Minor Kubuntu issues and their workarounds

I have already mentioned several times that I love Kubuntu and how much it progressed in the last couple years. In my opinion, it went from being a weak KDE distro not that long ago, to becoming a solid contester to lead the way on KDE land today. Take Kubuntu 11.10, an awesome release which, at last, incorporates the best from Ubuntu. An incredibly cool installation wizard, plenty of applications and dedicated PPAs or great support from a huge and ever growing community are features that Kubuntu users could already enjoy, but the latest implementation of Muon and its social features (application ratings, comments, etc.), make Kubuntu even more interesting.

Nothing is perfect, though, so during my time using Oneiric Ocelot I have stumbled with a number of issues that, while minor, can get in the way of a great user experience. Let's look at them and how I found ways around them.

MUTED SOUND WHEN SESSION STARTS

I know some other people have experienced this one as well. The idea is that one starts Kubuntu, logs in and as the session starts, Kmix volume is muted. I tried some of the fixes that I found out there, but none would help.

Trying to find what was causing the problem, I was messing around with Kmix settings and I found one parameter that I thought could be related to this problem.



When I had the problem, the option "Restore volumes on login" was ticked, so fixing it was as easy as unticking it.

SHUT DOWN AND RESTART BUTTONS DO NOTHING

Not exactly sure if this problem came after an minor KDE upgrade, but somehow the reboot and shutdown buttons from the main menu stopped working. I did a bit of research and found a workaround that fixed it for me. From a terminal window, type the following commands:

cd /etc/kde4/kdm

sudo kate kdmrc

Once the file is loaded, find the [Shutdown] section and complete the following changes on the HaltCmd and RebootCmd parameters:

HaltCmd=/sbin/shutdown -h -P now

RebootCmd=/sbin/shutdown -r now

Save your work and reboot.

REDUCE AMAROK MEMORY HUNGER

Amarok can do lots of things very well, but it is clearly not the lightest of audio players. This is obviously not an issue specific to Kubuntu, but since Amarok comes as its default audio player, it is good for Kubuntu users to ensure it doesn't bite more resources than it should.



The default Amarok settings have many plugins and services enabled that may or may not be useful for end users. In my case, a vast majority of them are not, for I am solely interested in playing my local collection. If this is your case as well, there are lots of resource-eating options you can live without. Simply untick them as I did in the screenshot above, then restart Amarok.