a pure brand new 32-bit processor nowadays! 64-bits are the future of computing (at least for the next couple of years) so there is no good reason to go old-school.

Here are the relevant hardware specs for the slected machine:

• Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ BOX (Socket 939) Venice
• Mainboard: Asus A8N-E nForce4 Ultra
• Hard drive: Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300 GB (SATA II, 16MB cache, NCQ)
• RAM: Kingston HyperX DDR 2x 512MB PC-433 CL2
• Video card: NVIDIA GeForce 6600 Asus Silent 512MB (128-bit) TV/DVI BOX (PCI-E)
• Optical drive: NEC DVD+/-RW ND-4571A LabelFlash

Secondly, why a 64-bit Kubuntu?

It’s certainly possible to install a 32-bit version of OS on a 64-bit capable computer. Even more - it’s much easier, since 32-bits are widely supported in terms of hardware and commercial apps. 64-bit applications are coming, but there’s still lots of white spaces. Choosing a 64-bit operating system equals asking for problems. Still, the superior speed and responsiveness arguments are indisputable. Basically, it’s a matter of convenience and the trade-offs we’re prepared to accept.

Coming back to my case, the new computer should serve as a main desktop for my wife. That’s why it should manage the typical desktop activities like Internet browsing and multimedia handling. But it will also acts as a Apache web server with PHP and SVN support, parallely running a postfix mail server. This is the reason why it should be also as reliable and multitasking-capable as possible. I have chosen a 64-bit system mainly due to its superior robustness and speed. The selection of Kubuntu resulted in a couple of reasons:

• my wife always worked with KDE and Kubuntu is one of the best KDE distros out there,
• Kubuntu is dead easy to setup for desktop use, it requires minimal customizations for typical use,
• Kubuntu offers a wide repository of amd64 packages, which is nice since I don’t like spending my vacations on compiling from sources and resolving the dependencies manually,
• Kubuntu is pretty up-to-date, and that’s important because KDE seems snappier with every new release,
• the selection of server packages for the Ubuntu family of systems is one of the best out there (the heritage of Debian), most of the packages are also preconfigured, so the time spent on configuring the apps is considerably shorter,
• I personally always liked and used Debian-like systems, so the learning-curve of Kubuntu is minimal.

All of these reasons caused that I have decided not to try the alternatives like OpenSuse 10.1 or Fedora Core 5 and went for the most straightforward solution with Kubuntu 6.06. You`ll see whether that choice was right or not.

Pic 1. Kubuntu 6.06 - the installer

System installation

I downloaded a regular Kubuntu 6.06 installation CD for my architecture - 64-bit PC (AMD64) - from the project’s download page. The graphical installer is available straight from the installation Live-CD (that’s a new feature comparing with Ubuntu 5.10). There is also an option to use the “alternate install CD” based on the dialog-boxes (the Debian installer enhanced) known from the previous releases. I have decided to try the new approach and this was a good choice because the Ubuntu team managed to make the installation process easy and pleasurable.

The Live-CD version of Kubuntu loaded in 2 minutes featuring the complete KDE desktop to play with. There was an icon on the desktop called “Install” which triggers the installer and that was the first thing I clicked on. Installing a system off a Live-CD is a great thing. You can browse the web or play with your new OS while it’s installing. No more watching the marketing sentences about how great your system would be - now you can check that yourself from the very beginning.

Partitioning

Kubuntu offers its own partitioning program bundled in the installer. I had some issues with using it. Probably I would be OK with the defaults which just take over the whole disk space to create two partitions: the main one with ext3 filesystem and a small swap partition. However, I wanted two partitions for data (root and home) and a little larger, 1GB swap (this is necessary for Orcale DB and some other hungry apps). Unfortunately, after creating those partitions (with XFS filesystems) using the Kubuntu installer, the partitioning tool didn’t let me continue. Precisely, on the screen with mount point definitions, I could not point to the SWAP partition I created (it just wasn’t visible). After a few more tries, I decided to reboot and try again (guess which operating system taught me that approach :P). It turned out to be a great solution since it “just worked” the second time. This time I created the ext3 partitions instead of XFS ones. Not sure if this was the reason it didn’t work previously, though. A little bit afraid what’s going to happen next, I went on with the installation…

The actual installation

The rest of the installation process was a breeze. The installer didn’t ask too many questions. It started to copy the default set of packages used in the Live-CD to the prepared root partition (not asking whether I like it or not). Copying the files took approximately 15 minutes. Downloading the remaining localization packages from the Internet took another 10 minutes (this was the case because I chose the Polish locales which are missing on the single installation CD). Then it only configured GRUB (the boot manager), did some other nasty things which I cannot repeat, and asked me to remove the CD from the drive while it reboots. Quite nice - I thought - and did what it asked me for.

