Flickering Screen After Upgrade to Kubuntu 10.04

First of all, I was amazed how smoothly the upgrade went. (K)Ubuntu and I guess other dis­tri­b­u­tions as well have gone quite a far way to become plat­forms for every­body — with a lot of soft­ware but even more tools, helpers and auto­matic back­ground ser­vices — like the nice upgrade service.

There was only one prob­lem I ran into and I want to share the solution.

I am run­ning Kubuntu 10.04 (just upgraded today) on a Lenovo IBM ThinkPad R60 (Yes, one of those with both brands on them ) with an ATI Radeon X1400 graph­ics device. But since upgraded, my dis­play started flick­er­ing — not per­ma­nently but unbearable.

The solu­tion that worked for me (at least par­tially — see below — and this is of cause depend­ing on the graph­ics device type) was to install the pro­pri­etary ATI dri­vers. I know, it is not a good solu­tion, I do not like to use them nei­ther and if any­one out there is read­ing this with a bet­ter solu­tion in mind, let me know it!!
Edit 2011-02-14: Added a new post with an addi­tional, alter­na­tive solu­tion here.

So what you need to do is  to get your favorite pack­age man­age­ment tool (e.g. Synap­tic or KPack­ageKit) — just hit Alt+F2 and type “pack­age” and pick KPack­ageKit from the list (it will ask you for the super user pass­word). Then, search for “fglrx”. In KPack­ageKit, you will find a result titled “Video dri­ver for the ATI graph­ics accel­er­a­tor”, and some­thing below the title like “fglrx — 2:8.723.1-0ubuntu3” but the ver­sion num­ber should not mat­ter. Click the arrow to the right, hit “Apply” and after reboot­ing, every­thing should per­fectly with­out any configuration.

Good luck.

Prob­lems noticed so far: The dri­ver causes “Seg­men­ta­tion Fault” error mes­sages, e.g. when try­ing to open up the dis­play set­tings. That’s ugly, I know. But you can read in sev­eral forum and blog posts, that the sup­port for the for­mer nicely work­ing dri­ver for the ATI X1400 has been dis­con­tin­ued since 10.04, hence, it’s just good luck that the fglrx works some­how — good to know *after* upgrad­ing, right. But still, the flick­er­ing was unbear­able for me, thus, I accept the issues for now. I will keep my eyes peeled hop­ing for a proper solu­tion in the future.

Change hotkey of Kubuntu’s Quick Launch Tool KRunner

First of all: I love those quick launch tools aka key­stroke launch­ers, they are real time savers — every­one should have one!

[For those with­out a glue what a key­stroke launcher is:] It is THE tool for launch­ing any kind of soft­ware or even open­ing doc­u­ments. Instead of mov­ing your mouse to you appli­ca­tions menu, click it, search the pro­gram, move the mouse there, maybe pick a sub-folder, move mouse again and finally click — unless you acci­den­tally moved a lit­tle but to far and the menu close again, com­pletely. But it is easy to put an end to this (as described below). Instead of doing all that click­ing, you hit a spe­cial key com­bi­na­tion, by default [Alt] and [Space], this will make a small input box show up, now, you only enter the first let­ters of the pro­gram — e.g. “f” will do after a few uses to start Fire­fox (the pro­gram learned that you use it a lot). It might save only a few sec­onds each time, but the sum up and, hey, it is very con­ve­nient, too!

So here is what you need to do:
Mac OS: It is already built-in — Just hit Alt+Space and type the name of the pro­gram you want to start (or files or what­ever).
Win­dows: Get/install Launchy and use it as explained above.
Kubuntu: built-in as well, BUUUT you have to hit Alt+F2 instead.

And there it is, some­thing that kept annoy­ing me about Kubuntu for quite a bit. I was hop­ing to get used to it but for what rea­son? Alt+F2 is really not handy com­pared to Alt+Space.
Finally, based on this old forum post and a few adjust­ments to fit nowa­days Kubuntu, all you need to do is this:

1. Go to “Set­tings” -> “Key­board and mouse”
2. Select “Global Key­board Shortcuts”
3. Pick from the select box “KDE com­po­nent” at the top “Run Com­mand Interface”
4. Now, you can access “Run Com­mand” — Change it to what­ever you like