I've been away from the Linux scene for a while () for a while and got back into it via KUbuntu 8.04 just to see how far things have come. Please forgive me for being rusty, especially in things like manual config and cmd line stuff!

I have encountered two problems since my install:

1) I've used Adept to add the "language selector," but I when I go to Settings in KDE I'm unable to add any other languages. All I get in the drop-down is US English. Am I missing something? Should I be looking elsewhere? I should note that I used a 7.x flavor of KUbuntu a while back and the same thing happened.

2) I'm online in that I've been able to use Adept (though it is exceedingly slow), but I can't actually browse the web. I imagine it's a DNS thing but I used to use SuSE so I don't really know where I can do things in KDE and I've sadly forgotten how to do things cmd-line style. Is Ubuntu so stripped down/ "user-friendly" that they've denied me any ability to easily configure network settings?

Any ideas greatly appreciated. Thanks!

1) install (trough adept, for example) the language packages for your language (i18n? kde-lang-something?), that ought to help.

2) No, it should be easy, but you can just as well use ifconfig (wired) or iwconfig (wireless, non-secured or WEP) or wpa_supplicant (WPA/WEP/wireless/wired) or any of the other tools around. Not sure how KDE handles it nowadays, but typically all you do is configure an interface and bring it up, and if you use DHCP (don't manually set ip addresses etc., but get them from a dhcp server), run dhclient or dhcpcd for the interface - the graphical desktop tools usually do just this.

I'm pretty sure Adept (apt-get) works by using URLs like other apps do, not plain ip addresses, so if it works that would imply your network connection is fine - but if you can't browse any sites, that sounds interesting. Does pinging work?

Thanks! It would seem that in KUbuntu the link to "Add Programs" leads to a simplified version of Adept, which gives you many less choices of things to install. There a "Japanese" query yielded about 2 packages, whereas a search in the straight-up adept gets a lot more, including language packs.

I wasn't able to ping when I was having the networking problem, but for some reason the next time I booted the computer everything was fine. I thought I'd gotten away from rebooting a lot when I moved from windows! Heh heh.

Thanks again.