Pic 2. System settings - the Kubuntu
clone of control panel

First impressions

My new Kubuntu desktop booted very fast, in less than 30 seconds. It detected and configured my whole hardware except the video card (it used the default, free nv driver) and the laser printer (more about both issues later on). The desktop looked very clean - there were no icons on it, just a few shortcuts defined on the KDE panel including Konqueror (the file manager and default browser), Kontact (the personal information manager, including an e-mail client) and System Settings (a KControl with Kubuntu layout looking much like the MacOS control panel).

The first thing I did was getting back the previous desktop configuration and overriding the defaults. This is the power and flexibility of Linux I love! Switching to the old system’s configuration was as easy as copying the contents of the old home folder to the new one. That’s about it. All the desktop icons, KDE settings, bookmarks, e-mails and more have been suddenly got back. I didn’t encounter any compatibility issues, mainly because my previous OS was also Kubuntu (a 386 version though). In case of migrating from another version or distribution I would have been probably more cautious and copied only selected folders to avoid problems.

After restoring the personal settings, I started to investigate the new OS again. The applications selected by the distro provider are pretty up-to-date. There is KDE 3.5.2, multimedia players: Amarok and Kaffeine, the CD-burning tool K3B and many other KDE defaults. From the non-KDE apps there is Firefox (1.5.0.3) and OpenOffice.org (2.0.2).

So, what is missing in the default install? Apparently there were no restricted or non-free (as in freedom) applications, that is: no Flash in Firefox, no Java plug-in, no Skype, RealPlayer, not a single non-free codec… A lot to do after the installation, but that’s the price you pay for installing a community distro like (K)Ubuntu.

What is a little disappointing, I didn’t find some of the nice Ubuntu enhancements (to be found in Ubuntu 6.06) in the KDE version of the OS. Gdebi - a great little app which makes the software installation as easy as a single click on the DEB package (with dependencies resolving) wasn’t there and there even wasn’t a simple way to get it working when installed (Konqueror just refused to cooperate when I set Gdebi as the default app for *.DEB files). Also, the Adept package manager turned out not to be as easy to use and flexible as the set of apps for installing and updating the system in Ubuntu (Synaptic, update-notifier, Add/Remove Programs applet). All in all, it wasn’t bad. Just not as good as in the older Gnome-powered brother.

Pic 3. Kaffeine playing a QuickTime
trailer of a popular movie

Getting the restricted formats

Shortly after getting the system finally installed, I figured out that there is no Macromedia Flash plug-in for amd64 whatsoever! This got me a little depressed. I got even more depressed, when I found out there is neither RealPlayer, Skype nor Opera for my new architecture as well. Looking at the Ubuntu Wiki and the article Restricted Formats didn’t make it better. However, I decided not to panic and start the research.

First, I came upon a little app called EasyUbuntu which makes it very easy to install all the restricted and non-free programs in (K)Ubuntu using a nice GUI frontend. The app works with the 64-bit systems as well. Unfortunately it looks like it didn’t do a great job. Although it installed the Windows fonts and some codecs (including a few of the non-free ones like QuickTime) it didn’t manage to:

• install Skype
• install RealPlayer or any other RealMedia player
• configure my NVIDIA card (although it downloaded and installed the appropriate amd64 drivers)
• get the Flash and Java plug-ins in Firefox working
• configure DVD-playback
• and get the nasty Windows multimedia formats like WMV work

This was a pretty long list. I tried another magic tool called Automatix later on, just to find out that it didn’t get me any further. If you still want to try, here is the link to the amd64 version of Automatix from the Ubuntu forums.

After taking a deep breath, I decided to start the manual configuration, hoping (whether it was reasonable or not) to get at least some of the remaining issues resolved by midnight (and it was 3 PM then).

The 32-bit environment in a 64-bit operating system

There are some apps that just don’t have the 64-bit version. Most of them are closed-source applications of commercial software providers like Adobe, Real Networks or Microsoft. The good news is that it is possible to run them in a 64-bit system through 32-bit emulation. In order to take advantage of it, the 32-bit environment needs to be prepared, which is as easy are entering:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk linux32

in the command line. From now on, each time we need to execute any 32-bit binary, we invoke a command like this:

linux32 program_name

and this will run the command in our 32-bit environment. As simple as that. But suppose we have a 32-bit package that wasn’t prepared for the amd64 architecture. For such cases, a special option of the dpkg installation tool comes to the rescue: force-architecture. For example:

sudo dpkg --force-architecture \\
opera_8.54-20060330.6-shared-qt_en_etch_i386.deb

will install Opera in version 8.54 (as long as it’s downloaded in the current folder, of course).

Finally, if we want to be able to use some of the non-free programs (but still free to use in most countries) we should update our /etc/apt/sources.list file. The custom contents of this file can look like stated in the UbuntuGuide’s section: How_to_add_extra_repositories.

If you live in the United States or some other country where the patent law allows patenting computer software and you prefer to stay legal, you have to be very cautious about what you install. The above list will be probably too dangerous to use in such cases.

Getting the Firefox plug-ins: Macromedia Flash and Sun Java

As it turns out, the only way to get Macromedia Flash working in 64-bit Kubuntu is to use a 32-bit web browser. Wiki helps us again, providing a fairly easy way of installing a 32-bit Firefox. It is enough to download it from the official website, extract, copy to the custom folder and run using the linux32 command. More details can be found on the Wiki page: Installing 32-bit Firefox in Ubuntu 64-bit.
There is an alternative method - using nspluginwrapper plugin which enables 64-bit browsers take advantage of 32-bit plugins. I haven’t tried this method but it is said to work well in most cases.

Macromedia Flash

Pic 4. Firefox in Kubuntu 6.06

The Macromedia Flash plug-in can be now installed in the 32-bit Firefox in a standard way - the installation will be triggered automatically by the app when you visit a Flash-enabled website for the first time. The plug-in can be also installed off the repository (this way it will work system-wide, not just for the current user). It this case, the plug-in path (/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/) needs to be linked to the new location of the browser.

So, Flash is installed…. almost. Probably there is no sound. Yep, no kidding. Fast Google search gives the answer: the libesd is badly linked! It’s a shame for the Kubuntu team, in my opinion to miss such an important detail. Fortunately, it’s easy to fix the bug:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libesd.so.0 /usr/lib/libesd.so.1

The restart of Firefox should do the job. You can quickly check the sound and video support by visiting YouTube or another Flash-oriented web service.

One more thing that’s important to realize. Flash in Ubuntu (and in Linux generally) is available in version 7. Macromedia (and now Adobe) does not plan to publish a new version until the beginning of the next year (which will be Flash 9.0). There is a documented possibility to use Flash 8.5 technology in Ubuntu, thanks to Firefox and Wine - HotwoForge: Flash Player 8.5 Linux (Ubuntu Dapper Drake). I personally haven’t tested this but it apparently works for many.

Sun Java

Installing the Java plug-in it a bit easier than getting Flash. There is even a working 64-bit version provided by IBM, but it obviously doesn’t work in a 32-bit Firefox. We can use a standard Sun Java 1.5 downloaded from the Sun download center, and install it using the following commands:

sudo bash
chmod 777 ./jre-1_5_0_07-linux-i586.bin

(of course if we downloaded a different version, the command will look a bit different as well)

./jre-1_5_0_07-linux-i586.bin

(now we need to answer a few questions, usually accepting the defaults)

mkdir /usr/local/java32
cp -r -p ./jre1.5.0_07/* /usr/local/java32
cd /usr/local/firefox32/plugins/
ln -s \\
/usr/local/java32/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so ./

After another restart of Firefox, we can easily test the Java plugin using the Sun Java testing page.

Recently another howto appeared on the Ubuntu forums: Howto Install 32 bit Firefox with Flash w/sound and Java for AMD64 which pretty much explains the Firefox plugins issues but it also provides a shell script which automatically installs them for you. I haven’t tried it but it’s been recommended by other users so it probably does the job as well.

Pic 5. Neverball with 3D acceleration

NVIDIA drivers

In order to play most of the latest games or use Xgl and other fancy desktop effects, hardware 3d accelleration is required. Unfortunately, the only way to get it with NVIDIA graphic card is to se their proprietary drivers. As I mentioned before, the EasyUbuntu script installed the non-free NVIDIA drivers (precisely the nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel-common packages), but it didn’t manage to configure them properly. As it turned out, a manual reconfiguration of the X.org package did the job:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

When the text wizard (which is invoked with the dpkg-reconfigure command) asks about the driver, we need to select nvidia instead of previously used nv. Upon next KDE login, the X acceleration should work.

Codecs

Most of the important audio and video codecs (both those free and restricted) were installed using EasyUbuntu. Ubuntu uses GStreamer engine by default, but if we want to view content in Microsoft or QuickTime format, we need to use a different backend like Xine or MPlayer (all three can be used in the Kaffeine frontend).

Windows Media

Microsoft WMV was the only key multimedia format that was still missing in my system. Here is a description how to overcome this issue: A patch for WMV native support on PPC, amd64 or any PC run linux. After installing MPlayer from the multiversa repository (apt-get install mplayer), it is sufficient to apply the patch (available as a DEB package): mplayer-amd64_0.99+1.0pre7try2+cvs20060117-0ubuntu8_all.deb, to get the WMV and other MS formats support. At least in theory because this just didn’t work for me. Instead, I compiled the MPlayer package (Debian way) applying the patch manually (as described in the linked article). The final effect was good - I eventually got the ugly Microsoft video support in Kubuntu for amd64.

Real Player

Getting Real Player 10 was as easy as calling the installer with a linux32 command. Unfortunately, a 64-bit version of Real Player does not exist, yet. The 32-bit binary is however completely usable (although a lot simpler than the full-featured MS Windows version). Anyway, I could play the RAM files and this is what counts.

DVD playback

DVD playback is another thing EasyUbuntu didn’t manage to solve. Getting it is however much easier than configuring Windows Media. It’s enough to use the script prepared by the Kubuntu developers for this purpose:

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples/install-css.sh

For 386 architecture it simply downloads and installs the libdvdcss package responsible for decrypting DVD movies (remember that it is allowed in the US without paying some cash to the patent-holders). For amd64 there is no package prepared, but the script is smart enough to download package sources and compile them automatically. It worked great in my case and within a minute I was able to play all of my DVD movies on the amd64-powered Kubuntu!

Pic 6. Amarok 1.4

iPod support - getting Amarok 1.4

Amarok is the default audio player in Kubuntu 6.06 and it works great. Unfortunately it’s provided in version 1.3.9. This series, although stable, does not support the iPod mobile player well. The full support for iPods has been added in the 1.4.x series (now it’s already considered stable). It’s quite easy to get the latest Amarok thanks to a special repository prepared by the Kubuntu team. It’s enough to add the following line to the /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/amarok-14 dapper main

and then enter in the command prompt:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install amarok

This command will do a package list update first, and then install the latest Amarok on our computer, removing the former one. Amarok is able to copy playlists and single tracks to an iPod player connected via USB. It can also remove tracks from iPod and play music directly from it. There is no support for advanced functions like track statistics, transfer of other types of data, etc. All of these can be achieved using GTKPod, a free Linux iTunes clone. For standard support, using Amarok is just more convenient since it is an awesome and very functional music player for Linux.

Hardware support

OK, I talked about all the problems that I solved. Now it’s time to cover the failures. Fortunately, there was only one, although pretty spectacular. It’s the Samsung ML-1710 laser printer I bought 2 years ago. It actually claims to be Linux-friendly and it’s provided with a Linux installer. Unfortunately the installer works only on the 386 architecture. I tried lots of tricks to get it working. A guide for a similar printer almost worked, but I was left with an unresolved libgtk-1.2 static dependency (libgtk-1.2.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory). I stopped investigating the issue as soon as I realized that the printer’s cartridge needs to be exchanged anyway. Then I decided to sell the printer and buy a new one that is 64-bit Linux compatible.

64-bit compatibility of hardware seems to have a lot to do with the openness of the drivers. If the vendors (or the free software developers) provide a free and open-source driver for the hardware, it usually works for all major architectures. Closed drivers tend to have a lot of issues which are usually a result of manufacturer neglecting the architectures different than 386.

So, one good advice is to check your hardware compatibility with a 64-bit Linux before spending the money on it. The more users prefer vendors providing free and open-source drivers, more and more manufacturers will follow this path.

Summary

As one can see, making Kubuntu 6.06 work on an amd64-powered computer is a bit time-consuming. If you need a straightforward solution, get a 386 installation CD and it will probably work flawlessly. For those who need the highest speed and responsiveness, a 64-bit Kubuntu system can be a really powerful solution. I personally spent a few long hours googling for howtos and faqs with solutions to my problems. It finally worked (except for the mentioned printer problem), so I hope you find this guide helpful and I hope it will save you some priceless time when you decide to follow the 64-bit path. It’s a shame that getting a real 64-bit support is still pretty painful in 2006. I hope the commercial vendors will soon notice the potential which exists in the amd64 architecture and start to provide better support for their apps. For the time being, you have to make the choice between the superior speed and the painless setup. I hope this article helped you make up your mind.

Translations

• Polish translation: Kubuntu 6.06 na Athlonie 64 from jakilinux.org
• Japanese translation: 第一次翻译的成果 from on www.iwxm.net